Goodbye dragon inn is a very calm and an almost silent art movie that shows us the events that takes place during an old theatres last screening before it stops screening cinema forever and also pans the camera to show us the characters who work there and are also there to watch a movie for one last time.
It has almost no dialogues...like there is a total of 3 or maybe 4 dialogue exchange that takes place in the whole movie
It has very long shots that are mostly still and has absolutely no camera movements in between and also nothing happens in almost all of these long shot scenes....so it might be painful and frustrating for those people who have no patience...hell this movie will test your patience to an extreme level for sure
I cant say I understood everything but I am writing here what I could process from watching it and what I liked about it.
The movie was very slow paced for me...this is the slowest movie I have seen till date...Adam drivers PATERSON was the one that I remember watching that was extremely slow paced before this one but this tops all the splow paced movies I have ever watched easily so I was surprised that even while staring at a long shot of hallway where absolutely nothing happens I wasn't bored and by the end of the movie it had already grown on me....
The actors in this movie are almost without expressions
There is this one gay guy though who is desperately looking for a one night stand....and his expressions his disappointment his irritation everything was amusing to me
The there is this young limping ticket counter girl who has feelings for the projectionist guy...this is a one side romance and it's shown to us in a very simple way and without any drama to it...I liked that too
Then about the dialogues there is one that will definitely change the way you think about the characters existence...yup
And this is why I liked the fact that it felt almost real to me like it had that realistic feeling to it BUT along with a possible supernatural element lingering along with it.
And I feel that those guys who have a favourite theatre of theirs...where they used to watch tons of movies on a frequent basis and had to witness that theatres demoliton and are emotional and nostalgicabout it....this movie may be very effective for them.
So I am concluding this essay lol
by saying that I will only recommend this flick to art house movie lovers or those peeps who are extremely patient
I also wanna add a small piece of something that I felt was true from the director of this movie
'The movies that we know today are so dominated by storytelling. My question is: is film really only about storytelling? Couldn't film have other kinds of functions? This question brings me back to my own experience of film watching. It's very rare that I remember the story of any film. I usually only remember a certain moment that touched me. But I direct my attention to daily life and living. In our own lives there's no story, each day is filled with repetition. Movies today feel like in their two hours they have to tell a story so they're filled with indexes and indicators to point to the completion of a story. The audience has gotten used to it. I think film can be more than just that. I believe that the stories of my films can all be told in two sentences. Like in The Skywalk Is Gone: Lee Kang-sheng and Chen Shiang-chyi walk past each other but don't recognize each other. That's it. I'm trying to remove the dramatic elements from the story to disguise it. Film and reality are different, but by removing that kind of artificial dramatic element, I believe that I'm bringing them closer.'
