Word: tsai
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Freshman Daniel Tsai made an impressive debut for the men’s alpine team with the top giant slalom finish of all Crimson skiers in his first event, the St. Lawrence Carnival...
...From the man who takes the motion out of motion pictures comes his latest movie, Goodbye, Dragon Inn. Tsai opens this radical experiment in minimalist extremes in the middle of a ferocious rainstorm; the night before it is scheduled to be closed, a grand old Taipei theater is showing the landmark 1966 kung fu film Dragon Inn to a scattered handful of ghostlike characters, including a young Japanese tourist (Mitamura Kiyonobu) apparently cruising for gay men. The crippled, young ticket taker (Chen Shiang-chyi) stalks the venue in search of the mysterious projectionist (Lee Kang-sheng)?perhaps...
...result, however, is a pretty strong argument for steering clear of the local movie house. Goodbye, Dragon Inn is unbearably inert. It's not so much that Tsai has neglected to craft a good story and characters; that's always been his style. What Goodbye lacks is exactly what Tsai's far superior 2001 film What Time Is It There? had in every frame: authentic feeling. Instead of the emotion that suffused the earlier movie?however artfully repressed?in Goodbye we get minutes-long still shots of an empty theater. There are occasional flashes of Tsai's skill for silent...
...good thing that most of the characters in Tsai Ming-liang's films seem to be compulsive smokers. The acclaimed Taiwan-based director is the master of the long, slow reveal that keeps camera movement to an absolute minimum. Just as frozen are his actors, who sit or stand or lie with that familiar art-house look of longing in their eyes, which often resembles nothing so much as a slight case of constipation. Were it not for the constant lighting of cigarettes and the smoke wreaths wafting through the frame, Tsai's scenes would be hard to distinguish from...
...blanche to experiment and explore. They have produced some innovative cinema, but there's a reason why none of the eight Taiwan films made last year grossed more than $30,000 in Taiwan. Without the blatantly populist tradition that keeps even Hong Kong's indie directors grounded, filmmakers like Tsai seem to feel little need to connect to the audience on any level. That's a recipe for the kind of movies that exist only to be shown at foreign-film festivals. At the end of Goodbye, a character walks out of the theater and sadly remarks to his companion...