Properly Screened

This might be my favorite discovery of the project, so far. A friend and I saw this for the first time and both fell for it immediately. Neither of us knew anything about it going in, apparently unlike everyone else, since the show sold out a 232-seat theater at 4pm on a Friday. Set in 1960s British Hong Kong, it follows two neighbors in a crowded apartment building who suspect their spouses are having an affair with each other. What grows between them is quiet, restrained, and heavy with feeling. Wong Kar-wai keeps the dialogue sparse, letting music, color, and close-ups --- hands, hips, glances, clocks, doorways, cigarette smoke --- do the talking. It took a bit of research to realize how many films and shows I love trace back to this one, including A Everything Everywhere All at Once , Moonlight , and Mad Men . Sofia Coppola has spoken about In the Mood for Love (2001) as a key inspiration when writing Lost in Translation , most notably in her Oscar acceptance speech for Best Origi...

Edward Yang's slice-of-life family drama has been called meditative, bittersweet, and stunning by film critics. I found it... fine. At three-hours long, it wasn't terribly painful, but it was just fine. I couldn't connect with the sense of disappointment, heartbreak, joy, and love the film is known for. Maybe the long takes, austere cinematography, or slow pacing of New Taiwanese Cinema are all too subtle for me. But Yi Yi (2000) felt overly restrained.  In my effort to understand why this film is considered one of the best ever made, I learned that yi yi means “one by one” in Mandarin. The film doesn’t follow any conventional narrative patterns; things simply unfold as they do in real life, one after another, one by one. So I suppose it's poetic. But it might be lost on me.  Yi Yi on Letterboxd