by ·Comments Off on I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (2006, Tsai Ming-Liang)

We got another The Hole situation, a girl living alone one loose floorboard away from the catatonic guy (played by short-haired Lee) in the apartment underneath. Meanwhile a local guy (this is Malaysia, where Tsai comes from) takes in a foreigner (played by long-haired Lee) who got himself beat up in the street, has to wash the mattress whenever the foreigner soils it, which is often. Overall more grime and desperation than usual (preceding the great Stray Dogs) though it ends with a lovely dream

The woman upstairs is Chen Shiang-Chyi of Stray Dogs, ticket taker of Goodbye Dragon Inn. Chris Fujiwara wrote of people “staying human under the most hostile conditions” in the final writeup of the Defining Movies book.

by ·Comments Off on Vive L’Amour (1994, Tsai Ming-Liang)

Realtor Yang Kuei-mei (The Hole‘s downstairs resident) brings home her Eat Drink Man Woman costar Chen Chao-jung from the mall, and while she’s occupied, passerby Lee steals her house key. Now all three of them live part-time in the same apartment, semi-aware of each other. Nobody really feels great about any of this, or about their jobs or anything else.

Does all their work seem scammy, or do movies make all businesses look scammy? This won the Golden Horse (over Eat Drink and Chungking Express) and the top prize at Venice (tied with Before the Rain, over Heavenly Creatures and Ashes of Time), beating two different Wong Kar-Wai movies within three months.

by ·Comments Off on Abiding Nowhere (2024, Tsai Ming-Liang)

Watched to bring my mind peace on the 5th – in retrospect, the last evening when “slow monk in front of Washington Monument” inspired happy thoughts. Walker keeps on walking, while his Days co-star Anong makes some noodles.

by ·Comments Off on Four Half-Hour Shorts (Wong, Tsai, Gomes, Mandico)

One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart (2021, Wong Kar-wai)

Making a Wong film out of outtakes fom other Wong films. It’s a cute idea – pushes its egg-metaphor too much, but gives us some scenes that I honestly can’t recall if/how they existed in the source features since I don’t watch his movies often enough.

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Wandering (2021, Tsai Ming-liang)

A woman walks through Tsai’s installation, watching a scene from each of the eight Walker films, alone except when the director appears at the end, transfixed by his own footage of Lee in a bath. A nice introduction and/or culmination to the slow monk project, with some new-to-me scenes, including a non-Lee monk in a white void.

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Redemption (2013, Miguel Gomes)

Four sections of archive footage illustrating narrated letters from the past. The end credits is where things get exciting, revealing the narrators and the letter writers (Maren Ade reading Angela Merkel!) then immediately revealing that all the letters were made-up. Per Vadim Rizov in Filmmaker, the letters are by “some of contemporary Europe’s least-liked leaders,” and the end result “a sympathetic but also fundamentally facile experiment.”

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Dead Flash (2021, Bertrand Mandico)

A scrapbook for Mandico completists – rushes and backgrounds with a mood-music mixtape. Extended shots of a multiple-stabbed dude, a double-dicked light-up crystal statue, the usual. Then the second half is ape-people as model and photographer (both played by Elina Löwensohn) in split screen with dialogue (“I want you to magnify this dirty memory”).

Fellow Mandico completist Gianni helps spot the source films on lboxd:

Outtakes from previous shorts (Extazus, Niemand, A Rebours and Huyswomans – Huyswomans is reproposed integrally) plus a brand-new short film about two anthropomorphic monkeys … the outtakes of Extazus have been released separately in a dvd box-set – Ultra Pulpe et autre chairs – with the title of A Black Sunset Upon a Violet Desert.

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bonus shorts from Criterion Channel:

Dream City (1983, Ulysses Jenkins)

Music and theater performances and other assorted stuff, mixed together with muddy sound recording and early video chroma effects.

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Black Journal: Alice Coltrane (1970, Stan Lathan)

Short, effective doc portrait on Alice at home and playing music. Beyond a few photographs previously seen, this is now everything I know about Alice.

