Wong kar-Wai's first English-lang film, "My Blueberry Nights"

I walked across Chinatown on Wednesday and I didn't see any sign of this.

xpost

but Lady based on the same novel as the Welles film, apparently? However loose, I consider that a remake.

(c) “When they told me we caught Saddam in his hidey-hole.”

I'm a bit wary of WKW's Lady casting of Kidman and Jackman. (she's too old, for one)

YOU DON'T SAY.

Blueberry also being shot in Memphis, Vegas, LA.

Ken, dunno; I'll be at the Mets game the night of the Lancaster twinbill! I want to take my neo-nephew to at least one Flynn, maybe The Sea Hawk. I don't think I've seen the Fairbanks or Ritz Bros Musketeers!

Didn't he direct another movie, after Happy Together, that was so awful I can't remember the title or what even happened in it? That took the whole "this is a giant rock video" concept to extremes? Nothing's mentioned in the imdb, so - I either dreamed that I saw a nonexistent and bad WKW movie (though I had loved everything of his I'd seen up to then) or imdb is covering up for his sins.

xpost yeah it was a while ago but I was like, "wake me up when it's done."

-- jaymc (jmcunnin...), August 4th, 2006 5:03 PM. (jaymc) (later)

no comment.

A friend of yours tells you he was in a Hollywood movie when he was like 12 years old and you're not curious?

The Master of Time: Wong Kar-wai in America
By DENNIS LIM

On a SoHo film set last August, Jude Law and Norah Jones were getting intimate. Repeatedly intimate. To be precise, they had kissed upwards of 150 times in the past three days.

The occasion for this outbreak of passion was “My Blueberry Nights,” the first English-language film by Wong Kar-wai, the maverick Hong Kong director turned avatar of cosmopolitan cool. This particular night was stifling as the crew spilled out of Palacinka, a small cafe on Grand Street that was the principal New York location, preparing for yet another take of the scene known as “the Kiss.”

It’s closing time, and Ms. Jones, the only remaining customer, is slumped on the counter, her eyes shut. A smudge of cream rests on her upper lip, the telltale sign of a dessert binge. Mr. Law, cleaning up behind the bar, gazes at her, slowly leans in and steals a lingering kiss. When he surfaces, the cream on her lip is gone.

The shot lasted less than a minute, but the number of permutations that Mr. Wong and his cinematographer, Darius Khondji, devised — 15 set-ups, by the count of the script supervisor — suggested it would play a central role in the finished film. The Kiss was being shot at different film speeds and from a multitude of angles: a wide shot, his point of view, hers, through windows, with objects in the foreground.

“I’ve never worked with someone who’s put so much emphasis on a single moment,” Mr. Law said between takes one night. “It’s extraordinary how he’ll take a moment and replay it and slice it up.”

The consecration of a fleeting, fugitive moment is one of Mr. Wong’s specialties. Perhaps more than any filmmaker since Alain Resnais, his great subject is time — or more specifically lost time. His rhapsodic movies, haunted by voice-over ruminations and swathed in lush regret, seem to transpire in the realm of memory. People and places are mourned even as they are captured on camera.

Mr. Wong, 48, is keen to describe “My Blueberry Nights,” a road movie shot in New York, Memphis, Las Vegas and Ely, Nev., with a cast that also includes Natalie Portman, Rachel Weisz and David Strathairn, as a new beginning. His last film, “2046,” was planned as science fiction but demonstrated the gravitational pull of the past as well, succumbing to the hothouse delirium of 1960s Hong Kong. A kaleidoscopic head rush, “2046” quoted so extensively from Mr. Wong’s earlier work that it felt like a midcareer retrospective unto itself.

To a notorious degree Mr. Wong finds his way as he goes, often plunging into production with little more than an outline. His exploratory method gives his films a unique shape and intensity; the result is inseparable from the process.

