Featuring in the book 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die I was naturally going to watch this Taiwanese film regardless, and I was prepared to sit through a nearly three hour length if it turned out to be good. Basically this film is all about the Taipei family, focusing on three members of the family and their perspectives as they go through various difficult, meaningful and poignant moments in life. These are the middle-aged father N.J. (Nien-Jen Wu), young son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang) and teenage daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee), as they start the film with a wedding, and the conclusion is a funeral. So N.J. has a job he is unhappy with, and desires to make a big deal in the Japanese video game industry, and unable to get his partners all on side he finds support from software mogul Ota (Issei Ogata), and he has former lover Sherry (Su-Yun Ko) trying to enter the fray. Son Yang-Yang is having trouble with teachers and stuff at school, and his daughter is in a love triangle with a neighbour and her troubled boyfriend. All this goes on while N.J.'s old mother in law is in a coma, his wife left for Buddhist retreat after having a midlife crisis, and overweight brother in law Ah-Di (Hsi-Sheng Chen) marries a film star and has to deal with extended family. I will be completely honest and say that I did not fully understand everything going on, because it has so many layers and situations to take in and make sense of. Also starring Elaine Jin as Min-Min, Adriene Lin as Li-Li and Pang Chang Yu as Fatty. I think the length was a slight issue for me, and it did add to the fact that I didn't know everything that was going on, but for some really good visual stuff, some interesting dialogue to see and listen to (a little English) and some social realism it is a watchable drama. Very good!

Yi Yi (2000)Losing director Edward Lang recently (he died in 2007) was hard on the film world in general, as well as on Chinese language films with an international reach. And "Yi Yi" is a great, offbeat and yet accessible, likable film. What happens is very simple--an extended family is portrayed over several months as they enter relationships and life takes its usual tragic-comic toll. In a way, nothing in particular happens. There is no grand focus to the film in the usual sense (a murder, a love affair, a business deal gone wrong) but instead all of these things happen and overlap.Some viewers will surely find it too dull and slow to withstand, but most viewers (the majority) once you give it a chance, will find the humanity bracing, the honesty of the acting and the writing (also by Lang) alive and well. It is filmed with straight forward storytelling expertise, but it is paced and edited with a higher order of intelligence. The sequence of disparate events, as young and old people fall in love and have close calls with death, is meshed together with intuitive brilliance.It might somehow not be a great film. It might lack the larger turning point drama to make it stand out and make a viewer stand up. But it's a quiet, almost magical film with terrific acting. Maybe the largest thing I took away from it is how universal people's activities are. True, this is Taiwan and not mainland China, so things are more Westernized, but we can identify with everything so acutely it's quite amazing. A gem of a film, too long, but still a gem.

Three light-on-its-feet hours long, the film starts with a wedding, ends with a funeral and in between captures what seems like a lifetime of experience. The story is about the emotional struggles of a businessman and the lives of his middle-class Taiwanese family in Taipei seen through three generations.Yi Yi: A One And A Two is a marvellous multi-generational drama from one of the leading lights of Taiwanese cinema Edward Yang, hovering at a delicate remove from its characters but conveying volumes about their hopes and disappointments. The film won for Yang the Best Director Award at the 2000 Cannes Film Festival, where it also debuted.

In the early new century, late Taiwanese director Edward Yang broke out from under the radar with his epic modern masterpiece and last film Yi yi (2000), a tender refreshing subtle drama centred around a domestic family. Remaining one of the most critically acclaimed films of the century, it's a shame that Yang left us before making another film but did broaden eyes to his other obscure works such as A Brighter Summer Day (1991) and The Terrorizers (1986); as all the practiced methods in these films come to their highest point of intimacy in Yi yi. Shuffling between a range of moods and themes, the focus and basic premise of Yi yi is a middle-class family in Taipei over the course of one year, beginning at a wedding and ending at a funeral. The characters disband and we follow each subplot discovering and developing each of them; the father (N.J.) spends time with his long lost first love, imagining what his life could have been and studying his past behaviour; the mother (Min-Min) who feels trapped in her status of housewife; the daughter (Ting-Ting) who discovers first love; and the son (Yang-Yang) who evaluates his surroundings. Other prominent characters include the husband and bride of the afore mentioned wedding and the soon to be deceased.The pivotal theme of Yi yi is in general the love we give and receive all throughout life – although this is not demonstrated in any chronological order within the film. First, there's the love a baby receives (which the bride from the wedding carries throughout the film) from the whole family and the parents – of which this mutual and constant love remains for eternity. Then as a young child, Yang-Yang, he just begins to notice girls and the effect they have on him. His sister plays the teenager representation, who seeks the opposite gender for sexual attention; a supposed illusion of love. As an adult, or when maturity is apparently complete and they're getting married, there's the love from the family and the strong attraction between the couple themselves. Later in middle age, when possibly this appeal fades (as presented by the fact N.J. and Min-Min take some time apart) there's the assumed love from ones children, peers and the sensation of reminiscing past 'loves'. Once one reaches old age there's the love from and to the whole family. Another theme is the representation of modern family life, working on superstition, traditions and behaviour. This being shown by the fact the entire family lives near or together, especially when one is weak. Also, the wedding is intentionally set on a particular date just because it's a supposedly lucky day on the almanac calendar (also giving their child a 'lucky' name). It also shows how materials and possessions are useless without any form of love.N.J. is one of my favourite and most fascinating characters in cinema. He's passive, understanding and rarely aggressive; even stereotyped by his colleagues as the 'honest-looking type'. For example, when he witnesses an unfriendly brawl due to an unwelcome guest, he avoids joining in and waits for it to calm down before considering making his entrance. But by this disturbance, he feels the occasion is ruined and kindly refuses to join though he doesn't judge any of the people involved. When Yang-Yang prefers to eat McDonalds rather than food at the wedding he indulges and makes no fuss. After this particular scene, he encounters an ex-girlfriend by an elevator who confronts him for standing her up at a date several years ago. N.J. does not respond. Throughout a much later set meeting in the third act, we discover that N.J. was in fact the nervous type, which leads us to evaluate his current behaviour against his old one – there's the use of parallels by having his study of his past behaviour over his daughter and her boyfriend's first date, following these patterns. Though he has reached a new stage in his life and he's finally comfortable with the woman, he doesn't feel the attraction. When it comes to business, he is very calculating, understanding what to do but when he feels pressure he escapes to music. Plus he is co-operative but not dominating.Due to all these themes and the effect of personal impact it had on me, I refer to this film as the most enlightening and life-affirming film of all-time for me. This is mostly because the film has entirely convinced me that its theories are true and they are very comforting and therapeutic, despite the equal balance of happiness and sadness. According to the director, Yi yi literally translates to "A One and a Two…", like the phrase bands say before their performance. It's as if everyone is only getting ready and this is one big rehearsal. Or it is one big irony because, as Edward Yang has stated; 'few things in life are as simple as ones and twos", unlike the situations in the film. It is an incredibly rewarding and satisfying experience, if emotionally draining. There's also a very reassuring quote from the film I love; "My uncle says… we live three times as long since man invented movies. It means movies give us twice what we get from daily life. For example, murder. We never killed anyone, but we all know what it's like to kill. That's what we get from the movies." This is the natural beauty of film and my inspiration. I think the thought of this film could carry me throughout my whole life.One of my favourite films of all-time.10/10