Dan Conley’s Writing Projects

The movie is roughly halfway through at this point, so it’s a good time to take a step back and look at the film’s structure. “Yi Yi” begins with a wedding and ends with a funeral. Here at the halfway point, we get a baby shower. Compared to

Edward Yang shows off his gift for scene-to-scene transitions in this segment of the film, which also happens to be about major life transitions for three of the main characters in the film. We begin with Yang-Yang finally putting his water balloon plan into place. We see him walking quickly

Min-Min’s brother A-Di seems like the comic relief in “Yi Yi,” a character who doesn’t fully belong in the family, and arguably doesn’t fully belong in the film as well. I don’t mean that as a criticism, he’s more like a dried red pepper floating

We hear a great deal these days about a loneliness epidemic, that people feel more disconnected from others than ever before. This happens even though the world has never been more urbanized. If you think of how people in your own family lived five or six generations ago, it likely

After a few major, important segments of the film, Edward Yang now relaxes a bit and gives us some connective tissue and amusement. The segment begins with Yang-Yang in class, all of this fellow students napping at their desks. This is apparently common practice in Taiwanese elementary schools and while

We now return to the beautiful in-car discussion between NJ and his son Yang-Yang that I wrote about in the first essay. This time, I want to take a step back from the content of the discussion and focus on the atmosphere instead. It begins in the hallway of the