WONG KAR-WAI

Started by Rudie Obias, March 01, 2003, 11:37:52 PM

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grand theft sparrow

WKW Box Set!!!!

This might tide me over until 2046 comes out in the US.  Might.



KINO ON VIDEO TO RELEASE THE WONG KAR-WAI COLLECTION FOR THE FIRST TIME ON DVD

Kino on Video is proud to release an unprecedented box set collecting five feature films from acclaimed writer/director Wong Kar-Wai. Releasing for the first time on VHS and DVD two of Mr. Wong's acclaimed early films (As Tears Go By and Days of Being Wild) Kino on Video's WONG KAR-WAI COLLECTION also brings new DVD editions of Happy Together and Fallen Angels, both specially re-mastered for this set. Chungking Express, made available by a special arrangement with BUENA VISTA HOME VIDEO, completes this unprecedented collection of featured films directed by one of the most regarded film auteurs of our time.

Each DVD (with the exception of Chungking Express) will be sold separately with a SRP of $29.95. The five-film WONG KAR-WAI COLLECTION is priced at 99.95 and will be available to the general public on October 19th, 2004.

As Tears Go By and Days of Being Wild were both written and directed by Wong Kar-Wai and are considered to be two of his most daring and poetic feature films (Days is certainly as acclaimed as his later works Happy Together and In the Mood for Love). Both feature films display, for the first time in Mr. Wong?s career, some of the motifs and aesthetic sensibilities that are widely seen as his trademarks.

The first of many collaborations between the director and superstar Maggie Cheung, As Tears Go By is often compared to the early work of Martin Scorsese for its viceral depicion of young mobsters. Days of Being Wild marks the first joint effort between Mr. Wong and acclaimed cinematographer Christopher Doyle (In the Mood for Love and Rabbit-Proof Fence). Mr. Doyle has lensed all feature films directed by Wong Kar-Wai since Days of Being Wild.

   
Kino on Video's WONG KAR-WAI COLLECTION also brings recently re-mastered editions of other two titles previously available from Kino on Video: Fallen Angels and Happy Together. Wong Kar-Wai's use of saturated colors and kinetic camera work can be better appreciated in these two new editions made from new transfers. Kino's newly remastered Fallen Angels is a cinematic ballet (choreographed to perfection) of rage, dark-humor and desire performed by a contract killer (Leon Lai Ming) and the female agent (Michele Reis) who books his assignment.

Kino's Special Edition DVD of Happy Together, also made from a recent high-quality transfer, premieres the fascinating feature film BUENOS AIRES ZERO DEGREES, which documents the making of this cinematic masterpiece set in dazzling Buenos Aires. The story of a gay couple strongly connected to each others abusive and sometimes violent display of affection, Happy Together combines moments of incredible subtlety with histrionic rage and stands as one of Wong Kar-Wai's strongest depictions of contemporary violence and alienation--here inseparably intertwined with human affection.

     
DAYS OF BEING WILD

In his first hypnotic backward glance at Hong Kong in 1960, Wong Kar Wai creates a post-modern LA RONDE set in a fluorescent labyrinth of cool desperation and unfulfilled need. Against the echoing rhythms of period rumbas, DAYS OF BEING WILD tracks a half dozen characters through their individual searches for intimate connection. Collaborating for the first time with cinematographer Christopher Doyle, Wong Kar Wai's restless visual imagination decorates this dreamlike fable with characteristic muted extravagance. DAYS OF BEING WILD offers an intoxicating cocktail of lush nostalgia and bitter alienation equaled only by Wong Kar Wai's subsequent films.

Star crossed Asian film icon Leslie Cheung (FAREWELL MY CONCUBINE, HAPPY TOGETHER) plays Luddy, a devastatingly handsome Hong Kong lothario who seduces and forsakes women without compunction. Abandoned at birth, Luddy's self-destructive search for love is really a Quixotic quest for a feeling of permanence and a sense of identity. When Luddy beguiles lovely shop girl Su Lizen, he unknowingly sets in motion a sequence of broken hearts and unremembered promises that climaxes in naked obsession, inadvertent self-discovery and shocking violence.

In possibly her most seminal performance, Maggie Cheung (IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, AS TEARS GO BY) invests Su Lizen with ethereal beauty and street level vulnerability. With a supporting cast of Hong Kong cinema notables, including Andy Lau (FULLTIME KILLER, AS TEARS GO BY) as Su's policeman confessor, and frequent Wong collaborator Tony Leung (IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE, HAPPY TOGETHER), DAYS OF BEING WILD's visionary audacity and deep romantic conviction sustains and rewards multiple viewings.  

