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If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Fantastic!

Great movie. Not sure what people expected but I found it highly entertaining.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

From start the finish, there is absolutely nothing exciting about this movie. It is a character driven piece, that lacks absolutely any excitement. In fact, it is at times hard to pay attention to the movie due to how dull it is. Avoid watching at all costs.In fact, I haven't seen a movie that has been as dull as this. From the music, which consists mainly of drums, to the lack of any visual appealing elements. There is absolutely nothing appealing about this movie. Most of the movie, is a series of characters having long monologues. These speeches last anywhere from 5 minutes to 10 minutes usually. They add plot details, but the way they do it is so incredibly dull and boring. Once again AVOID watching this movie at ALL costs.

Perhaps Asian movies there are considered slow. But inside this slow-motion film you can feel the intensity of the human emotions in every look. The intensity of every shoot makes this movie an extraordinary experience for everybody. The plot of the film is something more than a tribute of a losing tradition, the puppets art, is about the relationships between an old man an his adopted niece. How the affection between they could break absurd but ingrain traditions from hundreds of years ago. The incredible sequences of puppets are only an addition in the incredible beauty of the Taiwanese landscape.The entire movie in general has a flavour that makes it tasty from start to finish.

This movie is truely a puppet show: If I remember correctly the camery doesn't move even once - just a dozen or so cuts, each depicting one scene with a different set-up, each scene remaining for several minutes. Persons move through the scenerey: sometimes you see someone doing something, sometimes you even recognize what he is doing. After a while you realize the same persons appear in different scenes. Even later you start picking up the story. Yes, there is a story, even though noone explains anything, hardly any word is said (was there a word at all? Maybe even not). all your concentration is needed to find out what is going on. The audience finds itself in the situation of an ethnographer meeting for the first time some unknown group of people, trying to find out something about them. The scenes, which initially seemed to keep on forever suddenly appear to change much too fast - you might be able to understand more, if they kept on longer.Once you get into this movie, it is pure gold. If you want action, even one minute of The Puppetmaster will bore you to death.

As a film detailing a period of history through the experiences of a family, THE PUPPETMASTER is very similar to HEIMAT. By using an acting troupe as the narrative and thematic focus of this history, it resembles THE TRAVELLING PLAYERS and FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE. Stylistically though, it couldn't be further apart. Unlike the character drama of the first, the elegant, complicated camerawork of the second or the intense emotionalism of the last, THE PUPPETMASTER is a rigidly formal work, breathtaking to look at, baffling to understand, eventually oppressive to watch.The main narrative concerns the life story of the title character, up until the end of World War II - his story parallels the occupation of his country, Taiwan, by Japan. Interspersed between highly stylised and composed dramatisations of his life are interviews with the man himself as an old man.Although Hao's other films share a similar aesthetic (including the marvellous A CITY OF SADNESS), it is the puppetmaster's profession that shape the look of the film. He puts on elaborate puppet shows; and in the same way his little theatre looks like a cinema screen, Hao's film is less a fluid narrative than a series of tableaux vivants. I think there are only two camera movements in the entire film. Each scene is elaborately composed - decor overwhelms the characters, with masses of pillars, frames and characters dwarfing any individuality. There are hardly any close-ups, and such is the visual clutter, and the sombre lighting it is often shot through, that it's often hard to make out which character is which. The direction is highly distanced and artificial, letting these characters, like rats in a trap, blindly blunder, unable to find an exit.Any perceived objectivity in this style is deliberately illusory, and it is clear that the protagonist is not the only puppetmaster. Hao's strings are rarely unfelt, and behind the domestic traumas and bildungsroman narrative is a bitter denunciation of the effects of colonialism, and rigid hierarchical societies. Much of the entrapment of environment is linked to the traditional repressions of Taiwanese family life, with its absurd rituals of family nomenclature, masculine honour, and arranged marriages, which allow free rein to domestic brutality and the corruption of decency.It is no wonder, therefore, that the Taiwanese become such willing quislings, deference and anonymity being a familiar part of everyday life. The puupetmaster is deeply implicated in this, being a prominent, and officially valued member of cultural propagandist groups. Much of the local and symbolic detail was shamefully alien to me, so I obviously lost much, and maybe Li's plays - generous, enthralling excerpts of which appear at crucial points of the film - have a hidden subversion lost to the ignorant viewer.What isn't lost is a remarkable visual sensibility which often speaks for characters who can't. The historical saga is compelling, and the puppetmaster's life is often moving. The recourse to storytelling and an almost scientific faith in superstition and magic gives the film a feel of magic realism. It's just that by the second half of the film, you're throwing things at your TV, just to get the blasted screen to move.