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This the kind of film you see at an art film festival at some inopportune time after you've already watched twenty films. You start watching it and it seems so boring that you know it can't be THAT boring. You're missing something. You sit up and you concentrate. Nothing happens. There is this woman with a club foot. She sways and totters up and down like a boat caught in waves as she drags her foot down a sparsely-lit corridor. The camera is at one end of the corridor and it records her progress. Then after she is gone, the camera holds on the empty corridor for some long seconds, make that literally minutes, and then cuts to another scene.

This time the camera is looking out into a darkened movie theater. There are only a couple of people seated in the red seats. Finally some dialogue. It's from the movie being shown, a kind of sword and warlord melodrama set in the Ming Dynasty. (Actually it's King Hu's Dragon Inn (1967),a martial arts epic--hence the name of this movie). The camera watches the face of one particular viewer. He is just sitting there watching the movie. The camera watches him watching the movie. It watches him watching the movie for a long time.

At some later point the guy goes to the bathroom. He's actually a Japanese tourist. He stands next to some other guy at a urinal. Another guy comes in and stands at a third urinal. One guy smokes a cigarette. Some time passes. Then there is another scene. The woman with the club foot is in the bathroom. She opens one stall and flushes the toilet. She opens another stall and flushes the toilet. The camera stays on the scene until she has flushed the last toilet, and then holds on the empty bathroom...

At this point you figure out what is going on. This is an anti-film. Everything is backwards. The film maker (Tsai Ming-Liang) is not trying to entertain you, to impress you, or to excite you, or rally you to some cause, dazzle you, invoke your tears, uplift you, scare you, redeem you--no, the film maker is doing exactly the opposite of what film normally tries to do.

And then there's another scene, as if to confirm your interpretation. The one guy and another stand in the corridor smoking cigarettes. There is after a bit some words from the second man. He says this theater is haunted. There is no response. He says "Ghosts." No response. The camera now gets a little closer so that you see the men from perhaps a few feet away. Their heads are turned away from the camera so that only the back of their heads and a little bit of the sides of their faces can be seen. The camera holds. No one says anything.

And finally near the end of the film after the theater has been closed for the night (actually forever, as this is about the death of the movie house),one guy puts his palm on a fortune telling machine. The machine says, "Enter your question." He punches a button. After a bit, the machine says, "Please take your fortune." A pause, and then the machine kicks out the fortune on a strip of paper. The guy takes it and reads it. And then he leaves. The camera does NOT show his fortune.

The part you like best comes at the end as a woman sings a Chinese song about "Half was bitter; half was sweet." Her voice is gorgeous and the melody is engaging. And then the title characters run down the screen.

Okay, this film really IS boring unless you are a true student of film, and then you can see that this anti-film about people watching a film is a statement about the film-maker's art. As you leave the theater, now having seen twenty-one films, you declare that this was very interesting, and you know you are going to vote this one higher than some of the others because it so deliberately bored you that you were not really bored at all, compared to some other films that took themselves too seriously and really did bore you. "Interesting," you say to your companion. "Really makes a statement," he says. "Beautiful in a way," you say. "Yes," he says.

Suddenly you have an angle on the film. You're thinking, "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" somehow reminds you of the lyric from the Elton John song about Marilyn Monroe. The lyric is, "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road." Same thing, you think--or at least the same melancholy idea.

First of all, I must say that I wasn't sure as to what I was getting into when I sat down to watch the 2003 movie "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" (aka "Bu san"). I knew it was a Taiwanese drama, but that was essentially it. So director Ming-liang Tsai had every possible shot at impressing me with this movie.

So I sat down here in 2021 to watch "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" without ever having heard about it. And the result was atrocious. Oh dear lord, this movie was unfathomably slow paced and uneventful. It was without a doubt one of the most boring and pointless movies I have ever watched and sat through.

The storyline told in "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" was simple enough, but the fact that virtually nothing happened throughout the course of the entire movie was just beyond me. Sure, this is alledgedly artsy and all, but come on. I don't sit down to watch a movie to watch absolutely nothing on the screen.

Every scene and segment in this movie was prolonged to the point where it became painstakingly boring and a battle to sit through. I even dozed off two or three times along the way. Good thing that "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" is the type of movie where you can leave at any time and come back and pick up the story without having missed a single beat. In fact, you can leave shortly after the movie starts, then come back for the ending, and you will be up to speed with the storyline.

I am not familiar with the actors and actresses in the movie, though it was a very small cast. And keep in mind that the dialogue was minimal, a whole staggering single sentence was uttered I think. I will say, though, that actress Shiang-chyi Chen was actually the one standing out as the best performance in the movie.

While I managed to sit through the entire ordeal that is "Goodbye, Dragon Inn", then I was by no means entertained, and this is by no means a movie that I will return to watch a second time. Nor is it a movie that I will recommend to anyone to sit down and watch.

My rating of "Goodbye, Dragon Inn" lands on a one out of ten stars. This was seriously the most boring and pointless movie I have ever stumbled upon.

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.