(Kar-) Wai, Oh Why?

This sounded incredibly familiar - that's because I've said it before...a lot. So I agree with you and Dave about WHY? but I'm curious how you feel about those other sacred cows you mentioned. Especially QT. This is the first time I've read anything by you that mentioned him and I know you've not got any of his work in your top 120. I had hoped you'd give us something on 'Grindhouse' but if that happened I missed it.

Brussels sprouts: I blanch the little round bastards then sautee them in duck fat or bacon fat. Also great with pancetta, or roasted, or with miso, or shallots, or...

"In The Mood for Love": such a lovely film, even if the rest of Kar-Wai's work ranges from adequate to largely unsatisfying.

Lars von Trier: the only filmmaker alive who drives me to outright hostility. "Dancer in the Dark" actually reverted me to a Wolverine-like primordial state where I dreamt of blood, dismemberment and assorted acts of unspeakable violence to be perpetrated upon the Danish people as a whole. They're not all bad, though -- Hamlet, Dreyer, that chick from "High Fidelity."

I stopped reading McCoy's piece half-way through because I'm resisting all descriptions possible of the film before I see it, but while I disagree with him largely, his sentiments are well heard. I think "In The Mood for Love" is by far his best, most emotionally resonant work...that was released on the US within a couple of years. He made a great, great movie in 1991 called "Days of Being Wild" that came out here a couple of years ago, that has all of his playfulness, and fondness of melodrama, but without the artifice and pop culture infultration.

"Chunking" is a forgettable movie, and "2046" is an interesting failure (not in small part due to Zhang Ziyi and Tony Leung being on screen together quite a bit). As for his other films, I can't say. I think though, despite his flaws, he's an interesting filmmaker, just not one that's ever going to make an important contribution to cinema as a whole. It'd be interesting to see what he did with some already proven, well written material. If IMDb is to be believed, we'll be able to see just that, as he's listed to adapt "The Lady From Shanghai" in english next year.

As for Natalie Portman and the "sacred cows," she's a good actress you've somehow overlooked. I present "Closer," and "Free Zone" as irrefutable evidence. I won't even try to explain the vaccuum of acting talent that were the Star Wars prequels, or the nails on a chalkboard affected quirky-ness in Garden State, but those two other performances are very good. I can't speak on Kiarostami, von Trier, or Angelopoulos, as I haven't seen more than five minutes of any of their work, but Tarantino I think is misrepresented. Any questions about his admirable qualities as a filmmaker can be answered by listening to any loud, rambling (much like this), utterly untintelligable interview he's given in the past 15 years. He's an overgrown, undereducated purveyor of low culture, and he somehow fashions it into entertaining films. No more evident is his skill in shaping the media he's consumed into something of formal greatness than in Grindhouse. Rodriguez's half is entertaining, but nothing worth revisiting a great number of times, where as Tarantino's is complex and filled with experiementation and turns a generally formulaic genre into something thrilling and fun to watch.

1) Brussels sprouts are my favorite green vegetable. Steamed with butter, garlic and a little lime juice. I'm telling you...

Re: Very underrated.

2) Although Dave is perfectly correct to characterize lead actress Norah Jones as "the pleasant singer whose CD is found in every soccer mom's gas-guzzling SUV" (and, yes, she's probably been the subject of as much fashionably middlebrow hype as the Great Wong), she has achieved one moment of sublimity, a year or two before her rather bland debut album. Listen to her sing Roxy Music's "More Than This" on Charlie Hunter's "Songs From the Analog Playground." It's heaven.

Re: I like her single Sunrise, and a couple of other songs are more than palatable. She really is the quintessential adult contemporary artist. She gets a free pass, though, for being Ravi Shankar's hot daughter.

3) Read the whole piece, with specific observations about "Blueberry Nights" (is that a wine spritzer?), and please feel free to rise to Wong's defense with your comments.

Re: I just can't rise to Wong's defense. If I have to pick a Taiwanese director filled with ennui, I'm going with Tsai Ming Liang, who has made 2 or 3 of the very best films of the decade. In the Mood for Love was very good, but mostly, Wong Kar Wai has never managed to truly rise above the ironic disconnectedness that's helped make a smug bs artist like Zach Braff a star.

