Goodbye Dragon Inn

A film that exists in the quiet corners of in-between, and raises mundanity to the level of magical realism, yet with a perverse humor that seems entirely Tsai's own. His patient observation of life's liminal spaces and moments is nostalgic but never somber or precious. Goodbye Dragon Inn, plays as much as anything, as a celebration of what once was.

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.

I don't think I got it but it's hard to complain when it looks nice and runs so short.

What the hell movie. How is nothing happening very slowly this poignant? Nothing keeps on happening until nothing stops happening and then nothing ends. There's a lot of high-level conceptual shit going on here but none of that really accounts for the lingering evocative punch (of nothing happening). Lingering unfulfillment, lingering gaze, lingering longing, lingering stream of piss. Poetry is a bitch. This movie haunted my brain. Would not recommend to anyone.

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.

As a bittersweet meditation on the death of cinema as a communal experience, G.D.I achieves real resonance because the decline in participation mirrors the wider fragmentation of society as a whole. While there are loose narrative threads involving missed personal connections, it's the cinema itself that captivates, and Tsai brings this inanimate space to life via low key lighting and ambient sound to create a ghostly atmosphere that is evocative and rich and suffused with melancholy and loss.

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.

A lament for things past and missed connections, reflected upon with utmost composure, and yet in its quiet solemnity there is a good deal of humor. For me it is neither difficult nor strained, but completely disarming.

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 made me want to kill myself.

It's probably not totally clear via the English subtitles that this is the last movie that will play the cinema and that Tien Miao (the old man with the little boy) and Chuh Shih (the rapt man sitting alone) were watching themselves in "Dragon Inn" the whole time.

5 minute scene of woman eating a pink cake

Lol. I fucking hate myself.

Very fascinating conceptually but admittedly pretty tough to sit through - I love lingering shots as much as the next person, but I'm pretty sure this was just 80 minutes of lingering shots chained together.

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.

Excruciatingly slow, for little payoff. Some nice frames, but otherwise didn't take anything from it. Guess Tsai Ming-liang doesn't work for me without musical interludes... :/

Don't be fooled by the synopsis or colorful poster, this movie has nothing going for itself other than some memorable images from a photographic perspective. There's an uninterrupted static shot at one point where you can tell the editor, producer and director fought over what the length said shot (with no characters, mind you!) should be before cutting to the next one and the director clearly won with 2 minutes and 16 seconds. Yes, I timed it.

Soothing and somehow enjoyable.

Jacques Tati in a coma.

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, 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.

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.

I work in a movie theatre and lemme tell you the only part of this that I could relate to my experience is that there’s always a guest who gets annoyed by everything and obviously isn’t going to get laid that night

A successful pairing of ruminative longing and gay cruising.

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!

Star Rating: ★★★★1/2

damn i love the movies

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.

watched: 2013, 2022

"If you notice the people around you while watching a film, you will see that their behaviour is like that of ghosts, lifting up their heads to look at the moving images in front. The cinema itself is like a coffin with bodies, sitting still, as if under a spell. The moving images on the screen are camera records of events that have already taken place; they are remains of the past, strung together and called a film. In this hall of darkness, ghosts are watching ghosts." – A. Weerasethakul

wtf???? this is how people must have felt while watching some of my all-time faves, i guess

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

2. Başka Sinema Ayvalık Film Festivali.

orayi yikip 4 tane cep sinemasi yapmak gecti film boyunca zihnimden. innlerine girecegiz innlerine

It's like the coda of a musical piece but the final lingering note is the whole film.

Movie is kind a opposite of Fugees "Killing me softly" music video although the set is same and there is other similarities. You know what i mean when i have seen both of them. I watched this movie twice and fell a sleep both times. Its beautiful lullaby made in oriental style.

i think tsai put that crippled woman and the way she cannot walk during the whole film into the story because as cinema is dying, when you watch that woman you are dying inside slowly with it too..

too nostalgic

I really tried, but absolutely despised this. I am completely baffled by the fact that this is beloved by many. It's about the people in an old movie theater on the day of its closing. The movie playing is Dragon Inn, which frankly looks a WHOLE lot more fun than this. Paced so slowly it would make Bela Tarr and Chantal Akerman blush, there's a scene where one of the people who cleans the theater just walks up and down aisles cleaning. This goes on for, no exaggeration, five and a half minutes.

Tsai's ultra-visual approach (there are only two exchanges of dialogue in the whole film) deftly mixes loneliness, longing, and searching for the other, sometimes through a tragic lens, other times through a comic one. Tsai's work tends to explore the isolation of the modern world, and here he reflects on that in conjunction with the death of cinema. The dilapidated movie theater continues to draw people to it in their search for companionship, even as most of them fail to find it.

Cinema is dead.

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.)