OTB#93: Yi Yi

I haven’t seen any movies by Andrew Yang before… The Sight & Sound poll has been criticised before for only including American, European, Japanese and Hong Kong movies before, so here they take a wild step into the unknown: Taiwan!

It looks like we’re solidly in the mainstream of the “best of” genre, though: It’s a slow moving family drama.

Hey, that’s an original interior decoration idea: Table as lamp.

I like a lot of the shots in this movie — coldly registering at a distance. It’s nice.

All the shots are very calculated, but slightly off-kilter so that it doesn’t look like it’s that calculated.

See? I love that shot, and it’s one that I’ve tried to do myself more than few times, but it’s difficult to get right.

However! I’m not really getting into this film. Yang is obviously inspired by a bunch of really great directors, but the dialogue just feels so artificial. Like… that’s something a kid would say?

Exactly!

This is my kind of movie, and many of the performances are great (especially the kids (when they don’t have any lines to deliver)), but some of the adult male actors are just… there. That, combined with the unconvincing dialogue, constantly pulls me out of the movie.

And there’s so many cliches, like this sad sack without any characteristics we’re supposed to sympathise with — because he’s in love with a girl who already has a boyfriend.

At the bottom of the top 100, you only need nine votes to get in.

On the other hand, it has a 97% tomatometer.

I had planned on the first film for this blog series to be Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (also on a shared #93), but when I double-checked the S&S web site:

It’s not there! Did I hallucinate it? So I went undercover and did some real sleauthi’ (i.e., I checked on the Wayback Machine):

THERE IT IS!!!

There was originally 12 movies on a shared #93, but now there’s only 11, and Throne of Blood is gone. Did they do a re-tallying or something? I can’t see anything else changed on the list except that…

MYSTERIES!!!