Saturday, August 4, 2007
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6 comments:
Give me another week to catch it. Haven't had any time to watch anything recently. Hopefully by this weekend I will have caught it as well as our next screening room session, Falling Down.
So I watched it finally.
I was totally unimpressed by this film. The direction was typical, the acting over-dramatic, the lighting was terrible. I was stunningly bored by this film. I even tried restarting it to see if I would like it better, but for some reason I just didn't connect with these characters. I thought they were mundane and led trivial lives. There stories didn't reveal anything interesting about rejection and love. I found it all to be a soap opera.
I will say that if it was recast I may like it more. Not to sound like an ignorant American, but I can't tell one Asian apart from the other. There are two females, and two males here who I couldn't differentiate between. They looked and sounded the same. I know it isn't their fault, but I can't get involved if I don't know who is who, and what they did.
So clearly not a good first outing with Wong Kar Wai, but I don't plan on completely neglecting his work. I hear many good things about him, but this one was just so damn boring. I plan on revisiting him later, but for now I have more important directors I want to catch up with including Bergman.
I will be without internet for a week, so I won't be able to post on anything including Falling Down and Bugsy. When I come back from my vacation, I should have Falling Down and probably Croupier at home. For some reason Bugsy is a "Long Wait" on Blockbuster, and I can't find it at any library or video rental nearby. So it may be awhile before I catch that one. Hopefully I will be caught up with Croupier though, and we can finally discuss these at their proper times.
Wow. Just wow.
I never would have expected that reaction, not in a million years.
Just about the point that Days of Being Wild was cementing my belief that Wong Kar-Wai may be the single greatest filmmaker ALIVE, I don't think I could have fathomed even a partly negative reaction from you chachi.
Holy crap. I'll just say, I found my first film in the Screening Rooms that I loved and it's no surprise to me, as I've loved all of his films.
What I think you're missing out on is that I think Wong Kar-Wai's films are so much more than their plotline. Their very style is supposed to make you feel whimsical, enraptured and overwhelmed with beauty... in that regard, they make me feel like I'm falling in love. They ellicit those type of feelings. That's why his films are always about relationships (at least so much as I have seen, I did notice a Crouching Tiger-esque film in his filmography).
Maybe it's the first viewing. I don't remember being as impressed the first time I saw In the Mood for Love but ever since that first viewing, I've recognized it as a masterpiece (and probably my favorite foreign film of all-time so much as I've seen).
But to regard this as 'typical' directing I think is astonishingly ridiculous. I'm sorry, but the moments that Wong Kar-Wai creates are mezmerizing. The longing to feel love and be loved. Even the beginning and how Wong Kar-Wai shows Su Lizhen fall for Yuddy (the 'stare at my watch' scene is recognizeable to Wong Kar-Wai's fans as similar to his 'whisper into a hole in a tree' from 2046 and In the Mood).
The only fault I had with the film at all was the gun fight towards the conclusion. I felt it was a little over the top for a film that was so reserved for so long.
But c'mon, what about the story of the bird who could only land once in its life, the moment it died? So symbolic, so meaningful and so natural to its character.
Maybe it's the romantic in me, but if I were to be making films... I would want to be making films like Wong Kar-Wai. Not Tarantino. Not Kevin Smith. Wong Kar-Wai. He may not be as straightforwardly 'entertaining' as Tarantino's gangsters or Smith's adolescents but they're stories about love and life and people.
They're perfect.
Wow. Just wow.
God, I can't even let it go at that. Days of Being Wild is a masterpiece about unrequited love and people who feel unfulfilled and not truly whole. And I love how Wong Kar-Wai can bounce from story to story (Yuddy and Su to Yuddy and Mimi to Su and the Cop to Yuddy and the Cop) and it comes so naturally and wonderfully.
Plus, you're totally missing the boat on the cinematography. Days may be the least impressive of the Wong Kar-Wai films I've seen in this regard (2046 is probably the most astonishing) but he gets a tone in his shots that few filmmakers can even HOPE to match.
The only filmmaker I think who does anything even remotely similar is Terrence Malick (another filmmaker whose films are so much more about people and thoughts than they are about the storyline it's presenting). It's about the deeper meanings and the harder truths about humanity.
I'm totally rambling on, but only because I am so crazy about Wong Kar-Wai's brilliance. I hear My Blueberry Nights (his first English language film) doesn't live up to his foreign language ones and maybe it's because the style doesn't translate. But I want Wong Kar-Wai to go on making foreign films forever and let me sit back and have this wonderful sense of feeling connected to something deeper come over me.
As for the vacation, cool, we'll catch up with the other films later on then. Kelly and I are in the process of moving anyway this week and next weekend. And by next weekend I'll be back in the Fredericksburg area and you can stop by and borrow my copy of Bugsy if you want. I bought it long ago and never got around to watching it.
I haven't seen Falling Down yet but am going to get around to it soon. And I've got Croupier on my shelf as well. Looking forward to all these films.
We've had our first brutal disagreement with Days, but we'll see if we come out on the same side with these others...
There have been a few occasions where I completely misread a film on the first viewing. Hell first time I saw Dumb and Dumberer, I thought it was gold. So I will certainly try to revisit this film later once I've caught up with some others. Maybe I was just in a poor mood, or not in the right frame of mind. To be honest, when I sat down to watch it, it felt more like homework than pleasure. There are just so many films and directors I need to catch up with, that I just didn't have a desire to see this one. Would you recommend a better introductory film of his? You say such amazing things about him, and we tend to agree for the most part, that I must have missed something. I'll let you know if and when I see it again. Anyone else seen it so we can get a third opinion? What did Kelly think? Should I be committed?
Unfortunately Kelly can't back up my claims about this film because she didn't watch it. She's not as into film as I am, so I can't make her watch everything that I do...
And I will sympathize about the film feeling like homework. The first time I ever saw a Wong Kar-Wai film was in a class in college and for some reason I was totally against watching it (I'm usually up for anything but at the time I had never heard of him, nor the film and I felt a better use of my time would be to nap). It wasn't until I caught up with the film years later that I realized I had practically slept through a classic.
Now though I can't get enough and Days of Being Wild has been in my head like no film I've seen since Zodiac earlier this year (except maybe Bourne Ultimatum). I can't wait to watch this film again, but I want to continue my Wong Kar-Wai education before I start to double-dip. Next up: Happy Together (although I won't add it to the "Screening Room Sessions").
The two films that you're most likely to appreciate of Wong Kar-Wai's are the two listed on Edward Copeland's blog (film critic) in his voting poll for the greatest foreign films ever made, Chungking Express or In the Mood for Love.
Unfortunately with both, you're gonna run into the difficulty of distinction (yes, I also find it hard sometimes to differentiate the actors in his films until much later in the movie than it should reasonably take me).
I'd probably recommend In the Mood for Love first, because it's more 1 continuing storyline than Chungking (which decides to basically switch lead characters at points in the film thus making it a little harder to follow).
But if you really want to see something by Wong Kar-Wai and you don't necessarily want to dedicate another two hours, I'd recommend watching The Follow... his short film in the BMW "The Hire" series staring Clive Owen.
I've mentioned these films before, mainly because they're fantastic and they're put together by some of the greatest filmmakers working today. These are only 5-7 minutes long and are genuinely better than most films you'll find in the theaters.
At the least you guys owe it to yourselves to watch Wong Kar-Wai's The Follow, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Powder Keg and John Woo's masterful Hostage.
You can find all of them on youtube listed here. Do yourself a favor and check them out....
BMW's The Hire
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