4) My advice: Beware of films bearing Natalie Portman, the Julia Ormond of the 00's.

Re: I always hesitate to criticize an actor or actress for his or her work. Most of the time it's the director's fault. If a talented star chooses to act in one crappy movie after another (Julianne Moore, Sean Penn, De Niro, Christopher Walken, etc, etc, etc), then it's his fault. As of today, I think Natalie Portman is talented, adventurous, and a little young for your tastes. She's yet to do anything that's amazed me, but she's also done very little that's made me go "ugh..."

5) Anybody feel similarly about other much-ballyhooed contemporary sacred cows

Re: Much ballyhooed by who? Lars von Trier and Quentin Tarantino are pretty widely known and have both had spotty careers. The Idiots was pretty great, and Dancer in the Dark was a masterpiece of Sirk-esque melodrama. He does seem to be obsessed with the mentally handicapped. Even with its long dragging segments, Grindhouse might be the most satisfying film experience of the year thus far. Abbas Kiarostami and Theo Angelopoulos, I know very few people who have even heard of them. I haven't seen a single Theo Angelopoulos film, and all self-congratulation aside, I've seen lots of movies by obscure directors. I really enjoyed every movie Abbas Kearostami made from Where Is the Friend's Home? to Through the Olive Trees. After that, it's questionable. I certainly place more value on the awards doled out at Cannes than any other Awards ceremony. Look at all the winners of the Palme D'or and the Grand Prix. It's an infinitely more impressive list than director/picture winners from the Academy Awards, or 99% of other supposedly prestigious awards.

1) Brussels sprouts are gross, but I'll try your recommendation...maybe....

2) I can't stomach Norah Jones

3) I'm a sucker for style. I tell my brother that I'll take an application on my Mac that looks delicious, but has bugs, over an application that works perfectly, but looks lame. I've only seen 2046 (before In the Mood For Love, Jim, and I was totally fine), and I wanted to see it because of the style. The actual movie itself? I loved it. I thought it was fantastic. Yes, pretentious, but aren't we allowed to like a pretentious film every once in a while? (I watched half of In the Mood For Love, but didn't finish it. Not because I didn't like it, but I just wasn't, y'know, in the mood...get it? No?)

5) Tarantino, a little. His films, in retrospect, have lost some of their luster. But I'm a von Trier sheep, and I consider Dancer in the Dark to be one of the best films I've ever seen. Is von Trier pretentious? Oh, you better believe it. I'd hate to be around the guy in real life, but his movies get me. Am I merely being manipulated by von Trier? Maybe. But again, every once in a while, I think that's okay. I like saying "von Trier."

Nicholas, pacheco, et al.: Re: #5: I wasn't suggesting anybody SHOULD be disenchanted with these art-house faves, which is why I provided such a mixed list. I just know people who passionately hate and passionately love each of these directors. (And sometimes they're the same people who have love-hate relationships with them, depending on the individual film in question. I haven't gotten that deeply into any of them (maybe two or four pictures). Don't worry about having to hang out with von Trier as long as you're in the US, pacheco! LvT has never been to the States, and doesn't plan to visit....

Hey Jim, I've lurked for a while (your devotion to not only the films, but also the ongoing discourse on the art of criticism is great!), but not posted, until now. And I choose to post now because WKW is, without any doubt, my favorite filmmaker, bar none.

First, I would say that I have serious problems with the phrase "stylistic exercise." Such phrases perpetuate the ridiculous style/substance divide that is the very bane of contemporary criticism of narrative arts. "Style" can be substance (and usually is), and with WKW this is especially true. To separate the two when approaching Wong's oeuvre is to demonstrate a fundamental misunderstanding of the way Wong works.

As for the rest of Dave's comments, well, I take issue with a lot of it, but that's because, obviously, it's not REALLY a carefully written review, it reads more as an honest, "off-the-top-of-my-head" response. And as that sort of riff, it's colorful and entertaining enough. But sarcastically calling gazes out windows "soooo deep" and making comments like "It's atmospheric ... it looks cool, man," isn't really criticism that needs to be rebutted. They're dismissive comments that simply reflect that Wong's style simply isn't (and never will be) Dave's thing. Comments like "soooo deep" can be added behind the most brilliant phrase and will suddenly trivialize it.

