Bryan Washington at The Current:
I first watched Yi Yi on a busted cassette tape, in my small Texas town, rented from a Blockbuster behind a rice field and a pharmacy. If you were a high schooler growing up just outside of Houston and you weren’t throwing a football or running cross-country, then you could hardly call yourself busy. So I’d taken to scanning the collection of foreign films in the back of the rental store. Sometimes I’d bring a few home. And one day, at the end of my pursuit of something I’ve long since forgotten (Police Story, maybe, or Shogun Assassin, if I was feeling brave), Edward Yang’s portrait of a family navigating an increasingly globalized Taipei is what I ended up with.
It took me a minute to actually watch it. I kept putting it off. The running time seemed entirely too long. But one weekend, well past midnight, I stumbled into the family game room, under a too-large blanket, and my American suburban evening melded with the muted pastels of Yang’s Taiwan.
more here.