Bu san

If you've read the other reviews, you know what you're in for. Don't worry about spoilers (none here, but don't worry about others'), because not much happens in the movie. Tsai paints his movies at the speed of Michelangelo painting a ceiling--no, he unreels them at the speed of the epic that's played this old movie house a thousand times. As in other Tsai movies, the colors are rich, and even the starkest images are carefully composed, allowing the film to convey the full depth of feelings.

That's what this movie does. It doesn't tell a story, really, but conveys what it's like to walk along empty city streets on a rainy night, alone. And what it's like to be in a dying old movie palace. The community that has outgrown the old Fu Ho cinema seems to tell its patrons, its employees, and even the building itself that all of them really ought to be somewhere else. But there they are, where they need to be, for the last show.

The movie's point of view is variously that of the young limping woman, the Japanese kid, and the old actors, but ultimately, Tsai tells the story from the theater's point of view, as if he interviewed it Tsai-style, pointing the camera at it and letting the theater speak at its edificial pace. You feel all that it's seen and sees, every day. It's as if the theater knows it's done for, resigned to its fate, not yet ready to die, too tired to fight.

It doesn't matter that the theater is in Taipei. Anyone who had a special place for movies, especially if it's gone, will be able to see that theater in the Fu Ho. I thought of my last visits to Seattle's Coliseum, King and United Artists theaters, and how they clung to life in their final days. All of them could seat hundreds of patrons, maybe a thousand even, and I never once saw them close to filled. The King is now a megachurch, the Coliseum is a Banana Republic, and the UA is dust, with the marquee sign marking its grave. The movies that played there live on in DVDs and shoebox megaplexes, but their days of playing in grand auditoria to great audiences are largely gone. How can "Lawrence of Arabia" be "Lawrence" in a shoebox, or on any CRT or LCD screen?

Norma Desmond told us about the pictures getting smaller. Tsai warns us that the last days of the big screen are here, and that the credits are rolling. Many loved the old moviehouses in their grand glory days, but in "Goodbye Dragon Inn," Tsai shows the beauty of the big theaters as their curtains slowly fall.

"Good Bye, Dragon Inn (Bu san)" is something of a Taiwanese "Cinema Paradiso" and "Last Picture Show" in its love of old movie theaters and evoking the unfulfilled longings we project onto movies and their showcases.

We take refuge (and I have no idea how we were supposed to know that one of the characters we are following in is a Japanese tourist, per the IMDb plot description) during a rain storm on the last night at a huge theater, and the camera slowly leads us through every inch of the place.

The vast scale of the place is brought home to us (and it will have less impact when not seen on a big screen) as virtually every inch is navigated painfully by a lame employee, clumping (as we only hear ambient sounds) up and down all those stairs, from the red velveteen seats around every nook and cranny and down long hallways and seedy passageways.

I don't know if only a Western viewer thinks at first one character is a pedophile or another a transvestite, as the theater certainly looks like the old ones that were in Times Square, or if writer/director Ming-liang Tsai is toying with all of us, as he brings other assignation attempts closer (in what must be the longest time any men have ever spent leaning against a urinal), but they are as unreal as the movie-within-a-movie, the swordplay flick "Dragon Inn" which is just a bit more stilted and corny than the current "Warriors of Heaven and Earth (Tian di ying xiong)."

There is one especially lovely moment, within beautiful cinematography throughout, of reaction to the flickering screen when the employee pauses in her rounds to look up at the huge image of the warrior princess and shares our view of the screen with her. Amusingly, the only fulfilled feelings are hunger, as various characters noisily eat a wide variety of refreshments.

The projectionist is as much an unseen power as Herr Drosselmeier in "The Nutcracker," as we don't even see him until the theater is almost ready to close. He is as oblivious to interacting with real people as every other member of the sparse audience.

