Three Times Two

Chronologically speaking, [Three Times] forms a graph of the increasing unpredictability of life on Earth: from the courtesan locked in her gilded cage, via the pool hall hostess who is free to travel but always ends up in a similar place, to the rock singer who seems to be afloat in a sea of total freedom (brilliantly expressed on the singer’s web site: “No past, no future, just a hungry present”). —Dag Sødtholt, "The Complexity of Minimalism: Hou Hsiao-Hsien's Three Times" (in Senses of Cinema)



In the movies amnesia is bizarre, and thrilling. The star is usually a former assassin or government agent whose future depends on retrieving the bloody, jigsaw fragments that restore identity and explain the past.

Yet in the real world, people with amnesia live in a mental universe at least as strange as fiction: new research suggests that they are marooned in the present, as helpless at imagining future experiences as they are at retrieving old ones.
—Benedict Carey, "Amnesiacs May Be Cut Off From Past and Future Alike" (in NYT)