He also mentions that it's a story that's been done before. And my equally dismissive rebuttal to that would be: "so?" It's generally not what you tell, but how you tell it. I mean, really, isn't a statement like this seriously misguided: "the lingering slo-mo shots of actors looking into space (soooo deep), the claustrophobic framing, the melancholy soft focus -- everything, we suddenly realize, to take our mind away from a thin story about lost love and shattered souls that we've seen hundreds of times." Basically he's saying that Wong is telling his story through mise-en-scene (he tries to pass it off as “distraction,” but it actually is the manner in which Wong explores the implications of his usually simple narratives). This is a bad thing? I tell you what, the day this actually becomes a flaw is the day I'll stop caring about cinema. Once again, though, I feel bad reacting as such, it's pretty clear Dave's giving an honest riff about how he feels, and that's totally cool.

I guess I'll also take this time to express how disheartened I have been by some of the criticism leveled at MBN thus far. Of course, I can't say for certain, as I've not seen the film. So these are just hunches, but here goes:

I've heard several critics (including, I believe, Hoberman and Kenny and Wells) say this: that Wong's dialogue is cliched. And they've questioned the integrity of his Chinese films basically asking: "did we just let it go because it was subtitled? Could we not tell?" Well, this is upsetting to me on several levels. I just don't get it at all. Why are they just noticing this now?

If one actually took the subtitles of Wong's films at face value, and didn't lazily ignore them, it's been quite apparent from the beginning that Wong utilizes melodramatic, idiosyncratic dialogue. It's either very bizarre or very dramatic and yes, it often draws upon love cliches.

Thing is, this doesn't bother me at all. Quite the opposite actually. This stylized dialogue is an organic outgrowth of Wong's concerns and obsessions. Wong's films are culled from our memories (one of his primary motifs). And in our memory things are altered. Things blur together, speed up, and slow down (sounds like most of his visual manipulations. Funny how that works, huh?). We remember the lows as lower than they were, and the highs as higher. In our minds we all cast ourselves as the tragic, heartbroken hero/heroine. In our heads we all allow ourselves to say those mushy, over-the-top love declarations, because we don't allow ourselves to otherwise. We dramatize, idealize, and romanticize our memories. And because THIS is where Wong's films originate, I'm quite okay with his dialogue. It becomes atmospheric accoutrement. For me, Wong’s films leap straight from the depths of my mind; he captures nostalgia, longing, and passion perfectly.

Anyways, this has become far too long. I for one, despite its lukewarm reception, am still eagerly awaiting My Blueberry Nights.

Michael Ward, well put.

I'm pretty much riding his very accurate statements about Wong Kar-Wai. Especially in his saying that style can equal substance. It's like saying a martial arts action film has no story, when in actuality it's story is told through action. Our ideas of what story are can be very American sometimes and not open to other ways of telling them. 3 act plot structure is sometimes completely ignored by other countries, especially by Hong Kong filmmakers and I love them all the more.

Let me tell you Jim. "In the Mood for Love" devastated me. The final moments of the film took my insides and tightened them into a knot. And if you only watched the first portion of "Chungking Express" then you missed the better of two stories. The second story focuses on Tony Leung (one of the finest actors on the planet, one of the reasons why "In the Mood for Love" is so devastating and why "2046" so intriguing) and his kind of affair with someone who works nearby. It would be a shame to ruin it because it's such a joy to watch. Skip the first story with the hit woman, I'll admit it's just okay, and go right to the meat of it.

Also something that intrigues me about Kar Wai is his repetition of music. As if somehow a memory is created while we're watching the film and he wants us to recall that over and over again.

A truly inspiring filmmaker.

It's Lars Von Trier who bugs me a little. What a talent. "Breaking the Waves" is one of my favorite films in recent years. But does he have an ego the size of the tower of Babel, and one of these days he's going to scatter himself to the wind. And while "Dogville" is interesting and intelligent his lack of actual experience with rural America is largely ignorant and driven by egoism. Look how much better he is than 75% of America folks! That sort of attitude rubs me the wrong way. He and Michael Moore bother me. Taking opinion and truth and spinning them together so you can't tell which is which anymore. But I'll keep watching. Wonder why that is. I guess I don't like to have opinions without having experienced something myself.

