Stray Dogs

The modern film world is one filled with excess, and I'm not just talking about manufactured Hollywood block-busters. No there is even a large amount of excess in films that are more "artistic" if you will. And I want to be clear, that is not necessarily a bad thing, several films recent films have done wonders with just the concept of excess beyond reason, like The Wolf of Wall Street for example. But I do feel like something has been lost in the film world, a certain subtly that filled the films of Bergman and Ozu. A restraint that served to exemplify the characters and their struggles. Luckily there are some contemporary directors that are trying to continue this subtlety, and one of those directors is Ming-Liang Tsai.

Stray Dogs is the most recent film by Ming-Liang Tsai, and well Stray Dogs doesn't have a plot, at least not the conventional sense. The film instead follows the lives of a few different characters, and tries to capture them as they are. The film brings the audience close to these characters and let's the audience understand them for what they are. To say that Stray Dogs takes its time is an understatement, every single scene in the film is slow and is stretched to the very limit of filmmaking. And believe me when I say that the scenes are at their limits. There are two scenes in the film that go on for so long that it exceeded not only anything else I had seen in any film, but they exceeded anything I thought possible. There is something very hypnotic about these scenes, Ming-Liang Tsai forces the audience to just stare at these characters for minutes on end as we soak in their facial expressions and slowly become one with them. It is something that is truly gorgeous and needs to be seen to be understood.

If the actors in Stray Dogs were bad or even just average the film would be completely unwatchable, but luckily for us they are all fantastic. Especially Kang-sheng Lee, who plays the father of a small homeless family. (Kang-sheng Lee worked with Ming Liang-Tsai on several of his films.) He gives one of the most enduring and real performances I have ever seen. Another thing that's needs to be great for the film to work is the cinematography, which is also fantastic. The film is shot in a very matter-of-fact way, things are just shown as they are. The camera only a moves a handful amount of times in a film that's over two hours long. And the colors and lighting are just wonderful. Overall Stray Dogs is one of the most refreshing films I've seen in a long time, and if you think you can handle a really, really slow paced film, with a very unconventional narrative structure. I would highly recommend Stray Dogs.

8.6

A motion picture redefined as a slow montage of still photos and/or slides. The camera stays fixated on people doing nothing much, like eating chicken. Other than a documentary-like expose of a homeless family in Taipei, the film accomplishes little.

see this movie if u have nothing to see, then u won't want to see any more art films.waste of time.2 hours, no dialogues, no script.pathetic movie.the good thing about the movie are it's cinematography and costume design.if it made as a short film it would be far better than this thing.

Watching his films in order, they were always building to fulfill a vision and it is questionable if he achieved it, but here he broke the dam down. How to quantify this notion of the breakthrough? It is hard to say.

It is achieving deeper ends of surrealism than ever before, but not pushing it on us like the others. The others are really racing to impress us, work for us, as auteur works, clever puzzles.

This one is existing in its own orbit. So if I discuss the notion of a breakthrough it is that he finally erased the director Tsai from his film and let it exist on its own without the artist winking at us. That can't be understated in the arts which, and his body of work specifically, has always been about him. He even had a line of merch.

Something about the chilling emptiness of the slow cinema does something to our bodies, our minds. Here I feel he truly let the baby be born, and let it exist, and came into his own as an artist director.

It is a film that must be earned, through understanding Tsai, through understanding slow film and what it is reacting against in the traditional forms, it is not one that can be viewed through ignorance. It is making connections, moods, feelings, the canvas isn't the film on screen, but is our consciousness. All slow cinema operates in the same way, but to different ends. Here is the same actors and actresses as his other films, but they do not feel like the 10th film of them, it feels like they all got together for the first time. The transience of it all, creates a pure cinema and points to new frontiers.

Like watching paint dry, in the rain.

no reason to make, no reason to watch.

even if you speed up the movie it's still interminable.