The Wedding Planner (PG-13) She's a wedding planner who's great at her job but lousy at managing her own romantic life. He's a folksy kiddie-doctor who knows all the right things to say. They meet, and sparks immediately fly. The only hitch is that he turns out to already be engaged, and to one of her biggest clients, to boot.
Yi Yi Taiwanese auteur Edward Yang's meditative, minimalist epic unfolds as a series of small, seemingly disconnected moments that slip so effortlessly into one another we're hardly aware that a segue's taken place. Yang carefully, quietly observes the members of a more or less ordinary, middle-class Taiwanese family: a husband and wife experiencing what appear to be mini-mid-life crisis, their adolescent son and teenage daughter (both feeling the first tentative twitchings of love), and an assortment of friends, colleagues and rivals. The austere, elliptical structure of Yang's vision may seem daunting at first, but, gradually and ever so subtly, Yi Yi reveals deep and abiding connections between all of its characters, emerging not just as a vital social statement and an enormously satisfying entertainment, but as a sublime work of art. At Main Street Cinema in Clearwater. Call to confirm.
—Reviewed entries by Lance Goldenberg unless otherwise noted.