The major events in the film are when two characters even acknowledge each other's existence, let alone speak the only three lines or so of spoken dialogue in the entire film, reiterating what we've seen visually -- "No one goes to the movies anymore." The closing nostalgic pop song is jarringly intrusive at first to this quiet film, but the lyrics are very appropriate.

It's reasonable to assume that the Producer of this movie is one happy bunny because he sure didn't have to devote much of the budget to raw stock, in fact you could practically have shot it on short ends, a la Martin Benson. I doubt if there are more than 50 shots in the entire 82 minutes and possibly even less. The director's idea appears to be to nail the camera to the floor, snap on a wide-angle lens, shoot everything in deep focus and let the actors drift in and out of frame as and when the spirit moves them. The shooting ratio must have been an incredible one-to-one as opposed to an average six/eight-to-one. What happens? Well you might ask. It's a rainy night in Tapei. A guy ducks into an old barn of a cinema to beat the downpour. There's a movie in progress, Dragon Inn, a martial arts entry from another age. There's one employee, a lame girl who does everything but project the film. She leads us on a tour of the soon-to-be-closed-forever cinema. Leads is perhaps the wrong word. As I said the camera is nailed to the floor. The girl limps into frame and we follow her progress from our static vantage point. She prepares some kind of food that resembles coconut ice, eats some herself and takes the rest to the projection box which is all of twenty minutes walk away. in the absence of the projy she leaves the food where he will find it and repeats the journey in reverse. Meanwhile there are about three or four men watching the film. With something like six or seven hundred seats to choose from they opt for sitting together, moving several times til this is accomplished. At least one of the men was an actor in the film being shown and weeps to remember his youth. In one of the largest men's toilets I've ever seen in a cinema (at least 20 urinals) a single man is standing at one of them. Another man enters and with 19 urinals available opts to use the one next to the first man. Time passes. A lot of time. A third man enters, notices the 18 empty urinals and opts to join the other two. More time passes. A toilet flushes and a man leaves a stall and leans over the three men to collect his cigarettes from the ledge above them. More time passes. This is either a masterpiece or the worst thing to happen to movies since Peter Greenaway. Finally the movie ends the lights come up. The camera is nailed down approximately where the screen would be, looking out at the empty auditorium. Time passes. The girl enters from the left with a mop and bucket. She walks up three or four rows then between the seats and down the Right aisle. She exits. Time passes. A LOT of time. Finally we see the projectionist rewinding the film. The girl leaves the cinema It's still raining. A notice says the cinema is 'temporarily' closed. A jaunty yet melancholy 'pop' song from another age plays us out. End of story. Despite several walk-outs around me I stayed with it til the end. It does grow on you.

Goodbye dragon inn is a very calm and an almost silent art movie that shows us the events that takes place during an old theatres last screening before it stops screening cinema forever and also pans the camera to show us the characters who work there and are also there to watch a movie for one last time.

It has almost no dialogues...like there is a total of 3 or maybe 4 dialogue exchange that takes place in the whole movie

It has very long shots that are mostly still and has absolutely no camera movements in between and also nothing happens in almost all of these long shot scenes....so it might be painful and frustrating for those people who have no patience...hell this movie will test your patience to an extreme level for sure

I cant say I understood everything but I am writing here what I could process from watching it and what I liked about it.

The movie was very slow paced for me...this is the slowest movie I have seen till date...Adam drivers PATERSON was the one that I remember watching that was extremely slow paced before this one but this tops all the splow paced movies I have ever watched easily so I was surprised that even while staring at a long shot of hallway where absolutely nothing happens I wasn't bored and by the end of the movie it had already grown on me....

The actors in this movie are almost without expressions There is this one gay guy though who is desperately looking for a one night stand....and his expressions his disappointment his irritation everything was amusing to me

The there is this young limping ticket counter girl who has feelings for the projectionist guy...this is a one side romance and it's shown to us in a very simple way and without any drama to it...I liked that too

Then about the dialogues there is one that will definitely change the way you think about the characters existence...yup

And this is why I liked the fact that it felt almost real to me like it had that realistic feeling to it BUT along with a possible supernatural element lingering along with it.

