Goodbye, Dragon Inn (Movie)

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    Kino Film Collection, a Streaming Alternative to Netflix and Hulu

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    The service is an art house answer to what’s missing on some of the more popular streamers.Even those who swear by Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Hulu and their ilk must admit that the platforms leave something to be desired when it comes to art house titles.Netflix is perpetually chasing nostalgia or algorithmic trends. Prime is going for crowd-pleasers and classics. And Hulu can devote only so much energy to its film selection when most people still think of it as a TV service. So streaming consumers seeking independent films, foreign cinema and documentaries (other than true crime) may have to look elsewhere. We previously highlighted Mubi as one option; the new Kino Film Collection service is another.Like Shout! TV, Kino is tied to a brand beloved by cinephiles: Kino Lorber began as a film distributor in the late 1970s, and it is one of the most reliably high-quality home video labels, with particular emphasis on classic American cinema. It took some time to find the right formula for its streaming service, starting first, in 2019, with the à la carte Kino Now (an “arthouse iTunes”) before introducing Kino Film Collection late last year. Initially only available as an Amazon Prime Video channel, it became a stand-alone service in May, with its own app on Roku, Apple TV, Fire TV and Android TV.So what does it offer? Well, foremost and unsurprisingly, there are Kino Lorber’s own theatrical and home video titles, an impressive array of contemporary indies that includes “Martin Eden,” “Bacurau,” “Close to Vermeer,” “La Syndicaliste,” “Desperate Souls, Dark City and the Legend of ‘Midnight Cowboy’” and the Oscar-nominated “Four Daughters.” Several of these are found in a selection highlighting Critic’s Picks from these very pages, a wise organizing principle if there ever was one.Other sections are similarly well curated. As has (thankfully) become de rigueur for the streamers, a selection of “LGBTQ+ Stories” highlights queer cinema, past and present, for Pride Month. The Cannes Film Festival concluded a few weeks back, but the “Cannes Favorites” sidebar is still up, and well worth exploring. “Thought-Provoking Documentaries” includes explorations of everything from jazz music to the hedonism of Studio 54 to the history of the Great White Way. But the highlight may well be the robust selection of “Classics,” which runs the gamut from German Expressionism to nunsploitation.The Kino Film Collection interface is easy to use, and the image is excellent, with streams (of new releases in particular) frequently Blu-ray quality. The price is similarly nice: A monthly subscription is only $5.99 per month, or $59.99 annually, and a current promotion offers 20 percent off that annual rate. The service’s total number of available films is smaller than that of its art house streaming competitors Mubi and the Criterion Channel, but the price point is proportionately lower. (Mubi is currently $14.99 monthly, while Criterion charges $10.99 per month.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’: The Last Picture Show in Taipei

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }The Best of 2020Best ComedyBest TV ShowsBest BooksBest MoviesBest AlbumsAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyRewind‘Goodbye, Dragon Inn’: The Last Picture Show in TaipeiTsai Ming-liang’s 2003 movie watches moviegoers as they watch a martial-arts classic inside a cavernous theater.Lee Kang-sheng in “Goodbye, Dragon Inn.”Credit…Metrograph PicturesDec. 16, 2020, 3:34 p.m. ETA sparse audience attends the last show in a cavernous movie house. Now all the more poignant for being streamed, Tsai Ming-liang’s 2003 “Goodbye, Dragon Inn,” newly restored, is a love letter to cinema and also cinemas.The movie is set almost entirely inside the no-frills Fu-Ho Grand Theater in central Taipei. The Fu-Ho, which looks as though it can hold a thousand people, is a dramatic space, but the space on the screen, where King Hu’s 1967 wuxia classic “Dragon Inn” is projected, feels infinite.At once a martial-arts spectacle and an intricate chamber drama, “Dragon Inn” is a landmark of Taiwanese cinema. Although it would be years before Hu’s movie would be shown beyond America’s Chinatowns, The New York Times reported on its international success: “The popularity of the film, which depicts feats that appear fantastic to the Western viewer has brought a wave of action films.” Tsai would have been around 10 years old when “Dragon Inn” arrived in Taiwan. For him, it is not just a movie but the movies.The movies are also the places they inhabit. A sort of simultaneous double bill, “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” is predicated on the interplay of the projected “Dragon Inn” and the life of the Fun-Ho spectators. Patrons eat, sleep, cruise, hunt for fallen objects and wander out to the washroom.The theater manager, a young woman with a pronounced limp, climbs upstairs to the projection booth and down to the basement, searching for a persistent leak. (Torrential rain is one of Tsai’s trademarks, as is the presence of Lee Kang-sheng, revealed to be the protagonist just as the movie ends.) These various activities constitute a ballet of daily life, reminiscent to Jacques Tati’s subtle slapstick or Robert Wilson’s glacially paced operas.While “Dragon Inn” is highly kinetic, Tsai’s camera almost never moves. His “rigorous minimalism expresses a sensibility that is both tartly comic and mournfully romantic,” A.O. Scott wrote in The Times when “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” was shown at the 2003 New York Film Festival. “It’s an action movie that stands perfectly still.”Most of the dialogue and music in “Goodbye, Dragon Inn” emanates from “Dragon Inn.” And the movie within the movie is glimpsed at from a variety of angles, its shifting light patterns cast on the faces of spectators. (At one point, Tsai creates a montage in which the theater manager and the “Dragon Inn” star Hsu Feng appear to exchange glances.) “Did you know this theater is haunted?” an audience member asks another halfway through. The theater is haunted, both by the specters on the screen and the spectators in the seats, some of whom turn out to be in both movies.Tsai adds one more disembodied voice for the closing credits. The 1950s vocalist Yao Lee croons a wistful Chinese pop song about the presence of the past. She too is the spirit of the movies, a playback singer heard but not seen in countless films of Tsai’s youth and more recently “Rich Crazy Asians.”Goodbye, Dragon InnAvailable for streaming at Metrograph.com, starting Dec. 18.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More