New on Blu-ray: GOODBYE, DRAGON INN (2003)

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Product Description: Like the Royal Theater in The Last Picture Show and the title movie house in Cinema Paradiso, the Fu-Ho is shutting down for good. The Fu-Ho’s valedictory screening is King Hu’s 1967 wuxia epic Dragon Inn, playing to a motley smattering of spectators. The standard grievances persist: patrons snack noisily and remove their shoes, treating this temple of cinema like their living room. The sense that moviegoing as a communal experience is slipping away takes on a powerful and painful resonance. Yet Tsai Ming-liang’s Goodbye, Dragon Inn is too multifaceted to collapse into a simple valentine to the age of pre-VOD cinephilia. A minimalist where King Hu was a maximalist, preferring long, static shots and sparse use of dialogue, Tsai rises to the narrative challenges he sets for himself and offers the slyest, most delicate of character arcs (the manager, a woman with an iron brace on her leg, embarks on a torturous odyssey to deliver food to the projectionist, played by Lee Kang-sheng). By the time the possibility arises that the theater is haunted, we’ve already identified it as a space outside of time—indeed, two stars of Hu’s original opus, Miao Tien and Shih Chun, watch their younger selves with tears in their eyes, past and present commingling harmoniously and poignantly. 4K Restoration by CINEMATEK, the Royal Film Archive of Belgium.

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DVD & Blu-ray: VIVE L'AMOUR / AI QING WAN SUI (1994)

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Product Description: The sophomore feature from Tsai Ming-liang (Rebels of the Neon God, Goodbye, Dragon Inn) finds the acclaimed master of Taiwan's Second New Wave demonstrating a confident new cinematic voice. Vive L'Amour follows three characters unknowingly sharing a supposedly empty Taipei apartment. The beautiful realtor May Lin (Yang Kuei-mei) brings her lover Ah-jung (Chen Chao-jung) to a vacant unit she has on the market, unaware that it is secretly being occupied by the suicidal funeral salesman Hsiao-kang (Lee Kang-sheng). The three cross paths in a series of precisely staged, tragicomic erotic encounters, but despite their physical proximity, they find themselves no closer to a personal connection.

Featuring an intoxicating mix of Antonioni-esque longing and surprising deadpan humor, Vive L'Amour catapulted Tsai to the top of the international filmmaking world and earned him the prestigious Golden Lion at the 1994 Venice International Film Festival.

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New on Blu-ray: Tsai Ming-liang's REBELS OF THE NEON GOD (1992)

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Product Description: Tsai Ming-liang emerged on the world cinema scene in 1992 with his groundbreaking first feature, Rebels of the Neon God. His debut already includes a handful of elements familiar to fans of subsequent work: a deceptively spare style often branded “minimalist”; actor Lee Kang-sheng as the silent and sullen Hsiao-kang; copious amounts of water, whether pouring from the sky or bubbling up from a clogged drain; and enough urban anomie to ensure that even the subtle humor in evidence is tinged with pathos. The loosely structured plot involves Hsiao-kang, a despondent cram school student, who becomes obsessed with young petty thief Ah-tze, after Ah-tze smashes the rearview mirror of a taxi driven by Hsiao-kang’s father. Hsiao-kang stalks Ah-tze and his buddy Ah-ping as they hang out in the film’s iconic arcade (featuring a telling poster of James Dean on the wall) and other locales around Taipei, and ultimately takes his revenge. Rebels of the Neon God is a remarkably impressive first film that hints at the promise of its director: a talent confirmed by Tsai’s equally stunning second feature, Vive L’Amour (Golden Lion, Venice), and continuing to his most recent film, Stray Dogs, which ranked high on many “best of” lists last year. Though showing such diverse influences as the French New Wave, Wong Kar-wai’s early films—and, yes, Rebel Without a Cause—Tsai’s film is most remarkable for introducing his startlingly unique vision to world cinema.

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