what time is it there?

Have you seen YiYi? I guess there's something pretty great in Taiwanese cinema? I would say, of the two Taiwanese movies I've seen (YiYi and What Time is it There?), there is something pretty great in Taiwanese cinema.

So this movie is about a street vendor who sells watches and sits on a bridge over a city banging a watch on a pole to advertise (?). His father dies and his mother takes it really hard. Since you've been watching The Office a lot, I thought the phrase "that's what she said" might be appropriate because the mother is like sexually into the father's urn, and this is a totally amazing scene, where the mother is like all dolled up bedroom style and stares at a picture of the father as she like humps the urn that the father's ashes are in. later, the son finds her sleeping resting her head on the urn. she has a flower in her hair, it's heartbreaking but not over the top. to be fair, the urn is sort of wicker and not marble. i can never remember sex scenes so i'm not sure if the lady/urn pairing is the weirdest, but it's gotta be up there. what is nice about it and the whole movie is that there's not so much judgement, it's all very, it is what it is. and what it is is sometimes shocking or bleak or sad.

the other amazing scene i remember (there were many, but you know how you can't remember them all) has to do with the other protagonist. she is a woman who buys the watchsellers own watch because it has two faces and she is moving to paris so she wants paris and taiwan time all the time. this is why the bored watchseller sets clocks in taiwan to paris time, a chance encounter. isn't that beautiful? anyway, she is in paris and there's this incredible scene where she's very sick in a cafe and she goes to the bathroom and is vomiting and a chinese (is that what you call someone from hong kong? is that a dumb question? maybe just a xenophobic question?) woman follows her into the bathroom and sort of hovers as the other woman vomits. what got me was that, there was a door separating the toilet where the girl was vomiting from the outside waiting part where the woman was, and the woman didn't actually shut it until the girl stopped vomiting and was cleaning herself up. then when they were sitting at their adjacent tables, the chinese woman sent the taiwanese woman a glass of hot water and they begin this awkward chatting up sequence where you think after every exchange it's over but it keeps sputtering to start up again.




This is how it ends! So incredible! It's like a Kieslowski movie! I should see more of this guy.