Stray Dogs

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.

tsai ming liang is a director or should you even say an auteur who is really a strange bird in Chinese or in world cinema. this movie continues his same oddball line of work. it is perfectly suited for a highbrow art-house film lover who knows how to appreciate the overly and painfully long scenes completely incomprehensible storytelling and heavy symbolism all of which are mixed together to create an utterly boring movie that lasts more than two hours. the spectators gluteus maximus muscles are put to a tough test to get through the yawning experience...

director's previous works have been as peculiar or even more peculiar as this movie (to say the least - in "he liu" made in 1997 the father and son even end up in the same bed to have sex!) so i strongly recommend them only to a very elitist (western) viewer who wants to have recognition for his/her excellent taste (to get totally bored) and who still thinks postmodernism is a relevant mode to make movies.

it is indeed a real pity because i think the story could have had relevance to tell something important and revealing about taiwanese society but now all the potential substance to make a point is mostly wasted.

Tsai Ming-Liangs film Stray Dogs falls a bit short of being a great film but its not a disappointing one either. An existential and slow paced character study of a homeless drunk father and his two children living as the titles says "Stray Dogs". The films story reflects the desperation and misery of being homeless and a supermarket worker who becomes fond of the children and tries to rescue them from there misery. Downfall of the film is the careless editing of the long meandering scenes that seems to wear out there welcome after two minutes. This film could have been a great one if it only ran under two hours or less.

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.