In the mid-1990s, with Hong Kong’s reversion to Chinese sovereignty looming, Mr. Wong directed three films — “Chungking Express,” “Fallen Angels” and “Happy Together” — in quick succession. Made as if on deadline, they have a brash Polaroid-like immediacy. The films that followed, “In the Mood for Love” and “2046,” are period reveries rooted in the melancholy of transience. It’s only fitting that he had a hard time letting go; each took a seeming eternity to complete. “In five years you can make five films, but I spent five years making one,” he said in his Manhattan hotel room soon after the shoot, referring to “2046.”

“My Blueberry Nights” — repeat kisses notwithstanding — is a conscious attempt to pick up the pace. For one thing, Mr. Wong shot it in just seven weeks. “We thought of this as a vacation film, spontaneous and contemporary,” he said. “Making a film under the best conditions, it’s like a rock band on tour,” he added, ever the rock-star director: his trademark sunglasses stayed on through the New York night shoots.

For another, Mr. Wong said that the project “happened overnight.” He was in New York last year researching another movie, “The Lady From Shanghai,” a period drama (no relation to the Orson Welles film noir) that would star Nicole Kidman and shoot in Russia, Shanghai and New York. When that was postponed, he decided to make a smaller, off-the-cuff film, which he conceived as a vehicle for Ms. Jones, the Grammy-winning singer-songwriter, who had never acted before.

“She’s a natural,” he said, adding that he had instructed her not to take acting lessons.

As he sees it, “My Blueberry Nights” is in a sense about Ms. Jones’s face as it reacts to different environments. “In Memphis there’s something very classic about her presence,” he said. “In New York it’s very contemporary.”

Ms. Jones seemed less confident than her director. “I have no idea what he saw in me or where he saw it,” she said on a coffee break one night. “When I got the call, I thought he wanted some music for his movies. It’s weird because I feel like I’ve looked uncomfortable in every music video I’ve been in.”

William Chang, who has been Mr. Wong’s editor, production designer and costume designer from the start, is with him on “My Blueberry Nights,” but for the first time in 15 years Christopher Doyle, the iconoclastic Australian cinematographer, is not. Together Mr. Wong and Mr. Doyle invented a much copied visual shorthand for romantic alienation, a mix of neon-smudged kinesis and slow-motion contemplation. But their relationship has been strained of late, with Mr. Doyle’s Hollywood workload and Mr. Wong’s erratic schedules becoming incompatible. In Mr. Doyle’s place is Mr. Khondji, the French cinematographer best known for the dank atmospherics of David Fincher’s “Seven.”

Just as striking as Mr. Doyle’s absence from the project is the presence of Hollywood actors. Over the years Mr. Wong has built up a repertory of Hong Kong luminaries who learned to thrive under his impulsive demands. “My Blueberry Nights” subjects its starry ensemble to an open-ended process that would be inconceivable on a studio movie. (The film was acquired for American distribution by the Weinstein Company earlier this month.)

Mr. Wong was also working for the first time with a screenwriting partner, the crime novelist Lawrence Block, who had written some scenes based on an outline. While shooting, Mr. Wong constantly revised and added new scenes, often at the last minute. He said he was surprised to find that the actors were not only ready for the challenge — his reputation preceded him — but even excited.

“I wish we had endless time and endless money,” Mr. Law said. “It’s not often you get to be part of something like this — a living story that’s still being decided.”

There is a pragmatic side to Mr. Wong’s seemingly reckless method. Entire subplots are planned, cast and even shot, only to evaporate. But he recycles ideas as often as he abandons them. A stray segment from “Chungking Express” became “Fallen Angels,” while “2046” bloomed from a kernel first planted in “Days of Being Wild,” his 1991 breakthrough film.

Similarly “My Blueberry Nights” grew out of a planned omnibus called “Three Stories About Food.” One chapter became “In the Mood for Love” (2000). Another, the basis for “Blueberry,” was filmed as a short with Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, and has only been screened once, at the 2001 Cannes Film Festival.

