It feels like I just lived a movie that I’m not one of the characters, I was completely immersed and hypnotized.
a full movie. every moment, every scenario, speech, characters and soundtrack. movies that are not afraid to peel life and bring everyday things in a real, sometimes harsh and sensitive way, which can make everyone very thoughtful. bringing different years of life and with different perspectives that seem to be the same experience. completely obsessed with the minutiae of life that yang manages to convey in his works. I wish there was another 5 hours of film, 3 hours was not enough.
“The artistry is undeniable – tough insights blended with graceful compassion, gloomy certainties flecked with rays of hope.”
very difficult to put this movie into words. I’m going to use a few words from a review I read and cried even more. “Yi Yi” is a film about so many different things (the inescapability of regret, the architecture of modernity, the way that old loves turn into the most beautiful music) that it feels shortsighted to say that it’s a film about any of them. This life is too big for anyone to see the whole picture themselves, and yet we — who can’t even see the back of our own heads — are forced to navigate the infinite complexities of the world as if we’ve been here before (“Risk is high when you do anything for the first time,” one particularly wise character imparts). So we get lost. We make mistakes. We hold fast to even our flimsiest convictions to avoid being paralyzed by the uncertainty of it all.“
Fatty: “Life is a mixture of happy and sad things. Movies are so lifelike — that’s why we love them.
Ting-Ting:“Then who needs movies? Just stay home and live life.”
Fatty: “My uncle says we live three times as long since man invented movies.”
Ting-Ting: “How can that be?”
Fatty: “It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life.”
"If people could see everything for themselves, there would be nothing for us to show each other.”YES, this is literally the feeling of this movie, when it ended I found myself crying so hard.
“frankly… there’s very little I’m sure about these days, i wake up feeling unsure about almost everything. and i wonder why i wake up at all, just to face the same uncertainties again and again. would you want to wake up, if you were me?”
I love melodrama (Lorde’s Voice) in relationships and experiences, completely the human version in every way. the human crises surrounding the cities and the songs making a composition of loneliness, melancholy, drama and tension. the characters end up getting lost in their own experiences and sometimes end up reacting in selfish ways and also in a very privileged way of finding solutions.the doubts and questions of the characters with each other and with themselves, I love that they live a constant discussion and argument about what living is and what the first things in life mean. I love that yang always manages to quote a line about cinema and how movies change people or bring them experiences. he manages to put relationships in a way that makes you feel like you are part of the relationship, bringing the intimate feelings of the characters and the question of perspective, love and family, the dilemmas of different times of life, childhood, youth, adulthood and old age. "At a time when we aren’t able to see each other, and escapism has been elevated to something of a public health service, it’s so cathartic to watch a movie that doesn’t try to distract from the emptiness of our lives — a movie that’s determined to reveal their fullness, instead.“
"why are we afraid of the first times? everyday in life is a first time. every morning is new. we never live the same day twice. we’re never afraid of getting up every morning. why?”
