I am an oddly big fan of Slow Cinema. With an effective enough atmosphere, a work of Slow Cinema can be an immersive, absorbent experience for me, and 'Goodbye, Dragon Inn' almost perfectly fits this bill. While you could say a couple of shots run for a bit too long and the film occasionally borders on tedium, I feel that its overall impact is unexpectedly exciting in a way. A meditation on cinema and the passage of time, the film uses sparse dialogue, beautiful cinematography, subtilely lush sound design, and the setting of a haunted movie theatre to chilling effects. Not to mention, 'Goodbye, Dragon Inn' is also a very funny movie. Its dry sense of humour is able to break the possible entry into boredom by providing quite a few genuine laughs. Much of the comedy perfectly captures the subtle, awkward tensions that every so often casually pop up in the average person's daily life. At the same time, the film also gives off a rather melancholic vibe interspersed with genuinely unsettling moments. By the end of the film, I even feel vaguely uplifted, and I'm not even sure why exactly, there's just something about it all that provokes unexpectedly strong emotional responses. All of these feelings miraculously bloom from many extremely long, drawn out shots that sometimes feel almost painfully mundane, and yet it continuously draws my attention throughout, finally ending with one of the most enigmatically hypnotic and gorgeous final shots in cinema history.
Review of Goodbye, Dragon Inn