That short, called “In the Mood for Love 2001,” contained the blueprint for the Kiss. As Mr. Wong expanded the scenario, it turned into a road movie partly because it would cost too much to shoot entirely in New York. So he contrived a romantic predicament to send Ms. Jones’s character on a trip. “She needs time to think so she takes the longest road across America, from the Atlantic to the Pacific,” he said.

The next step was to map her route and find at least two pit stops. Crew members went on three cross-country location scouting trips, accompanied twice by Mr. Khondji and once by Mr. Wong. Both took copious photos of highways, diners, motels: slices of Americana in the style of Robert Frank and William Eggleston.

Mr. Wong considered post-Katrina New Orleans, but the logistics were daunting. He opted instead for Memphis, where Ms. Jones would encounter Mr. Strathairn and Ms. Weisz’s unhappy couple. (Mr. Wong called the Memphis segment a tribute to Tennessee Williams.) He discovered Ely while driving along Highway 50, often called the loneliest road in America, and decided to place Ms. Portman’s story line there.

Mr. Wong asks for complete trust from his actors, but he’s also willing to customize their roles to suit them. This was especially so with Mr. Law’s character, the cafe proprietor, who started out as a quiet type but grew more boisterous when the actor’s charisma and energy became evident. “I kept telling him to get louder,” Mr. Wong said.

More than a month into the shoot, despite the breakneck pace and permanent uncertainty, the atmosphere on set was relatively serene. “There’s an incredible calmness to him,” Mr. Law said of Mr. Wong.

Even so, there are some basic aspects of production in this country that run counter to his prized spontaneity. Permit applications must be filed well in advance. Union regulations stipulate penalties for long days, precluding the marathon sessions that he has been known to hold.

In Hong Kong “we make films like a family business,” he said. “Here everything has to be quite specific. I have to explain to the crew that even though I respect the rules, there’s certain things I want to keep my way.”

As Ms. Jones put it, “He’s open to everything, but he knows what he wants.”

BETWEEN takes of the Kiss, Mr. Chang, the production designer, was fussing over Ms. Jones. He rearranged her hair, fanning her curls out on the countertop, and reapplied the spot of cream on her lip. Compared with the exertions of “2046,” which called for period re-creations, futuristic sets and a heaving wardrobe of traditional and android couture, this was a breeze.

“I really needed a break from period,” Mr. Chang said, smiling.

The cafe location had only been minimally altered. There were hand-painted inscriptions on the glass windows and a new sign outside with Cyrillic lettering. Mr. Chang had also installed a pair of columns to break up the tiny space and mounted mirrors to maximize the angles.

That night Mr. Khondji was working out a complex shot that required him to pan, track and shoot the Kiss through a vase, a cake dish and some beer bottles on the countertop.

After a few takes Mr. Wong asked if the shot would work better if Mr. Law, before swooping in for the smooch, extended his hand to touch Ms. Jones’s face. Or, as he put it, “Foreplay or no foreplay?” A vote was taken among those present; the former prevailed. Mr. Law incorporated the maneuver into the remaining takes.

Later Mr. Wong jokingly explained: “I had to ask because in America, sometimes they prefer things macho. I wasn’t sure if it should be too tender. In Hong Kong I don’t have to ask. I know what a guy would do.”

Most nights the mood music was “The Greatest,” the latest album of dreamy downer ballads by Cat Power. For Mr. Wong the on-set soundtrack was mostly for the benefit of the cinematographer. “The best way for the camera to pick up the rhythm is music,” he said.

Mr. Khondji said that he and Mr. Wong had intended to adopt a casually alert, near-documentary style, using a small crew and natural light. But once they got under way, perhaps through force of habit, the shots became more stylized. Still, Mr. Khondji added: “It’s not as perfect as his last two movies. There’s no time for perfection.”

Mr. Wong left for Hong Kong in September with almost all of “Blueberry,” his ninth feature, under his belt and — it would not be a Wong Kar-wai film otherwise — questions surrounding the ending. He said he would likely return in the winter to shoot the concluding scenes.

