Review of Yi Yi

Although I was touched by a few scenes in this film, I felt mostly like Edward Yang was trying too hard to be "poignant" and "symbolic." Almost every scene is riddled with overly symbolic material that just made me roll my eyes or yell at my television. Examples of this include the scene where Yang Yang is watching the movie on lightening with its obvious sexual allusions and then sees the underpants of the girl who he secretly has a crush on. Another example was the whole cutting back and forth scene from Sherry and NJ in Tokyo back to NJ's children who are living out parts of NJ's childhood. I was like, "Oooo, deep, Mr. Yang. Deep." In addition, there is much annoying screaming in this movie. This is not something I usually notice in films, but I think there must have been a good ten to fifteen minutes of women (a few men) making annoying screaming noises. Another thing that bugged me about this film on video (no fault of Yang's) was that the subtitles were almost impossible to read for much of the film. Didn't the film company check this out when they were editing the film with subtitles? And finally, though this wasn't always the case, I guess I felt annoyed by the way the characters were all unconscious victims of the Confucion patriarchy/matriarchy and this fact was never brought to light by Yang. Though there are moments of sympathy in this film, I often feel this when I watch films with a Chinese focus. Hey, the archy hurts everyone, baby. Empathy is healing. Make sure you bust out a magnifying glass for the subtitles and some eye drops for eye rolling if you rent this film.