A Chinese romantic drama directed by Wong Kar-wai, starring Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung.
A man whose wife is constantly busy with work and goes on business trips to Japan meets a woman next door whose husband is always busy with work and goes on business trips to Japan.
Very pretty, but pretty boring. The blocking in Wong Kar-wai films always stacks characters and items in focal depth. A prime example in this film was the woman standing in front of the man and walking away. She is in focus, then he is in focus as she walks past him and goes out of focus into the background. It's just brilliant camerawork! The music was alright too. Everything else sucked. The plot held my attention like a wet paper bag holds battle axes. Sex could have been implied in a very discreet and classy way, but we don't even see them taking their shoes off to enter the homes. They never touch one another. Is having a friend next door this scandalous in Hong Kong? I rate this poor. Read that first sentence of my review paragraph again.
A Chinese romance directed by Wong Kar-wai, starring Leslie Cheung, Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung, Carina Lau and Jacky Cheung.
3 men have relationship problems with 3 women. One of the men is adopted, dislikes his adopted mother and wants to find his real parents.
Muddy plot. I watched an hour of it, then read the plot on Wikipedia and turned it off. It just doesn't make sense to me. If my understanding of the plot is correct, it's a whole lot of nothing, so why even bother making the movie? Everyone else online seems to think it's great though. Something is wrong here. I rate this shit in accordance with my turn off policy. Do not watch! ...or listen to everyone else and watch it. I don't care.
A Chinese crime romance directed by Wong Kar-wai, starring Andy Lau, Maggie Cheung and Jacky Cheung.
2 brothers are small-time criminals and one of them falls in love with a cousin. Problems with a gang lead to increased violence.
I think most of this was lost in translation. It doesn't look like Wong Kar-wai work, but the plot definitely fits what little I know of his films. I just have some interesting points to bring up. Hearing "Take My Breath Away" (originally recorded by Berlin and featured on the Top Gun soundtrack) with Chinese vocals was a little odd. There were so many translation mistakes in the subtitles that I could not possibly list them here. One character asks the cousin to give him a phone if something happens. At about 1:03:30 one of the brothers puts a gun into a gangster's pants to blow his dick off (image). I rate this o.k. because it just seemed like an average eastern crime flick to me.
A Chinese romance directed by Wong Kar-wai, starring Tony Leung Chiu-wai, Gong Li, Carina Lau, Chang Chen and Maggie Cheung.
A writer lives in a small hotel and dates women. He is writing a science fiction story about secrets and uses the room number of a woman he met there as a year or place to set his story.
Very pretty, but pretty boring. Apparently, this is the sequel to 2 of Wong Kar-wai's other films which I haven't watched yet because of my alphabetical order. I think that the writing was what did this in for me. The camera-work was absolutely beautiful. Framing, composition and creative angles were all present and top shelf. Depth of field and something I can only term "item stacking" were great. Shots were arranged in a way which put people behind people, in front of doorways, between cutrains, etc. The plot and characters just could not hold my attention. In stark contrast to the last film I watched, Nymphomaniac (2013), this had me hoping for longer than usual credits so that it would just be done. I rate this poor because of unbalanced production that its visual beauty could not save.
A Chinese wuxia directed by Raymond Lee, starring Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Ka-fai, Maggie Cheung and Donnie Yen.
Opposing groups meet at an inn run by a woman. One of the groups is lead by a woman with a flute and they want to rescue children who are political prisoners. Another group is military from the organization that was holding the children prisoner. A lone swordsman also shows up who was the flute woman's boyfriend, but he becomes entangled with the inn owner.
Pretty standard for the genre. The plot was full of holes. The biggest being: where did all those guys on horses go at the end? The main characters were mostly identifiable. I liked the inn owner most, but she tended to get mixed up with sword boy's ex. The reason that I liked the inn owner was that her dialogue and acting were most expressive. The head chef from the kitchen was comic relief and he was acted well too. The sets and costumes looked great, as they should in wuxia films. Camera-work and editing were not to my liking quite so much, though. The style of editing was like a new, American action film. There were lots of close shots and very quick editing cuts. It's possible that early '90s Chinese action films started the style that post-2000s American action films lifted from them. When things slowed down, I could tell that everything was staged and composed correctly. The special effects consisted of impossible jumps with rope rather than real flying. There was also blood and a goat cutting scene with item replacement across an editing cut. Audio was in Chinese, but I found good English subtitles. Dialogue was mixed correctly and the sound effects didn't repeat as much as in older Chinese action films. There were multiple sword sounds to vary the sonic landscape. IMDb lists a rating of 7.3/10, AllMovie lists 0 AllMovie rating with 3.5/5 User Ratings and Rotten Tomatoes lists 78% Audience Score for an average of 55.25%. It looks low because AllMovie possibly did not rate it? Without the zero, it would be 73.6% which I agree with. I rate this adequate. You might want to watch it, mostly if you've seen the original Dragon Gate Inn (1967).