Thank God someone else feels the way I do about Wong Kar-Wai. After seeing three of his films ("Chunking", "In the Mood for Love" and "2046"), I can't for the life of me understand why he is hailed as one of the world's filmmaking greats.

To be fair, I did think enough of "In the Mood for Love" worked to give it a passing recommendation...for once, Wong's stylistics merged (albeit briefly) with the characters inner lives. But by the time he had reached the ludicrously overpraised "2046", Wong once again fell into his old bag of tricks.

Of course, the critics swooned: "Wong captures the painful, yearning of love in scene after glorious scene" would be a typical caption in a review of "2046". Really? All I saw was the world's greatest cigarette commercial.

Another sacred cow of cineastes that I can't stand is the man who is very much the American equivalent of Wong in my eyes (only far worse because of his rampant misanthropy): David Lynch. Far and away the most useless, "emperor has no clothes" director currently working (although he must be doing something right, because I still, despite my better judgment, want to see "Inland Empire").

sacred cows?

If I'm forced to pick one contemporary sacred cow, it would have to be Alejandro González Iñárritu. He's not a horrible director, but he's not half as good as a number of critics have claimed. I thought "Babel" was his best movie, but even there he seemed to be overreaching. It could have been two great movies, but instead we have one long uneven movie. "21 grams" was a mess, and "amores perros" was forgettable at best.

Making non-linear, multi-character dramas seems like the ultimate "artistic" directors conciet. Some directors call pull these elements off well (Altman, P.T. Anderson, Tarantino, John Sayles). All of those directors, however, have proven, at one time or another, that they are capable, and willing, to tell fairly straightforward, character-driven movies.

Iñárritu seems like the ultimate art-house-for-the-masses cliche. If he could focus his stories, and shake off some of the pretentious bits, he might be a truly great director. But having made only three features, I suppose I should keep the jury out.

anyway, i suppose it's only my two cents.

I thought of one filmmaker who doesn't deserve nearly as many accolade as he does. Steve Soderbergh. He's entertaining enough (Oceans isn't all that boring and "Out of Sight" was clever.) But his "high art" is drivel at best. He massacres a sacred cow like "Solaris", originally by one of the greatest directors of all time. Even his Oscar winner "Traffic" was so tragically common most of the film bored me (thank God for the guy who mumbled his way through "Usual Suspects".) Brokovich was blah. That one about the doll factory and the other one shot hand held with Julia Roberts...ugh! I don't care if "Sex, Lies and Videotapes" was supposedly ahead of its time. It did nothing that pushed the envelope of ideas or of what a film could be or do. It was common. Give him a pop culture free-for-all and he's alright, give him heady drama and he's in over his head and under-baked.

I don't really get the hype about Tarantino. I really liked "Pulp Fiction," and I really dug his half of "Grindhouse," but his other movies left me wanting more. Especially after I heard so much about how "Kill Bill" was a masterpiece. Sure, at least he admits to borrowing a lot from movies that have inspired him. However, he seems to do a lot of things in his films just because they look or sound cool (which isn't enough for me), and his dialogue is, most of the time, stiff and unnatural. While some of his stuff is entertaining, I don't think he can be taken seriously as a director.

You want a sacred cow? Here you go: Stanley Kubrick, the true purveyor of emotionally cold, lifeless, set pieces. There is nothing more dreary than watching the acting in a Kubrick film. The only characters to rise out of the mire of Kubrick's vaccuum are Jack Nicholson in "The Shining" and HAL in "2001." Kubrick's films are beautifully filmed but utterly lifeless.

Okay, attack me now!

I beg anyone to watch the David Strathairn segment from "My Blueberry Nights" and not be moved. Other than that, the film's quite uneven, and it's good points are marred by bad voice-over segments. I already wrote about it a bit, though, so that's all I'll say here.

I am very fond of "In the Mood for Love" and "Chungking Express," however. "2046" …not so much (but I didn't hate it).

I don't think Kiarostami has made a good film in a very long time. Most of it is lazy crap.

Regarding WKW: I was never that excited about In the Moode, or Chungking... But Happy Together is flat-out brilliant. I highly, highly recommend checking it out before writing off WKW entirely---it has all the atmospherics of his other films, but with a smart, surprisingly tight structure keeping it all together.

Ashes of Time is also interesting---not great, but truly, profoundly weird.

