Goodbye, Dragon Inn

PopcornIdeology2.0

*me reading the summary of the film*: “oh how could I not love this?!?!”*me while watching the film*: “oh that’s how...”As I was watching Goodbye, Dragon Inn on a completely legal and morally upstanding website, I was suddenly informed via a small pop up that there was a newly single milf (I believe by the name of Nicole) within a 5 mile radius that wanted to have a discussion of sorts. As I hovered over the unassuming “x” with my cursor, I became entranced by the audacious solicitation, the bold assumption carried out by “Nicole” that I would want to talk to her. And then I realized Nicole is a hero. She’s a hero because for those 45 seconds I was more invested in her misplaced advances then I was in Goodnight, Boring Inn. So “Nicole,” if you are reading this, thank you, and maybe I will reply to you one day, it depends solely on if people keep recommending me boring films.4.5 / 10

clare5.0

Sixty in September: 22/60Cinema of my dreams. About looking. At people. At movies. At people in movies. At people through movies. At yourself. About remembering. Remembering movies. Remembering people. Remembering yourself.Reaching out and standing next to and breathing the smoke of and lighting a cigarette and next to someone's feet.Rain indistinguishable from the hum of the projector. Ghosts. Memory. Death of cinema. Love of cinema. Loss of cinema. Remembering. The process, the cycle of cinema going, film watching. Arriving, watching, walking home. Communing alone.I have empathized with no moment in movies more, perhaps ever in my life, than when the film oscillates suddenly back and forth from the ticket girl to the warrior girl. The pinpoints of light on her face, her eyes completely alight. I saw myself seeing myself.Above all, an eternal love of movies. Being haunted by them. Remembering them. Elegy for all the souls who go looking in them, all the souls in them. Who are haunted by them, who haunt them. A song for the wonderful, sad mystery of what movies are, always fading, fading away. Alone. Together.

Jake Cole4.5

Captures the paradox of theatrical viewing, a communal isolationist experience. It's not until 45 minutes through an 80-minute picture that someone speaks, but the line, informing a Japanese tourist lightly cruising throughout that the theater is haunted, is unnecessary even after such a long time without speech. Cinema as a vessel for ghosts, shades of the past played before a small group of holdout devotees who wander and drift like spirits themselves. Even the actors in the movie being shown come to watch their past selves. Extreme long takes of wandering ticket lady, empty seats and the film at hand communicate both loss of a way of film viewing and a quintessential element of its magic. Everyone goes home alone, but as they sit in silence for two hours, the patrons are one.