*mild spoilers, maybe*
Perhaps the highest compliment I can pay this 3.5-hour movie is that I never once felt myself wishing it were ended. This was some of the best pacing I’ve ever seen in a film, and it comes from a mixture of plotting, musicality, and a rare nimbleness of cinematography, by which I mean that the camera shifts effortlessly and rhythmically between the grand and the human scale, depending on what is needed to move the story forward.…
This was, as advertised and just as I had hoped, 90 minutes of pure Taiwanese 80s vaporwave. Neon signage everywhere proselytizing on behalf American and Japanese brands—silent, blinking reminders of a benign capitalist imperialism at the end of history—and all over Taipei roaming bands of street toughs decked out in absurdly wide cotton suits when they’re smoking and gambling in a bar, or tight, faded jean jackets and equally tight jeans when they’re riding two to a motorbike out in…
This rang hollow for me, and for a while after seeing it I wondered if that first negative impression might change, but if anything it has hardened and solidified. I honestly don’t know if seeing the film contributes anything beyond what is already conveyed in the the pithy Letterboxd précis of the film’s plot. Why compel the viewer to watch a bunch of Nazis self-actualizing in the shadows of Auschwitz? And why should the viewer never once be able to…
