The missing narrative link between What Time is it There? and The Wayward Cloud. Is it necessary? Not really but still has its charm and Tsai’s trademark precise compositions of isolated characters. Tsai touches again upon the urban alienation caused by a city through the missed connection of the two leads. They were somehow connected even when physically separated by continents, yet when they’re back in the same city they've become hopelessly split, unlikely to ever reconnect.
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What Time Is It There? 2001
Tsai Ming-liang’s Three Colors: Blue, except minus the dourness. Leave it up to the man to make a film about dealing with grief and longing for connections so sneakily funny and absurd. Yes there is a pervasive melancholy as with all Tsai films, but in many ways this is one of his lighter, more hopeful works. It’s also perhaps his most mysterious as well, a quality captured by the title being an ambiguous question. The “there” of this film comprises…
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Everything Everywhere All at Once 2022
On the surface, one of the most ridiculous films I've seen in which its core concept is, on paper, an unexplained mess of massive proportions. But somehow that really doesn't matter at all, the film piles on the absurd jokes and imagery at a blistering pace such that you never have the opportunity nor the mindset to really question what's going on. And, for the most part, I'd say the film's sheer maximalism worked really well.
The one main problem…
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Tie Xi Qu: West of the Tracks 2002
Watched in three sittings separated by a week each. After finally finishing, I'm sad to say I got less out of this behemoth than I did out of many feature-length films.
Now there are quite a number of cinema verité films I rather enjoy, even long ones like Frederick Wiseman's City Hall or Steve James' Hoop Dreams. But Wang Bing takes that style and philosophy to an extreme. Through an inordinate amount of handheld long takes, he lets the camera…
