Interlooper~

I jogged around the greater block in 16:35. I should be able to shave 1-2 minutes off that should I actually press myself to run (provided I can make it to the end).

Movie news

Anyway, my movie review for today is "Goodbye, Dragon Inn", which I saw last night.

Before going to such a film, it is advisable to be familiar with the kind of movies the director makes. Vive L'amour was the first movie I saw of his. It was devoid of almost any dialogue or script. It made an art of understanding feelings and intention purely from the action observed.

Goodbye, Dragon Inn is done by the director Tsai Ming-Liang, a Taiwanese director who seems to enjoy this sort of movie. It takes some adaptation of the viewer to enjoy watching them. If someone were to inadvertently see this film without understanding that they might be somewhat confused.

The movie is set in a cinema, whose popularity has somewhat dwindled. That being said, there seems to be many people wandering through its cavernous architecture. There are few seeming real people there, but one is a young man who sneaked into the cinema, who we only find out later, is Japanese. He seems out of place in amongst the other denizens (much like someone who doesn't understand such films might feel). All he wants is someone to light his cigarette. So he tries languageless cues to get people's attention. He fails most of the time. All through the sounds and artificial dialogue of the movie being echoes throughout the place, emphasising the lack of speech from the "characters". There are some bizarre scenes. With a door shutting by itself. Another opening. Possible homoerotic themes. And then the endless people passing through the passageways the Japanese guy finds himself. In the first dialogue of the film, eliciting applause from one of my fellow theatre-goers, it is revealed: "This cinema is haunted," and then followed up by "It is haunted!" We never know if the Japanese man understands but he finally gets his light before saying in Japanese-accented Chinese "Wo shi ribenren" (I am Japanese). "Sayonara" comes back the reply. Regardless of whether he understands what was told to him, later, in probably the most comic moment he is scared witless and runs from the cinema.

All the time, the lady at the front desk (who has a whithered or prosthetic leg) struggles around the cinema on different quests.

On the whole, I enjoyed the movie (more than Vive L'amour, but perhaps only because I had checked my expectations for the movie). I wouldn't rank it any higher than "Good", just because it doesn't have in a movie everything I look for, but it was a nice excursion into a completely different world. It is these kinds of movies that you can lose yourself in easily though. Another theatre-goer remarked the similarity of the screen flow and that of the movie. The movie on the screen in the movie was a martial arts movie. But often in such movies, it is just lurching from one fight scene to another with justification in between, before ending and fading without a trace. Goodbye, Dragon Inn had this without the fighting.

I may see one of his other films What time is it there? in the future.