Goodbye, Dragon Inn (2003) dir. Tsai Ming-liang. Matinee at Willow Creek Cinema with one other happy patron.

This was one of the most incredible and undoubtedly memorable cinematic experiences I’ll ever have: Tsai Ming-liang’s slow cinema masterpiece, Goodbye, Dragon Inn at the Willow Creek Cinema on a sad Saturday afternoon. I was totally unprepared for this bizarre little movie, which is about the last day of a Taipei movie house, haunted perhaps, but probably not, leaking rainwater, peopled by bored cigarette smokers taking in the 1967 wuxia classic Dragon Inn. Thing is, the Willow Creek, though not old, is gloomy and radiates failure; its parking lot was torn up, it was bereft of people, and in Theater 1 was only me and one other fellow, who laughed uproariously throughout the picture. Arriving a bit early, I thought, “they won’t show the usual shit beforehand, will they?” Of course they did—why wouldn’t they? Repellant ads for microwavable mac ‘n’ cheese, the exhausting M&M spy capers, and the terminally corporate Marvel and Jurassic trailers. All of this, it turned out, made Goodbye even better—I’m actually glad I saw it there, alone in the back half of this broken down theater while the laughing man enjoyed his half. We reflected Tsai’s world; Tsai’s people reflected ours. Beautiful.

I do have to continue my anger, however: I simply couldn’t believe the Kraft Microwavable Macaroni and Cheese ad. In it, a young man is bored at a party, rolling his eyes and sighing forlornly. For whatever reason, this party apparently allows guests to plunder the kitchen cupboards, because he sees a cup of microwaveable mac ‘n’ cheese, nukes it, and begins eating. This being an short film of corporate evil, of course the processed food is rapturous. What troubled me so much was that the filmmaking was actually close to exquisite. Having procured his cup of glop, we now see the young man walking outside on what looks like a New York City street fresh after a spring rain. He begins dancing, and it’s kind-of beautiful—he floats, he seems to have disconnected from gravity; he is so impressive that someone shoots his antics on their phone, and this video morphs into a mildly mindbending animation that seems to reference Yellow Submarine or the comics of Kim Deitch, and everyone appeared bathed in a profound happiness. I was enraged. I knew deep down that Goodbye, Dragon Inn was bound to be brilliant, but this awful, evil little film was interfering with this wonderful experience, and its goal, unhidden, was to sell you what is arguably the saddest food product in human history and make you forget that better food existed. I wanted to stand up and scream, “You motherfuckers don’t get to do THIS for Kraft Macaroni and Cheese!” But who would’ve heard me? Laughing man hadn’t entered yet. And if I’d been heard, I’d have been thrown out, and my night would’ve been reminiscing about that ad and not Goodbye, Dragon Inn.