Not the best place to start with Tsai (I speak from experience). It's incredibly slow paced and minimal so you really have to be in a good mood to appreciate it. The great thing for me is that this is a movie about watching a movie, and not much else, but with less than 10 lines of dialogue and a feature-length runtime Tsai manages to come up with a bunch of humorous and saddening situations. Like the best Tsais it stews in your brain for weeks.

5 minute scene of woman eating a pink cake

I love it and I don't love it. Another film that gives me the warm fuzzies in structure and ideas, but I can't exactly get with it.

Film centers around a rundown lonely theater with a few patrons who wander and glance about aimlessly seeking comfort. The atmosphere in this film is surreal and haunting. There are moments where you wonder what exactly you are watching..especially the 5 minute urinal scene. The dialog in this film is sparse and cryptic when spoken but it's not about the patrons but the personality of the theater itself. It's interesting that the only music you hear is from the old Dragon Inn movie playing.

Hypnotic (and only slow if you believe that a clear plot is all there is to a movie). This is all about the observations we make and the repetitions we perform on a daily basis and - of course - about the power of the gaze: both the glances shared (and avoided) between the moviegoers and (extratextually, if you will) the glance of the viewer outside the filmtext looking in and observing all these people moving around and living in the cinema. Added points for a 4-5 min. long take at the urinals.

Jacques Tati in a coma.

Watched this in my college film class...I had never seen so many sleeping students in one room. It was like Jonestown, the morning after.

Where *Tampopo* is about food and an aspiring ramen shop owner, *Goodbye Dragon Inn*, seems to be about movie theaters and movies; 2) the love between a ticket lady and projectionist; 3) "cruising" for homosexual contact in movie theaters (the filmmaker's personal memories?). Like the *Tampopo* the film has little humorous situations in a movie theaters. I really enjoyed the visual aspects and minimalist approach to the "romantic" relationship, too. (Warning: the film is slow at times.)

Who are these people? What thoughts are going through their minds? Are they ghosts, haunting the cinema after its death? "No-one goes to the cinema anymore" is one of the few lines in the film (40 minutes into its 82 minute runtime!), and it is mentioned that ghosts haunt this place. It's a mysterious and odd film, perhaps even haunting, and the way the showing of Dragon Inn occasionally affects the patrons serves as an effective reminder on the power of cinema. Incredible.

Perfect movie if you like to take frequent bathroom breaks. If you like watching a lady limp up and down stairs for minutes at a time, enjoy!

"Tsai's elegy to a now-departed Taipei theater is also a beautiful love poem to the movies." - Ed Gonzalez

wish i'd seen this at the cinema

This was my first Tsai, and it was a bad starting point. I may give it another whirl once I've seen the rest of Tsai's films, but for now, I don't consider myself a big fan of this. The idea is good, I suppose, but the execution to me felt gimmicky and a bit forced. Still, it gets many points for some very beautiful and thought-provoking shots and sequences.

Tsai's slowest-moving and most difficult film. It takes his minimalist approach to an extreme, with less than 10 lines of dialogue, incredibly long shots of a person walking down a hall or up some stairs, and "climaxing" with a 2 or 3 minute shot of nothing but empty theater seats. It's a movie that requires you to fill it with your own feelings, your own ideas. It has almost everything a Tsai fanatic looks for, but there's SO much empty space that you really have to be in the right mood for it.

Unwatchable. One of the four worst pieces of absolute shit I've ever seen. And I loved what time is it there. This is not a film. This is an hour and twenty minutes of shit that could have been cut from a more talented visionary like WKK's worst film.

Lol. I fucking hate myself.

I always had a hard time imagining how hell looks like. Now I know. It's a screening room where you are forced to watch this and "Mat i syn" like Alex in "Clockwork Orange" ...for eternity. Just thinking of that makes me shiver.