Reached by e-mail recently, he said he was editing with Mr. Chang and would not make any decisions about additional shooting until he had a first cut. The plan had been to balance the completion of “Blueberry” with preproduction on “The Lady From Shanghai,” but Ms. Kidman announced last month that she was pulling out of that film. “None of those reports have been confirmed by anyone involved with the project,” Mr. Wong wrote. Without Ms. Kidman, though, he added, “There is no reason to do it.”

Over tea shortly before he left New York, Mr. Wong said he was exhausted from the grueling shoot. But far from being fazed by the sense of incompletion, he seemed invigorated: the door remained open, no alternatives had been lost, the story was still alive.

And how might “My Blueberry Nights” end? “I think there will be a second kiss,” he said. “But I don’t know where.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

gah wtf

daaaaamn but Jude Law looks good in the photos, considering he's not Tony Leung.

I'm dying for this movie to come out

Mr. Wong asks for complete trust from his actors, but he’s also willing to customize their roles to suit them. This was especially so with Mr. Law’s character, the cafe proprietor, who started out as a quiet type but grew more boisterous when the actor’s charisma and energy became evident. “I kept telling him to get louder,” Mr. Wong said.

This line worries me

I want exquisite silence, y'know?

seriously this is going to suck so much ass. don't torture yourself.

holy shit this is going to be bad.

it looks terrible!

Also...it's called MY BLUEBERRY NIGHTS!

I've had a few blueberry nights in my time, but I've never been in a hurry to remember them.

i saw a movie with that name a few days ago here in rotterdam. it was horrible.

didn't this come out last summer? anyway yeah the word is not good

The HK DVD is out in a little over a week it looks like...

http://us.yesasia.com/en/PrdDept.aspx/code-w/section-index/pid-1010046194/

some website has a pool going on the actual US release date (now April, I think)

why don't you link us there?

ha, i've been in touch with a publicist about this for a while... she's saying maybe march but i don't really trust her..

out in the UK in two weeks.

interview with our very own norah jones.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/02/09/bfnorah109.xml

It's not really good. You get what you'd expect from a WKW movie but not in the masterful manner of his previous films. Then again, i'm probably not the best judge of this film as I fell asleep time and time again during the showing. Going to see a movie at the theatre while being really tired is not the best way to enjoy a movie, though I always find it very refreshing to do so.

new date for US is April 4, diff cut than Cannes.

http://www.cinematical.com/2008/03/06/theres-a-new-release-date-and-version-of-my-blueberry-nights/

It's an Armond rave!

Jones’ placid, biracial beauty helps clarify Wong’s feeling for women. A close-up of Jones’ lips stretching into a smile as she sleeps—a dreaming smile—is one of the cinema’s great sensuous icons. This uncanny gift for erotic empathy isn’t just an example of Asian exoticism—it’s also the way Wong presents Weisz and Portman. Neither actress has been so convincing and alluring as they are here.... It’s Wong’s most tactile film—almost as if he's found a new medium. Working in video with cinematographer Darius Khondji, Wong sharpens his usual ideas and images and emotions. Sensations result.

http://nypress.com/21/14/film/ArmondWhite.cfm

i hope "Sensations result!" gets quoted on the poster

or "placid, biracial."

"Lava-like sludge... ennui made iridescent!"

"Tactile!"

"Not just an example of Asian exoticism!"

much as i like his stuff, i get really turned off these days by cross-industry star turns. yes, norah jones is striking/exotic, and good for her that she'd like to act, but aren't there hundreds of other equally striking/exotic young women out there who would like to act, too. who in fact ONLY want to act? can't you spare me feeling like you've made a huge concession in your casting just for that extra marketing hook?

i'll probably see it eventually, somehow, but i'm not running to the theater the way i would be normally. (and i'm a portman fan, too.)

i feel really bad for the striking exotic young women of hollywood tonight.

