Wong Kar Wai - Why?

Buick6

too punk to drunk
Why do intellectuals love Wong so much and champion his work so much?

OK, he's a 'visionary' but so is Leigh Whannel and James Wan who made 'saw' for that matter ( a film which represented to me, the most cynical, post-modern ripoff in recent memory)...

I've seen three of his films 'Fallen angels', 'in the mood for love' and recently '2046'.

I really put alot of faith in '2046' as the one that would 'do it' for me, mainly becuase of the sci-fi/cyberpunk sub-plots, but it came off like some neo-Kubrickian meets an Impulse deodorant ad, type flick.

What's with Wong's framing?? Can he frame a shot beyond a doorway? Since when has the 'rule of thirds'in c-tography been anything more than that?

Ok, so I can understand his noir/mellodrama stylings because we all know that mellodrama is the cinematic 'raison d'etre' in today's po-mo/homo culture stagflag state. But it's tired. Dull. A formula.

So please enlighten me fine film buffs and indie-pariahs, why should I choose Wong over Robert Siodmak or Sergio Martino for that matter? what is it that I'm missing, and every trendy, well paid film crits and their devoted legions of festival-gimpies and neo-romantic simpies get? :p
 

owen

Well-known member
Buick6 said:
it came off like some neo-Kubrickian meets an Impulse deodorant ad, type flick.

:p

:eek: not quite sure if i can really answer a tirade like that. but i'll have a go

call me shallow, even call me a 'neo-romantic simpie', but i like wong kar wai because the films look absolutely gorgeous, are beautifully acted, are filled with all manner of interestingly coloured light, are frequently very funny, have the most mesmerising cityscapes, and yeah i guess they are romantic verging on sentimental- i do have a high tolerance for, er, 'mellodrama'
 

francesco

Minerva Estassi
Buick6 said:
why should I choose Wong over Robert Siodmak or Sergio Martino for that matter?


Yeah why? I love both Robert Siodmak and Sergio Martino and Wong Kar Wai and a hundred others. "fallen angel" anyway is in my top ten films ever for too many reason, one of them is that his films are better than my life.
 

Canada J Soup

Monkey Man
I had never managed to sit through a Wong Kar Wai film long enough to decide if I liked his stuff or not until a couple of weeks ago when I watched Fallen Angel with a mate while very drunk and high. We laughed our asses off the entire time (particularly at the assassin's agent crying-while-masturbating* scene and the bit where the entire family is being forced to eat ice cream**), so I decided to give it a watch sober a day or two later. I loved it aside from the over use of that Massive Attack sounding track and have since put all the rest of his films on my Netflix queue. I didn't attempt to appraise it in intellectual or cinephile terms (I'm too lazy for the former and not passionate or knowledgeable enough about film for the latter). I just enjoyed the experience of watching it.

* subsequently referred to as 'having a crank'

** which kind of reminded me of something from Bunuel's Fantome de la liberte and may have been the turning point of my loving the film
 
O

Omaar

Guest
Ī have to say the repetition of music in Chungking Express detracted immensely from my enjoyment of this film. Tony Leung is hot though. I wasn't really that impressed by the visual style of that film (who was the cinematographer? I forget his name but I'm sure I've enjoyed other things he's done), and found it's message a bit laboured and ponderous. I remember enjoying in the mood for love, and I'm quite excited about 2046. Didn't really get into fallen angels, I tihnk again it was cos of the visuals, which are a bit 80s music video. I'm going to be in HK in a few weeks, I might try and find that midnight takeaway from chungking express.
 
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Buick6

too punk to drunk
Yeah but don't say Taylor Hackford and Adrian Lynne follow the same line as wong, they're just white?

and if you want to tow the queer-line, didn't early joel Schumacher use the same homoeroto triphop-MTV stylee with 'Lost boys' and the Gregg Araki retread it via 'doom gen','nowhere' etc..etc.etc.etc.etc...

just to tip the scale back, I must admit Wong is a maste rof the female deriere, up there with Tinto Brass. Whether it's a camera lens or not, I must appluad his 'expansive' vision in that dept. :rolleyes:

But I still don't get the rapture. :confused:
 

zhao

there are no accidents
I think one thing "intellectually" interesting about Kar Wei is his process: he uses no script, and shoots 100 or 200 hours of complete or semi improvisations and then cuts together a "story" in the editing bay. he knows his actors so well and his actors know eachother so well that the scenes really flow and feel really natural.

Happy Together is a really really good one. it goes from grainy black and white to saturated colors. I loved 2046. only partially because the skinny girl that lived down the hall is like a clone of my x... especially when she says certain things in a Beijing accent. reminds me of home.
 

rob_giri

Well-known member
Well, i actually watched Happy Together just last night. I was not aware of the process of which you speak confucious, but hearing about it now I am 1. not surprised and 2. more adament of my liking of the film that i was before. I saw Chungking Express a year or two back when my brother was doing HK cinema at Melbourne Uni. Its great. Obvisouly the over-saturated use of the Mamas and the Papas got exceedingly annoying, especially considering my usual association with that song - fuckin' monkeys watching the film of 'He Died with a Felafel...' and drooling over it. god i hated that. More to the point, the cinematography in nearly all of Kar Wai's films is done by none other than Christopher Doyle - Australia's own cinematographic genius...apparently.

But yeah, to answer your question, I guess the appeal, or the reason why critics/cinephiles blah blah like his work so much is that it fulfills the romantic appeal and the...existential appeal if that makes sense. For instance, his entire production process, being unconventional as it is, allows him to work freely with time and reality representation (fulfilling the 'grittiness' schtick that was the hallmark of '90s independant film). ie - its all bound by one fundamental concept - what we get from Kar Wai's (and no doubt many other '90s filmmakers) is this simple (yet seeingly complicated) idea:

1. in life, there is a bunch of stuff happening
2. nothing exists outside of context
3. narrative and plot are illusionary devices and hence not valid to 'reality'
4. there is a bunch of stuff happening
5. ...all the time...
6. ...endlessly...
7. ...that and nothing more


sorry to run these rather obvious things by you, but that is basically the summation of independant film in the last 20 years (well, on a REALLY fundamental level. add a dash of social syncronicity to most of them too). Wong Kar-Wai portrays all of this (using the aforementioned production process et al) AND (now heres the thing that REALLY gets all Cannes, Berlin, Venice etc etc critics) he portrays 'feelings and emotions' and all that sort of shite (use your imagination). Plus Christopher Doyle uses a bunch a' crazy colours n shit (que the Brakhagein personalisation of the medium, homeboy)

dig?
 
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