A Taipei family faces personal and moral uncertainty as everyday events test their relationships and sense of purpose.
Rated 5.0 / 5 from 2 logs on Katalog
One of those scripts that is so tight it transcends the genre Beautiful from beginning to end, extremely immersive, slightly too long (but also just the right length? if that makes sense) I feel like it tells so much. A really large slice of life.
The idea that you have to be able to pitch something simply and catchy to capture attention has escalated to insane proportions. I think we’ve gotten addicted to and, naturally, started adopting the mindset that fun concepts and catchy ideas without willingness to execute them until the end with skill and attention is completely normal and enough. Suddenly everyone is an “ideas person”, a “concept person”, and this superficiality, this lack of willingness to commit had poisoned all spheres of life, our work, our hobbies, our interests, our relationships and our art. Not to say that movies heavily relying on intriguing or fascinating or controversial premises can’t turn out to be decent or even great, of course they can. But every now and then you watch a movie whose concept is not only not catchy or fun, but indescribable. Explaining it to someone is difficult, and it’s difficult to pinpoint why. It has a plot, it has characters, the story is comprehensible, it’s fun, it’s engaging, it’s immersive, but you can’t exactly describe it. It’s difficult to even say what exactly makes it that good. You could dissect it and overanalyse it piece by piece but it still wouldn’t make sense because it’s all of it but there’s also something much deeper to it, almost like magic that makes it all work together. Yi-Yi is one of those movies, and perhaps one of the best of such movies I’ve seen, because it masterfully weaves that magic into a seemingly conventional story. (Unrelated: I watched it in a packed cinema in Berlin, and I’m glad people still go and pay for movies, myself included, but boy do I miss my empty government-owned-need-no-audience cinema back home. Today, I spent the first hour battling nausea from being surrounded by the smell of fried chicken, pork that marinated a bit too long in that takeout box I’d say, mandarins whose bits and skin were afterwards left all over the seat like some fucking curse, the smell of popcorn that surprisingly came as a sort of remedy, reminding me I’m in a cinema and not in an bio-waste thrash can, on top of 20-minute commercials and loud chewing. The smells lingered for the second hour but luckily the movie had a third hour that I could enjoy with all my senses. Catharsis completed.)