It's an Armond rave!

oh no.

i'm sure i'll enjoy this movie. whether i'll be able to defend it is a lot less clear.

"A close-up of Jones’ lips stretching into a smile as she sleeps—a dreaming smile—is one of the cinema’s great sensuous icons."

This is indeed one of the great icons of the cinema wtf?

http://www.moreno-stone.co.il/playground/humor/photo/smile%20cat.jpg

all you think about is pussy

This has lost 20 minutes since Cannes.

think the weinsteins messed with it; on the other hand WKW is pretty famous for recutting his own stuff a lot. the only reason to see this is to be able to take issue with armond w. it sounds like complete bullshit.

A.O. Scott no likee very much.

could it be worse than 2046, i wonder?

sight and sound rather liked it, I think

nomfup

What was depressing about this movie was how many great/interesting things got destroyed by the shitty things (bad dialogue/jude law). I love all the shots through glass and the extreme out of focus things. But seriously jude law is just horrible.

down to just Angelika in NY, shd I go?

going to see this on monday

saw this last week and was the only one in the theater. it's not very good. and i loved 2046.

norah jones was surprisingly ok but yeah jude law & natalie portman were terrible.

maybe its only(?) redeeming quality: hot pie shots

tedious.

did a morbz go?

the hot pie shots were more gross than appetizing

also: this sucked

i hain't gone, no. It doesn't look likely; the Hou movie is already playing at a reduced sched at IFC Center, and I'd rather see that.

This isn't bad. Norah Jones was just fine; main problem is the Law and Jones characters aren't particularly compelling as conceived, esp compared to Strathairn, Portman, or even CHAN.

i thought the actors were the least of this movie's problems, it was just tedious.

not until Nevada, I thought. Even then, mostly at the poker scenes.

the only time i really noticed norah's inexperience was in the portman scenes... she was playing such a demonstrative flamboyant character it seemed to really cow NJ.

M Sicinski:

I would submit that Wong's work has never been about "character" per se so much as image-of-character, a kind of iconicity that reverberates in the memory after loss. So flatness, or at least a partial flattening, or a tendency toward subsuming the character into the role of a figure in a painterly landscape of the mind, hardly seems damning in the context of a Wong-goes-to-"America" project. No, what matters is that everything is rather frothy, even the moments of poignancy. The pie filling is canned, not fresh. (Doesn't this tell us something concrete and specific about the connections between American culture and life in Hong Kong?) So for instance, Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz) offers a rather wan emotional-breakdown speech, but almost immediately Wong offers us a near-still image of Sue Lynne standing beside her convertible, just before she blows town. This is the kind of perfectly etched encapsulation of neon-Hopper Americana that poor, hapless Wim Wenders would give his left nut to be able to generate these days.

http://academichack.net/reviewsApril2008.htm#Blueberry

"a kind of iconicity that reverberates in the memory after loss... subsuming the character into the role of a figure in a painterly landscape of the mind "

fancy!

This movie was dreadful.

Even the cinematography was weak by his standards. And terrible acting across the board (although not sure this utterly tedious and humorless script would have worked better with his regular cast either.) And (Jude's) melting ice cream seeping into (Jones') blueberry pie not an image I want with me. Ick.

yaow. i kind of liked it. there was something so once-removed about it, like the fact that it was wkw's impression of eggleston-esque day-glo america, but shot through his eyes, and the fact that two of the actresses were like soul singers but kind of ersatz modern day once removed soul singers, it felt sort of apposite. it looked beautiful, too, i think. no christopher doyle, but it was total rich syrup to look at throughout.

Yeah, totally underrated, it's only shite by WKW standards. I hated how he used the Tony Leung theme in it though. There was no Tony Leung! Basically if Tony Leung was in it instead of Jude Law, even just if he was speaking entirely in Cantonese and there was no subtitles I would have preferred it. A lot.

Is hot.

