There are few cinemas which deal with the obsession of cinema and cinema halls and yet showing the decaying of cinematic culture as new technology has wiped the projector based 'Run-of-the-mill cinema halls. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is a cinema which stands for the urban alienation of people, the decaying culture of cinema and also showing in an uncanny style of cinematography the audience in this case most of them are homosexuals or people seeking sexual companionship. Goodbye dragon inn is stripped of bare essentials such as emotions, jazzy editing and any sort of background music. There is no plot except for a cinema hall showing a martial arts movie in a rainy day over Taiwan. The event of cinema takes place over 2 - 3 hours and has unnamed characters. One lady ticket collector who with a limp manages the theater but is not the owner. Tsai in a unique and subtle way shows the audience during the course of the movie where there is hardly a few people. One of them seeking to brush with other men in the cinema hall and is somewhat repulsed by women or their gross antiques of chewing food in a noisily fashion in the theater. But the whole film has so much more and is in the least entertaining. This cinema is what one would call life reflecting art. This is a cinema made for people reflecting the future in a mysterious way where decadence has made a lot of cinema halls go out of business. Everyone talks of nostalgia but there is none when it comes to reviving old cinema in the halls. It makes us wonder if a martial arts movie cannot drag a handful audience in a rainy day, can a n obscure or lesser known cinema do any better in a normal day. Tsai also takes a swoop on the people who go their for their vested interests. Surprisingly most of them are homosexuals.A very slow pacing cinema which has a few scenes and done in a extremely minimalist fashion unflattering it in the same instance. Though it has long shot of an empty cinema hall for a few minutes which baffled me. But it made me wonder, does the director wants to show the emptiness of it ? This is one of the best films which I have seen which deals with cinema. Cinema is dead, Long Live Cinema.
Review of Goodbye, Dragon Inn
