What have you watched recently: Electric Boogaloo

Yi Yi (A One and a Two) - when it comes to 'best films of the 00s' commentary, Edward Yang's Yi Yi is a regular fixture. Despite it sounding fascinating, for some unreasonable reason I had always avoided tracking down a copy (long since out of print here).

One Criterion sale later, I finally copped on enough to sit down and watch this 173 minute opus. It's reputation is deserved - as epic and masterly an achievement as you're likely to come across. Grand yet intimate, sprawling yet intensely focused, this is one of those rare films that manages to encapsulate the complexities of the human condition.

Focused on one extended family (although the focus predominantly on NJ (Nien-Jen Wu), his teenage daughter Ting-Ting (Kelly Lee) and his young son Yang-Yang (Jonathan Chang)) it examines their experiences with life, death, love, disappointment, curiosity, joy and everything in between. Full of beautifully poetic dialogue - the scenes with a Japanese game developer (Issei Ogata) are particularly insightful - and gorgeous cinematography, it's also a great city film as it allows its characters to traverse both Taipei and Tokyo. In one of the film's most elegant sequences, NJ's rekindling of a youthful romance on a Japanese business trip is contrasted with Ting-Ting's first real date back in Taiwan - beautifully expressive storytelling through editing, visual echoes and dialogue contrasts. It's a film obsessed with time, and all characters are motivated by their past, their current situation and their future dreams, and they battle to reconcile the three.

There are one or two bits that don't work as well (a strange violent incident near film's end seems a tad ill-fitting), but for the most part this is as poetic and hypnotic as modern filmmaking gets (alas, it proved to be Yang's last film). There's a great scene in the film where one character observes that we live twice as long since the dawn of cinema, because of the range of emotions and drama it allows us to experience. The film itself is that thesis' proof.