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China

Goodbye Dragon Inn begins with a showing of Dragon Inn, a movie about the Ming Dynasty in China. Dragon Inn deals with the "Fan-tze". The Fan-tze were secret agents of sorts; martial artists led by a man named Tzao Shao-Chin; an older gentleman who was an expert swordsman. While the movie {Dragon Inn} begins and the opening credits roll we watch the theater from various vantage points. Cut to the lobby of the Fu-Ho Grand Theater then to a woman {Shiang-chyi Chen} as she limps down one of the hallways and through the theater to a back room where she eats her dinner and seems to be a bit depressed.

Eventually Chen hobbles back down the hallway and up the stairs to another hallway where she continues to hobble for several minutes. Back in the theater we watch the movie and movie watchers for several more minutes until it begins to feel like this film is trying to set some sort of record for "slow". Chen spends a bit of time checking the stalls in the women's room then we cut to the men's room and watch for what seems like an inordinate length of time while several men make use of it {slowly}.

After Chen has wandered about the building for a while, we watch several other patrons of the theater wander then we watch for several minutes as Chen sits and stares. By this time you may be thinking to yourself something along the lines of: "Oh My God, this film is just excruciatingly slow!" and you'd be right.

A middle aged man is amongst the wandering patrons. He spends considerable time just standing in a hallway, smoking cigarettes. When another man approaches him and asks for a light, the smoker tells him all about the ghosts that supposedly haunt this theater, the two stand and slowly smoke cigarettes for several minutes then the smoker walks away. The film doesn't get any more exciting than that. It does make something of a point. {But, hopefully, so will this review.}

Despite the fact that this is just excruciatingly slow and both the story and performances are nearly non-existent, it's really beautiful in a dark and dingy sort of way. This is the sort of film you might want to see just once so that you can know you've seen it or just to see how something like this can work. On the other hand, once you have seen it, you may be a bit irritated with yourself for having actually spent the time and or money to do so. If you were excited by Warhol's Sleep or his footage of the Empire State Building, by all means, buy this. It will thrill you out of your wits. If you enjoy film conventions like dialogue and motion... this is not your cup of tea.

I'm giving Goodbye Dragon Inn a fish for film quality, a fish for having the audacity to do something like this {This is a "different" sort of experiment. Unfortunately, audacity's not much of a commodity these days. You probably need a bit of it just to walk out the door most mornings. A few years ago it may have been worth two or three fish.}, two fish for ambience and one for originality. I'm also adding the warning that you will most likely not like the film and there's a very good chance that it will put you to sleep.