Review of Good Bye, Lenin! (2003) by Chads. — 08 Nov 2005

It's an amusing gambit to make a movie about going to the movies when the film-within-the film is going to be of more interest to the average moviegoer...in Taiwan. An international festival audience, however, sits in admiration at how Taiwanese cinema has matured since their pop-entertainment days of martial arts epic, without understanding that those days were halcyon.

I suspect that Tsai Ming-liang's films are more popular abroad, as are the filmographies of Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang. Late in the film, two old men commiserate over how people don't attend the movies anymore, and "Goodbye Dragon Inn" is just the sort of film to keep them away.

This film could be construed as a self-criticism of a formalist director's failure to enrich his own people's lives with stories they can relate to. It was the author Sherman Alexie who made me first aware that the high-end of non-white artists are not popular with their own people.

Alexie, a Native-American, had said that "all of his ancestors were illiterate," and that his fanbase are largely white, middle-class women. The key to getting anything out of "Goodbye Dragon Inn" is to project yourself as one of the film's patrons.

Don't be you, be them.