How about Bruno Dumont? He won the Grand Jury prize twice. Flandres wasn't bad, but L'Humanité must have been the most painful and boring cinematic experience I've had in the last 5 years.

So it's happened! The Wong Kar-Wai Backlash is on! Jeez, the guy makes one reportedly lousy movie and bashers come out of the woodwork like ants to sugar.
Personally I love Wong. I admit to having doubts in the past- I thought that his stylistic flourishes were too gratuitous, too similar to the advertising/MTV aesthetic I dislike so much. But there's no getting around it: the man produces beautiful images.
I think his slickness is a zeitgeist stamp: Wong, like Douglas Coupland, is simultaneously a symptom and an analyzer of the dislocation, rootlessness,
confusion and disaffection of that now-cliched entity, Generation X. FALLEN ANGELS, CHUNGKING EXPRESS, and HAPPY TOGETHER are quintessential nineties movies, and I think Wong was being at least a little self-conscious about how his wide-angle lenses and flashy post-production effects were dating him. For him, the Pop-slick sheen is background and context as well as simple style. For all his flash, Wong still retains a critical distance from his material, and I suppose the combination of this distance and his self-conscious style-heaviness adds up to a sort of irony, as a previous poster put it, but I don't think that's the whole story. Wong is more complex than that: he stirs things up with a huge injection of genuine, unironic, passion to boot. To me it's a winning formula.

As for the other stuff, I strongly disagree with Jeremy about Kiarostami's recent stuff. If anything, I think he's gotten better. FIVE is his best picture yet. I don't think he's become "lazy," I think he's paring his art down to the most minimal, microscopic, essential level he can get to. His gaze is heavily circumscribed, but I think that kind of limiting works to increase the power of his images to a degree unprecedented in the history of cinema.

And I largely agree with Michael on Kubrick- he's got incredible talent, but it's inextricable from his cold, anal, airless style. He rejects naturalistic acting but offers nothing adequate to replace it, just line deliveries so flat and obvious they sound dangerously close to camp. He's static and chilly, but that in itself isn't bad. What's bad is where those qualities come from in his case: a condescending misanthropy. As crude as she put it, I think Pauline Kael had him down cold: she summed up his attitude toward the world as "People are disgusting, but things are beautiful."

Here's mine: Hal Hartley. He seems like a cool guy, and I really want to like him, but the movies are just ... OK. They're always a borderline slog to get through, and they don't hold up to multiple viewings. (Believe me, I tried.) He does have great soundtracks, though.

Also: Richard Linklater. What does anyone see in "The Waking Life," besides the cool animation? And "Before Sunrise/Sunset"...ugh. Please, no more beautiful people yammering at each other for two hours.

Lars von Trier: I hate most of his movies, but he did make "The Kingdom," arguably one of the best TV series ever.

I'm a Kar-Wai fan, I can't deny it. Chungking Express has its problems, but it's an interesting failure. In the Mood for Love is outstanding, for all the reasons people listed above. But 2046 really blindsided me: about halfway through the film I was more or less loss, but by the end he'd hit me unexpectedly in some of my deepest nerves. How he pulled it all together, I'll never understand - but I definitely respect him for it.

What I especially like about 2046 is that one of the central conceits - of having fiction within fiction - doesn't feel as artificial as in the usual films about writers, in part because of the huge stylistic and genre gaps between the story (urban melodrama) and the story within (trippy science fiction) that allow the emotions of the latter to seep in unexpectedly, and in my mind, more satisfyingly. It IS a bit of a mess, but it's the kind of mess that somehow works - and maybe works better - even if you can nitpick the parts (I'd include movies like Magnolia in this category). The sloppy, loose plotting and the bizarre style choices somehow cohere into a work greater than the sum of its messy parts.

Sacred cows I don't understand? I'll up the ante on the people who listed Kubrick above, and throw out Lynch - I respected your essays on him, Jim, but I just don't get the movies. Inland Empire was a three hour slog-fest followed by an outstanding final 20 minutes or so. There are some directors who can string you along with their surreal dreams (Maddin's a favorite), but for some reason my brain just doesn't make the connections that Lynch's (or his fans') are making, and I find myself trying my hardest to stay awake.

Also, Paul Haggis. I don't have much nice to say there.