Bu san

"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.

At the risk of coming on too strong, I think the other posters here who disliked this film were idiots. True, Good-bye Dragon Inn is EXTREMELY slow. Almost nothing happens in the film. Nonetheless, it is truly excellent. A great, subtle ghost story...

It's especially good if you have ever been to any of the big, old, concrete movie theaters in Asia... Theaters that are now being totally replaced by multiplexes.

Good-bye Dragon Inn is basically a poem to the old cinema culture of Asia. I have great memories of going to those huge, decaying movie theaters... in summer to escape the heat... during the rainy season, when the sound of the rain almost drowned out the film itself. Great stuff.

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.

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.'

I particularly value what is often advertised as 'meditational' films. Visual mantras that demand stillness of mind and concentrated observation. But, although they have proliferated over the last 15 years, so few get the experience right, which seems to be the result of a younger generation of filmmakers who have merely studied the command Tarkovsky or Antonioni had over their camera but not the truthful seeing.

Tarkovsky and Antonioni swam in polar extremes of the same flow; inside and outside. The experience is the same. We flow with them to the place where we can get in-sight of what it means to flow in our world. In Solyaris, we flow inside the mind where our images are born. In The Passenger we flow outside self and identity into a liberating awareness of the world as is.

This could've been something special in this regard because there's a film-within to flow into from the one we are watching. But it never happens.

The two levels are not conjoined into a larger narrative, but rather contrasted. Inside the film the audience is watching (King Hu's Dragon Inn from the golden years of wuxia), the characters are free, passionate, filled with an ardor of life. Rigid hierarchies of clan or dynasty imply a comforting plan in this fictional life. Outside the film, life is a murk, a haunting of anonymous souls. The crippled girl is always struggling to get somewhere, up a flight of stairs or down the corridor. The Japanese guy is always constricted by indifferent strangers. Both their efforts inside the theater are with the sole end of watching the movie, the place where seems to be some purpose and things make some sense.

So, inside the preordained world of fiction the characters are strangely free, while the reality of ostensibly myriad possibilities is shown to be thoroughly aimless.

Being an art piece (what dreary connotations, no?), we get all these as elongated stanzas. We literally watch the crippled woman walk all the way up. It works barely enough to resonate with the ideas mentioned above, but it's very little for a feature film, very hollow. The few ideas here rattle in so much emptiness. Whereas in a Kiarostami film this elongated observation teems with life, here it is stylized to the point of a trinket that is perhaps pleasing to the eye but lifeless.

If you simply want to see a love letter to movies and movie- watching, seek out the Chacun sons Cinema compilation. Almost all the films are better than this, and they're all shorts. I have particularly fond memories of Andrei Konchalovsky's entry, Dans le Noir, which also takes place inside a cinema.