And I feel that those guys who have a favourite theatre of theirs...where they used to watch tons of movies on a frequent basis and had to witness that theatres demoliton and are emotional and nostalgicabout it....this movie may be very effective for them.

So I am concluding this essay lol by saying that I will only recommend this flick to art house movie lovers or those peeps who are extremely patient

I also wanna add a small piece of something that I felt was true from the director of this movie

'The movies that we know today are so dominated by storytelling. My question is: is film really only about storytelling? Couldn't film have other kinds of functions? This question brings me back to my own experience of film watching. It's very rare that I remember the story of any film. I usually only remember a certain moment that touched me. But I direct my attention to daily life and living. In our own lives there's no story, each day is filled with repetition. Movies today feel like in their two hours they have to tell a story so they're filled with indexes and indicators to point to the completion of a story. The audience has gotten used to it. I think film can be more than just that. I believe that the stories of my films can all be told in two sentences. Like in The Skywalk Is Gone: Lee Kang-sheng and Chen Shiang-chyi walk past each other but don't recognize each other. That's it. I'm trying to remove the dramatic elements from the story to disguise it. Film and reality are different, but by removing that kind of artificial dramatic element, I believe that I'm bringing them closer.'

Tsai Ming-liang's "Goodbye Dragon Inn" is a spectacularly dull movie, a limp ode to the bygone days of cinema-going. A film smitten with its own stasis, "Goodbye" culminates in a shot held for an obscene amount of time of an empty movie theater. Tsai's known for holding his shots way past the point most directors yell cut, and the result can be strikingly effective in the right context (the brilliant final shot of "Vive L'Amour") but "Goodbye" is almost an art film parody in its studied minimalism. The money shot in particular is a groan-inducer that makes you long for a fast-forward button.

"Goodbye Dragon Inn" sounds like it ought to appeal: a homage to the glory days of cinema by a great director, but Tsai seems to be resting on the assumption that anything he cranks out these days is destined for acclaim (which is true). However, ever since "The Hole" Tsai's inspiration appears to be running out; what in the earlier films seems innovative comes off as mannered in the later ones. "What Time is it There?" is a good flick but hardly feels like anything new from the filmmaker, "The Skywalk is Gone" is a short-film punchline for "What Time?," and "Goodbye" is just grinding. Tsai's probably incapable of making a thoroughly awful movie and there are spots of greatness in "Goodbye Dragon Inn," but hardly enough to justify a feature-length film. You can almost feel the director yawning behind the camera as he's filming, telling his actress to just continue sitting for an interminable amount of time so he can pad it just a little more (though the movie is only 80 minutes long it feels much, much longer). The director's always threatened to deadend his limited stylistic resources and "Goodbye Dragon Inn" is the wall he's always threatened to hit. I like Tsai and think he has some worthwhile things to say, but he's said the same things over and over again and the point's been made. People these days have trouble connecting, the values of the old days have become buried under the industrial rubble of progress, yes yes. Tsai fixates on the same themes in the same way he fixates on an empty theater or a woman hobbling slowly across the screen. Since there isn't too terribly much variety thematically or stylistically in the his films, familiarity with his past work leads to a feeling of having repeatedly tread the same path. It takes a true master to be able to be as stubbornly dwell on the same ideas in the same manner over the course of a career and pull it off, and Tsai is hardly a Bresson or Ozu. Flashes of brilliance and invention are certainly to be found in Tsai's movies, but "Goodbye" just uses minimalism to mask its lack of substance. Slow movies don't have to be tedious and unrewarding, as a few Tsai Ming-liang films have demonstrated, but often the tendency among art film devotees is to equivocate slow and good. "Goodbye Dragon Inn" isn't very good. The ideas are slight, the homage curiously lacks feeling, and the whole thing just drags along way past the point of interest like Tsai's lead actress down the corridor.