in which I make a baseless accusation against Hou Hsiao-Hsien

To NWFF to see Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times. It begins with a game of snooker, played to the tune of "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes", by the Platters. Oh, you bastard! I thought. Edward Yang owns that song after his use of it in The Terrorizer. And then he plays it again! And then he plays "Rain and Tears" by Aphrodite's Child multiple times, too! Like it's a Wong Kar-Wai movie or something! And then it stars Chang Chen, discovered by Yang, and a frequent performer in Wong's movies. Is Hou throwing down the gauntlet or something? Or is this like all those Fifth-Generation filmmakers suddenly starting to do wuxiá films? ...Not that Yang is getting that much more attention, although I think he's the greatest of the three... But, despite my resistence, the "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" sequence works beautifully, and I was completely under the spell of the first story's romantic longing. It duplicates the scene I liked most from Russian Dolls: the backs of two hands brushing, and then the fingers slowly interlocking, defined by the negative space--if he'd held the shot a couple of seconds longer, I would have been in tears, but, thankfully, that's not what he's after. I understand why so many people like the first sequence best (I guess I do, too), but the whole movie is brilliant. I love that there's more dialogue in the silent movie than in the other two sequences combined. I love that the contemporary sequence is harder to identify with than the sequences set in the past. I love that the same elements show up in three entirely different stories with three entirely different rhythms. I loved the way the musical accompaniment to the silent film becomes direct sound--breathtaking.
Final shots (since there are basically three films here): two tableaus, and one shot of the protagonists shot from above going down the road, eventually offscreen (which is also a repitition of the opening shot).
I had meant to stay and see 42nd Street, but Three Times lasted too long, so I went home and tried to make my new cat feel secure while watching The Firm on DVD, the Alan Clarke film starring Gary Oldman as a 30-year-old football hooligan. I still have a lot of Clarke films to get through, but I'm not sure I love his stuff. There are always amazing performances, but there's an "educational" aspect to each one I've seen so far; a tsk-tsking that inevitably involves the suffering of the cutest, most blameless character because of the actions of the protagonist: the lad who gets raped in the two versions of scum, and Gary's baby's encounter with "Stanley"
here. That's tv-movie stuff, and I guess they are, actually, tv-movies.
Final shot: I don't have a classification for it--the movie suddenly switches to documentary-style, and it's a group shot of all the secondary characters toasting.