I keep thinking Law was the worst thing about it, but then I remember Rachel Weisz and Norah Jones and David Straithern and Cat Power and Nathalie Portman and I realize everyone sucked badly which leads me to think that the real problems were probably script/direction related. It's nearly impossible for Hong Kong directors to succeed stateside (going back for like ever) so it doesn't shock me that WKW followed the John Woo path and sucked at it too.

I thought Cat Power was great actually.

I could see him working well with Nicole Kidman maybe.

Maybe if she speaks Chinese.

wkw is completely down the toiler

so is kidman.

!

So we watched this last night, my first Wong Kar Wai film after years of film students and lecturers raving about him to me. It was like watching a bad Flickr account come to life. Jude Law's a prick, his accent was from the wrong side of the Pennines, it had no plot whatsoever, and the lead actress was the least capable of the three principal females. I have no desire to investigate Wong Kar Wai any further. Am I wrong?

It was not a good place to start. Try Chungking Express or In the Mood for Love and if you don't like them, quit trying.

Do they look like bad Flickr accounts? Cos if it's all shot through glass or as reflections or with out of focus objects in the super-foreground with that yellow saturation and neon / black palette I'm going to get pretty tired pretty quick.

EVERYONE in MBN looked like they had liver disease.

Which in the case of Jude Law isn't a bad thing.

Dude (or his DP) was at the forefront of the bad Flickr aesthetic.

Shame.

In the mood for love's a beautiful film, though. see it at a cinema if you can. the surface (dis)connects well with the substance, if that makes sense.

I voted to nominate Norah Jones for Best Actress, that's how sensational a year it was.

I have no desire to investigate Wong Kar Wai any further. Am I wrong?

He's a shallow director, and not without charms. I like Happy Together a lot, 2046 less so.

Happy Together and In the Mood for Love are both nicely sensual. 2046 is a gorgeous slog. I, too, have very little motivation to really dig into Wong's work.

i've only seen Chungking Express but I thought it was pretty great.

Tony Leung talking to household items = awesome.

I like Days of Being Wild and Happy Together a lot, and 2046 is the closest he's come to a masterwork.

I voted to nominate Norah Jones for Best Actress, that's how sensational a year it was.

― Dr Morbius, Tuesday, January 13, 2009 4:13 PM (18 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

no, that's how much of a spaz you are.

enrique, ladies.

Yes?

What have I done now?

who is s.g.s.m.b., then?

:p

Enrique is every ILXor. It's all in he.

watching MBN - Jude Law the same old laddish 1990s drama student type, like in Alfie: how on Earth has this person been so consistently acclaimed, when he drags down any picture with this bad mode of his?

don't think the laundry list of faults with MBN can really be put down to Jude Law.

No, maybe not!

It was kind of OK, by WKW standards, between the time she left him (c.20 mins) and the time he comes back on screen (c.35 minutes). Then you get Law being Law again, gurning his UK thespian BS down a telephone. 'No, I don't want to order your fried chicken'. He's excruciating !!!

OK, that film is pretty poor, but one thing that can be stated with confidence is that Norah Jones is NOT the worst thing in it. It actually gets worse when Natalie Portman shows up.

Excruciating is actually the perfect word for JL in this.

i don't hate fallen angels. its the only one i've seen.

hahahah ok wait what the fuck is this diner brawl that looks like something out of footloose

maybe watch happy together or in the mood for love first, btw Tony Leung = dreamy

wnkiw post-fallen angels wkw.

wnkiw?

i think i was wrong about ITMFL. even wong's good stuff is pretty bad i reckon. still looks gorgeous though.

would not kick it with.

even wong's good stuff is pretty bad

looool.

I wonder if I would hate all of them if they were in english, like a romantic haze of orientalism adds to the enjoyment mebbe, if so kinda sad :_;

i like the earlier ones more coz christopher doyle's camerawork is pretty exciting + gun battles.

i was a bit rash there, i think that i would probably still like happy together.

& i should see ashes of time i suppose.