2046 by Wong Kar-Wai

this is pretty much what did happen according to Sight and Sound this month. i have watched about half of this unsubtitled from the net. Obviosult i can't undertsand the story but it looks Poor by WKW's standards and the "future" stuff looks pretty naff to me. Maybe he got so close to the material he lost any sense of perspective? still looking forward to seeing it on the big screen in a couple of weeks.

The Sight and Sound Article goes into quite a bit of detail about the filming for ITMFL and 2046 - the fall outs with Chris Doyle, the moving of the unit from Hong Kong to Bankok after 2/3rds of the film had been completed. Wong then decided to start again from scratch (on the grounds that Bankok looked more like the Hong Kong of the 50's and 60's then Hong Kong itself did) and relations with Doyle broke down - as a result anly a few minutes of ITMFL were actually photographed by Doyle. When shooting began (for the first attempt) on 2046 Wong and Doyle made up to an extent and decided to give it a go again but that didn't last for long and all of that material was subsequently scrapped. Criterion are about to release a special edition of ITMFL with Doyles Hong Kong footage on a seperate disc - apparently a great deal of footage and a completely different film and concept from ITMFL as we know it now.

i read about this with great disappointment. they haven't worked together since the 'In the Mood' reshoots.

For me, the most amazing part of the film is a very short sequence regarding the science-fiction novel written by the hero in 1967, about the year 2046. In that novel, a Japanese man is on a train that will take him out of the year 2046 and toward a "new beginning." The only reason he went to the year 2046 anyway, the story explains vaguely, is to "find his lost memories." On the train, he meets a robot girl -- played by Faye Wong -- who he falls into an odd litle love with. He asks her, his words appearing for the second time in the movie, "Do you know what people used to do when they had a secret? They went deep into the mountains, found a tree, opened a hole in it, whispered the secret in, and sealed it with mud. That way, no one ever had to know the secret." He then asks her to come with him, to his new future. She doesn't answer. He thinks she doesn't want to go. Then, in a conversation (in Chinese I'm not . . . sure he understands) with a bartender, he's informed that the robots on the train out of 2046 take several hours to react. If they try to laugh, it might be five hours, or ten hours before the laugh comes out. In addition -- the train out of 2046 takes a different length of time for each passenger. For some people, it's only a few minutes. For the Japanese man (played by SMAP star Takuya Kimura, who also does the main character's voice in the new Hayao Miyazaki film opening next week), it takes several weeks. This is because his past is, of course, the same past as the past of the writer, played by hot-star Tony Leung. Everything in the sci-fi portion of the story has a counterpart in the 1960s Hong Kong portion of the story, though no two of the instances are really fun or clever to point out.

I haven't seen "In the Mood for Love", so I can't comment on their relation, but 2046 worked well on its own.

So, I take it that 2046 hasn't been released yet in the US... What about the UK? Did I start this thread too early?

boy "chungking express" really is amazing, isn't it? i just watched it again this week.

Everything he's done (except for Tears Go By which is just okay and Days of Being Wild which is him still working up to Chungking Express and Happy Together) is amazing. Ashes of Time may be my favorite now though.

mary it doesn't have a distributor yet so there's no news. :-(

but in the meantime you can buy the DVD from hong kong!

Well all of his movies are pretty messy. Happy Together manages (and not by accident) to perfectly capture something though within its mess (or perhaps because of it.) In The Mood For Love is maybe the weakest of the post-Days WKW flicks (tied with Fallen Angels perhaps) but even slightly off WKW is about a million times better than what most other director's churn out.

I can't tell if that's meant to be an insult or not.

Milo it'll get picked up eventually. Most of his films have taken forever to get distribution, but they all get released eventually.

not really. people have said that this is significant because somebody once said that HK would remain unchanged for half a century after the handover, and that WKW had had the 'profound' realization that nothing stays the same for fifty years. ho-hum. not exactly a bad film, but certainly an incoherent one.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcfour/listings/programme.shtml?day=tuesday&filename=20050111/20050111_2300_4544_38184_95

BBC4 Tue 11 Jan, 23:00-00:35 95mins Stereo

"Five inhabitants of Hong Kong's seedy underworld come together in Wong Kar-Wai's stunningly filmed second feature film.

