A film to wrap yourself in like a warm blanket. This is not your family; this is not your life. But it might feel like it at times. There is a deeply rooted ontology baked into the dna of this film. And that makes sense, its nature being so reflectively intimate. The movie feels like a home movie without looking like one. It temporally transports without distracting anachronisms. Its so quiet, yet violent conflict collides in front of you. An astonishing and invisible juxtaposed entanglement of serenity and violence somehow coexist on the screen without breaking the soothing momentum. Life and death are equally loud, but each has a distinct existential sound. Both are facts of life. Life is the substance and death is the bookends. Together they tell an entire story, and yet that story is but one patch in the tapestry of the cosmos of the human race.

A film to wrap yourself in like a warm blanket. This is not your family; this is not your life. But it might feel like it at times. There is a deeply rooted ontology baked into the dna of this film. And that makes sense, its nature being so reflectively intimate. The movie feels like a home movie without looking like one. It temporally transports without distracting anachronisms. Its so quiet, yet violent conflict collides in front of you. An astonishing and invisible juxtaposed entanglement of serenity and violence somehow coexist on the screen without breaking the soothing momentum. Life and death are equally loud, but each has a distinct existential sound. Both are facts of life. Life is the substance and death is the bookends. Together they tell an entire story, and yet that story is but one patch in the tapestry of the cosmos of the human race.

Every memory feels like it’s being gently exhumed. So specific it somehow becomes universal — nostalgia with dirt under its nails.

Every memory feels like it’s being gently exhumed. So specific it somehow becomes universal — nostalgia with dirt under its nails.

A simple story told in “moments” - brief scenes of significance in this family that is threatening to fall apart from the strain of surrounding cultural change. They seem innocuous, and to describe the plot would be an exercise in perfunctory biography, but the cumulative weight of authentic family drama and formalistic precision is overwhelming. I started crying 30 minutes in and it took a while to pull myself together. This film is beautiful and true.

A simple story told in “moments” - brief scenes of significance in this family that is threatening to fall apart from the strain of surrounding cultural change. They seem innocuous, and to describe the plot would be an exercise in perfunctory biography, but the cumulative weight of authentic family drama and formalistic precision is overwhelming. I started crying 30 minutes in and it took a while to pull myself together. This film is beautiful and true.

lit crazy movie

lit crazy movie

It’s got some poetic moments but a lot of it was just really sad and boring. I get what Hou is up to. He’s trying to impart the incredibly sorrowful feeling that we don’t seem to live our lives so much as let it pass by us. Yet he just doesn’t quite illustrate the stakes that well and the lives of the family he portrays oddly enough never seems fully realized. At least “Dust in the Wind” vividly depicted the industrialization of Taiwan in the early 80s. This one suffers from the strange sensation of being hermetically sealed while being oddly unspecific.

It’s got some poetic moments but a lot of it was just really sad and boring. I get what Hou is up to. He’s trying to impart the incredibly sorrowful feeling that we don’t seem to live our lives so much as let it pass by us. Yet he just doesn’t quite illustrate the stakes that well and the lives of the family he portrays oddly enough never seems fully realized. At least “Dust in the Wind” vividly depicted the industrialization of Taiwan in the early 80s. This one suffers from the strange sensation of being hermetically sealed while being oddly unspecific.