Goodbye Dragon Inn

This afternoon, MrStinky insisted that StinkyLulu honor a prior commitment to see a movie with him. See, StinkyLu'd been all caught up daily drama -- teaching, catching student plagiarism, arranging a haircut, preparing for a bigass/superlame conference this weekend -- the usual. But MrStinky prevailed & so StinkyLulu caught this afternoon's screening of Goodbye, Dragon Inn...

Wowie kazowie. Various folks have celebrated or reviled this flick for its studied minimalism -- but those folks seem to really know about the filmmaker & his other stuff. StinkyLulu knows not a whit about all that & even the minimalism is not really what StinkyLulu thinks is so nifty about this film. It's really a simple (yet somehow epic) portrait of the moviehouse as a venue for all kinds of things but -- most especially -- for romantic hope. From the clubfooted ticket-taker's unrequited love for the projectionist, and to the sweetly urban young man looking for a little tenderness among the many other men skulking around the edges of the cavernous theater, and finally to the two actors from another era watching themselves and each other both on the screen and in the moviehouse... And StinkyLu hasn't even mentioned the urinal men or the peanut-chomping lady. More happens in this film than any film StinkyLu's seen recently & yet -- you'd almost miss that for the nearly paralytic stasis of most of the film's elaborately extended shots. (Even more -- StinkyLulu totally did not expect the acting to be so heartrending OR for the whole dang thing to be so consistently hilarious throughout this bittersweet ode to moviegoing.)

Simply put -- Goodbye, Dragon Inn stands out as the most enthralling movie about the movies that StinkyLu's seen in some time...