The central stories involve an anonymous assassin, a mysterious man who takes over closed stores and the gunman's enigmatic female assignment officer. [Wong Kar-Wai, 1995]"

What is the consensus on this?

hah yes, i did that phrase that poorly.

I guess I feel like I just need some kind of Cliff's notes with the two WKW movies I've seen which I rarely feel about even the artiest movies. Unless his films really are to be taken simply at face value as "omg asian chixxors are hot esp when smoking cigs in green light" exercises.

Anyone seen 'ashes of time'.

yes.

and? :-)

It's great.

now reduxed!

what dyou think of it s1ocki?

not a huge fan of ashes, i like it, it's really pretty but a little on the boring side i find. reduxed version looks nice.

the one where they play California Dreaming 500 times is pretty sweet, can't remember what it's called.

Chungking Express

Happy Together's still my favorite.

the one where they play California Dreaming 500 times is pretty sweet, can't remember what it's called.

i hated that movie because of that.

i like ashes a lot. probably his most experimental movie? wuxia impressionism.

Finally watching 2046. I now know it is 129 minutes long. Uh-oh.

This might be my favourite movie of all time.

it keeps ending. again and again. then it ends.

I was so disappointed when it ended.

(that it was over)

I remember leaving the cinema and wanting to buy a black suit and loads of Nat King Cole records. It passed (mercifully) but the movie is amazing.

i still love this movie. sure it could be shorter but why? it's never going to have a 'succinct' narrative. I like it as the big sprawling pretty mess it is.

I made it less than 25% of the way through so far.

I will report back if I make any more progress.

I'm sorry, you should send your soul back because it is faulty.

I wasn't sure how bad this film was. Then I watched the 2003 Promo, with material from the film and material that didn't make it - an utter farrago that makes the whole work seem like the vanity project of an embarrassing, shallow, half-educated popinjay.

... but the film itself isn't as bad as that. I'm still not sure how bad it is. The SF element gives it another level, though a superfluous, arbitrary one. On the whole, though, I guess it's pretentious, aimless, vacuous and possibly the best WKW film I've seen.

Wow, faulty was the wrong word.

A terrible film. It makes no sense in terms of plot or emotionally. It doesn't work on its own and it doesn't work as a follow up to "In the Mood for Love" (and actually kinda ruined that film for me too). It's a huge mess and it is utterly boring.
― jed_ (jed), Wednesday, 19 January 2005

Yeah its just massive incoherent mess but it has so many beautiful textures and its so elegantly poised on the edge of numbness and oh god everybody is so beautiful and the clothes and the music. Its immersive.

I forgot how good Fallen Angels is

yeah. it's one of those films i've forgotten everything about. i've reduced it to the massage scene on the market stall in my head. isn't there some new dvd out?

wtf was pinefox on about this movie is incredible.

this might be my favourite movie ever

Really love the imagery and vibe of 2046, but it felt like a huge letdown to me after In the Mood for Love, which was so beautiful and charged. Basically what I got out of it was that the director likes pointing the camera at beautiful people, especially women, especially when they are having the feeling of acting sad. As a cinematic reverie, it's pleasant enough, but frustratingly arbitrary and insubstantial. By far my least favorite WKW movie, though I haven't seen Ashes of Time or My Blueberry Nights (films a lot of folks seem to hate).

People hate Ashes of Time? Those people are dumb. My Blueberry Nights OTOH is godawful.

The negative criticism of Ashes of Time mostly seems centered on its supposed incoherence. Been meaning to see it for years, just somehow never quite got around to it (though I've somehow managed to make time for irredeemable shit like Raiders 4). Have you seen the recent AoT remix? Figure I'll skip that at least until I see the original.

That's a weird criticism. AoT is no more incoherent than Days of Being Wild or Fallen Angels or whatever.

Have not seen the remix though.

the remix is very, very similar, only cleaned-up. just see it

It's on my list.

Wong Kar-wai announced his new film BLOSSOMS as a part of trilogy with In The Mood For Love and 2046. He said he has prepared the script for last 4 years and he’s ready to shoot in the end of this year or beginning of next year #WKWisback pic.twitter.com/d73Cueo39a

— Hang Lu (@hanglutvd) March 19, 2019

https://thefilmstage.com/wong-kar-wais-blossoms-shanghai-finally-gets-distribution-outside-chinawong-kar-wais-iblossoms-shanghai-i-finally-gets-distribution-outside-china/