Goodbye, Dragon Inn

It has been nearly two weeks since I saw Bu jian bu san (Goodbye, Dragon Inn) and I still can't get some of the images out of my mind. This is partly due to the fact that the director (Ming- liang Tsai) holds onto an image, a scene, long after, or before any action occurs. In doing so he insists the viewer bear witness to its own self re-presentation in the form of characters in a film they are watching.

Two of the finest moments in the film are moments where the camera is pointed back towards the mostly empty chairs of the cinema itself. In one, an actor who appeared in the original kung-fu film Dragon Inn watches a scene from the original. As the camera settles on his face, we are pulled ever closer, listening to the original's soundtrack while watching the actor as a receptive viewer. We are watching the emotions of time and change develop on his face. Finally, with his face in extreme close-up and the water glistening in his eyes with the film's light reflecting in them a single tear falls down his cheek.

Near the end of the film as the old classic has ended the camera is again pointed to the empty chairs of the cinema. There is no one there, then on the far side of the frame the ticket woman enters with bucket and mop. She walks across, up the stairs, back down and out the left side of the screen, literally walking off the frame as the camera remains motionless. He holds this shot for what many will argue is an interminable time. But he wants you to really take in this shot, consider what you are witness of, think about your own place now, viewing a film.

There is far more to this film than just these two scenes. They just exemplify the kind of artful ways this film explores the nature of action and reaction. What adds to this already complex and studied examination of cinema and the cinema viewing experience is the exquisite cinematography done by Ben-Bong Liao. If you love film, especially film that asks you to fully participate in the moment, then find a screening of this film and get lost in it.

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.

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.

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.