A very long movie of very small events. It starts with a wedding, ends with a funeral, and has a birth in the middle -- the full cycle of life -- in addition to an off-screen suicide attempt, an off-screen murder, and even an eleventh-hour touch of the supernatural. But to collapse it to those milestones is to make it sound more tumultuous than it feels. Most of it is taken up with the minutiae and mundanities of middle-class Angst as it afflicts the Jian clan in present-day Taipei (meaning McDonald's, N.Y. Bagels, etc.), and filmmaker Edward Yang fits a great deal of cultural information into his capacious frames -- info on places of work, education, residence, leisure. Ozu, from a time and place a little removed, might come to mind now and then, but no one in an Ozu film was ever heard to say, "I'll cut off your dick and feed it to the pigs." That's the present day for you, and the illusion is abruptly dispelled. There are plentiful polished little vignettes: a visiting Japanese businessman, during a break in negotiations, turning pirouettes on the terrace with a pigeon on his shoulder; or immediately adjacent to that, his Taiwanese counterpart half-singing the English lyrics to "Baby, It's You" in duet with an inaudible Walkman. And there are occasional well-developed whole scenes: the off-screen discovery of the would-be suicide while the spectator is left to contemplate the opulent Westernized décor of the man's apartment; or the youngest Jian, eight-year-old Yang-Yang, suddenly seeing his female tormenter in a new light when she arrives late to a classroom film on meteorological phenomena and, as its narrator speaks of "opposite forces" and "the origin of life," she passes across and into the ominous clouds on screen. Somehow, though, all of this does not begin to fill three hours. The film, always gently coaxing, is never really gripping. Wu Nienjen, Issey Ogata, Elaine Jin, Kelly Lee, Jonathan Chang. (2000) — Duncan Shepherd