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And we got access to that animation streaming site that I already forgot the name of, and watched two of this year’s oscar-nominated shorts that I already forgot the name of.

by ·Comments Off on The River (1997, Tsai Ming-Liang)

Ann Hui plays the director who casts passer-by Lee as a body floating in the river, after which he starts having serious pain in his neck and back. Running into his dad in a cruisy bathhouse doesn’t help (dad Miao Tien is a Goodbye/Dragon Inn star), while mom (Lu Yi-Ching of Stray Dogs and everything else) deals with water leaking into their apartment. The same three actors play the family in Rebels of the Neon God, so I’ll have to go even further back.

by ·Comments Off on Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003, Tsai Ming-liang)

I watched Dragon Inn (1967) at home Friday night. On Saturday I was the only person who bought a ticket to Goodbye, Dragon Inn which is entirely set in a nearly-empty movie theater that is playing Dragon Inn… then I was the only person at West Side Story (2021), which is of course a remake of the 1961 movie. So, both of the newer movies are resurrecting the 60’s in their own way, both feature people watching their younger selves (actors from Dragon Inn are in the Goodbye audience, and 2021 Rita Moreno has a big scene with Anita, Rita Moreno’s 1961 role)… and both feature coin-operated fortune-telling machines.

Goodbye was my first Tsai film, watched originally on a blurry DVD, which inspired my first pre-blog web writeup. This week I’ve seen it twice – or, one a a half times, the second being a Metrograph stream in the background while I read Nick Pinkerton’s book on the film (and on so many related topics). Reading while the movie plays feels like a good idea, not only with the other Fireflies/Decadent books, but with books in general, which I should maybe always be reading with a Tsai film playing behind them. This movie seemed so slow and empty twenty years ago, and now it seems very full – and I wrote “so many cuts” in my notes, so my definition of “slow” is obviously very different now.

Apichatpong is a big fan, and I thought of his actress Jen when the crippled ticket taker was making her way around the theater. The first words aren’t spoken until halfway through, and they’re about ghosts. Later, our Japanese cruiser encounters a seed-chewing woman who may be a ghost, and he runs straight out of the movie. On the same day I watched this movie where a guy is confronted by a loud eater, a Florida cop was acquitted for killing a guy who threw popcorn during a movie argument.

“No one comes to the movies anymore.” Surprised at how small Lee Kang-sheng’s projectionist role is here, and how much of the movie takes place not in the screening room but the surrounding hallways. Despite being set in the back alleys of a haunted crumbling building, it’s at least as gorgeous as the King Hu film, probably more so.

by ·Comments Off on Two by Tsai Ming-liang: Sand and The Night

Sand (2018)

A Walker feature – 80 minutes of walking extremely slowly. I was in heaven – Katy tried to ignore me. Emerging from a pipe onto a beach, past tents and hovels, the surroundings become more industrialized as his journey goes on. Other people sometimes heard in the distance, never seen. Where does he end up? Somewhere indoors, but not heading towards what looks like the exit. That long final shot transitions from machine noises on the soundtrack to the sound of ocean waves. Maybe the walker’s going in circles indoors but dreaming himself back to the sea. 16 shots in 80 minutes, filmed in Taiwan’s Zhuangwei Sand-Dune Visitor Service Park.

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The Night (2021)

Bustling Hong Kong nightlife – not in a party sense, doesn’t seem like a party section of town, just everyone is out and moving around. Closes with a song about being sad the night has to end. Watched in headphones and thought I could hear the cameraman softly humming in my left ear. 13 shots in 20 minutes, no walker to be found.

by ·Comments Off on Days (2020, Tsai Ming-liang)

Lee is taking it easy, getting treatments for a bad back, which includes having Anong give him a happy-ending massage in a hotel room. Anong seems touched by the gift of a music box, the two grab a meal together. Even less happens in 2+ hours than in Tsai’s Walker shorts.

I’d been counting shots but lost track when I had to pause for a meal – surely fewer than 100 total. Shot #9 was food prep, not a great camera setup but I learned a new method of shredding green papayas. Shot #20 the camera moves through an alley!

Cinema Scope’s pick for movie of the year. Blake Williams’s writeup ties it to Tsai’s earliest films with Lee, which I still haven’t watched, so I’m lacking some context, but I still don’t think I’m in the headspace where a movie this meditative is gonna be a high favorite.

by ·Comments Off on No No Sleep (2015, Tsai Ming-liang)

I’d just rewatched Walker with Katy, hoping she’d want to go on a multi-part Walker journey before graduating to Stray Dogs, but nope that was quite enough for her, so I watched this recently-surfaced movie alone.

The walker is slower than ever, an even more hardcore viewing experience than the first movie.

Lovely urban digital photography.

Suddenly we are nude bathing with Miike (and Nightmare Detective) actor Masanobu Andô!