Hacker Cinema
Goodbye, Dragon Inn
不散
2003 · Film · 82 min
Directed by Tsai Ming-liang
On a dark, wet night in Taipei City, a cavernous old picture palace is about to close its doors forever. A meager audience, the remaining few staff, and perhaps even a ghost or two, watch King Hu’s wuxia classic "Dragon Inn", each haunted by memories and desires evoked by cinema itself.
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2 comments on Hacker News
I still have netflix dvds, although I only get one now and usually take a long time to watch it. But I started January 2001. I bought an expensive (at the time) dlp projector and make a large screen and stand out of blackout liner and some wood from home depot that I would put up in my living room to watch it. My kids were young so I would watch movies in the dark after they went to bed. They still give me a hard time about "Goodbye Dragon Inn" which they say was the worst movie ever, and my daughter cried at the end of the Bicycle Thief. We did not (and still don't) have cable tv so that and VHS tapes was how we got entertainment. I'm not sure when it stopped being a thing for us, but gradually things like Netflix streaming and youtube became more of what we watched. So I don't think I will really miss the service so much but I think I held onto it for more or less nostalgic reasons.
Another excellent example of slow cinema is Once Upon A Time In Anatolia. The long night shots of immense fields of windblown grass illuminated by the flickering light of a couple flashlights and some lamps are like Van Gogh paintings. The movie is all atmosphere, but it's entrancing nonetheless.
Goodbye, Dragon Inn is also great. The movie itself isn't very long, but the long shots are pure slow cinema, stillness made into an aesthetic sublime.