Dull, at least it looks nice.

Good visual palette, good sound design (enhancing background noises to give life to the environment), but not easy to get through. Story is a bit all over the place, and mostly uneventful.

The life and times of an unambitious son in a small family in a sleepy Taiwanese village. Hou once again shows his ability to create a time and place with naturalistic ability. There's some nice cinematography and nuances to the traditional Taiwanese family dealing with the new generation. This is another film that explores the development of Taiwan and the vacant feeling of the youth searching for identity. It's good but might be confusing or slow to those unfamiliar with Taiwan.

I liked this one, but as usual with Hou, didn't love it. It took me a while to figure out the characters and their relations to each other (Hou is never very helpful in that regard) but once that became clear I started getting more into it. At least it sort of had a point to it.