[malakaheso]

^^It's a film that falls between two stools. It's not really a character driven piece, since we don't get a lot of character development, nor is it particularly successful as an allegory because it's too simplistic. Notice how nobody is able to offer a defense of what the film is really about other than repeat the mantra they read from other journalists that it's a film about the growing pains of Taiwan? That's great and all, but so what? There is nothing universal about it. Great films are capable of finding the universal in the specific. ABSD fails to do that.

I have no problem with long films, even long symbolic ones---Angelopoulos' The Travelling Players is one of my favourite films, it runs at 230 mins, has no score and is ostensibly a film about modern Greece which finds a universal meaning in a culturally specific context--but I felt that ABSD was not compelling enough on any level (story, aesthetics etc) to really grip me. Satantango is twice as long as A Brighter Summer's Day yet it felt so much more interesting. It was the product of a unique, if terminally grim, worldview. ABSD denies us emotional identification while offering very little in return for our efforts. In short, it functions as an 'intellectual film' that encourages a strong level of viewer detachment but it doesn't actually give us any ideas to actually mull over and chew on.

I don't think it's a major work of cinema. It might be a major work of Taiwenese cinema, but I don't believe it is a great work of actual cinema. I also find the Taiwenese New Wave directors to be quite underwhelming in general, but that's just me. I do like Yang though, and ABSD is the worst film of his that I've seen so far.

If people think it's great, that's fine, but just keep in mind that we don't all think it's less of a film than you do because we have short attention spans.