SPECIAL FEATURES

A Wong Kar Wai Trailer Gallery
Stills Gallery
Filmographies
Optional English subtitles
Enhanced for 16x9 TVs

1991   Hong Kong   89 min   Color   Letterboxed (1.85:1)
In Cantonese with optional English subtitles

AS TEARS GO BY

Though as gritty as any 80's Hong Kong gangster picture, AS TEARS GO BY is a watershed film heralding one of the most auspicious directorial debuts in international cinema. Wong Kar Wai's visually stunning, tough and romantic 1988 first feature deftly smuggles the director's now celebrated genius into an incendiary "Heroic Bloodshed" street opera.

Already stretched to breaking in a loyalty tug of war between Triad bosses and his loose cannon partner, Wah (Andy Lau - FULLTIME KILLER, DAYS OF BEING WILD), a rising star in the HK underworld, finds himself saddled with beautiful, ailing country cousin Ngor. As an escalating test of wills with a stubborn debtor explodes into bloodshed and a mob turncoat instigates a ruthless police crackdown, Wah's growing fascination with Ngor becomes his last chance for escape from a violent past and a dubious future.

Cast in comic eye candy roles prior to AS TEARS GO BY, Maggie Cheung (IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE) cites Ngor, her first of many collaborations with Wong Kar Wai, as the character that truly began her dramatic career. Under Wong Kar Wai's direction, Jacky Cheung (DAYS OF BEING WILD) earned the 1988 Honk Kong Film Awards Best Actor Award for his portrayal of Wah's guilt-ridden, out of control partner Fly. Balancing epiphanous imagery with experimentation and realism with brazen romanticism, Wong Kar Wai's AS TEARS GO BY offers a tantalizing glimpse into the nascent brilliance of one of the most influential filmmaking talents of the last twenty years.

SPECIAL FEATURES:

A Wong Kar Wai Trailer Gallery
Stills Gallery
Filmographies
Optional English subtitles
Enhanced for 16x9 TVs

102 min   Color   Letterboxed (1.85:1)
In Cantonese with optional English subtitles

FALLEN ANGELS

Acknowledged throughout the world as one of the most important directors working today, Wong Kar-Wai (HAPPY TOGETHER, ASHES OF TIME) has developed a signature style that employs bold, experimental use of photography, music, and editing to capture the tension of the approaching millennium. Originally intended to be a third story in his now classic CHUNGKING EXPRESS, FALLEN ANGELS has emerged as what some critics have come to consider his "quintessential work."

Set in the neon-washed underworld of present day Hong Kong, FALLEN ANGELS intertwines two exhilarating tales of love and isolation. First, there?s the unconsummated love affair between a contract Killer (Leon Lai Ming) and the ravishing female Agent (Michele Reis) who books his assignments and cleans up after his jobs. When the Killer decides that he must move on, he leaves her with only a coin for the jukebox and instructions to play song number 1818 - "Wang Ji Ta" ("Forget Him").

Ex-convict Ho (Takeshi Kaneshiro) stopped speaking at the age of five after eating a date-expired can of pineapple. He lives with his father, who runs a guesthouse where the Agent is in semi-permanent residence. Ho makes a living by re-opening shops that have closed for the night and intimidating customers into buying goods and services from him. After an awkward romance with a girl named Cherry, Ho finds himself all the more alone.

Wong Kar-Wai brings these parallel storylines together in a blitz of ultra-hip style and classical cinematic  sensibilities. A poet of modern alienation, Mr. Wong's universe is populated with characters both dark and comic, magical and existential; FALLEN ANGELS is both a vie at revolutionary cinema and an homage to a love for movies.

Special Features:

A Wong Kar-Wai Trailer Gallery
Stills Gallery
Filmographies
Optional English subtitles
Enhanced for 16x9 TVs

HAPPY TOGETHER

Winner of the Best Director prize at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival, Wong Kar-Wai's HAPPY TOGETHER is a cinematic balancing act, a stunning display of filmmaking style and a touching love story evenly mixed into one film. Hong Kong and world cinema have never seen anything quite like it.

Tony Leung and Leslie Cheung, two of Hong Kong's biggest stars, play a pair of gay lovers living out the waning days of their relationship as expatriates in Buenos Aires. Together with Australian Christopher Doyle, Wong's longtime cinematographer, the director discovers a city rich with diverse cultural influences. HAPPY TOGETHER reveals a corner of the world alive with intimate colors and an astounding array of sounds. Even more striking, though, is the way that such an international collaboration brings to life a romance that is both realistic and universal. Ho and Lai are characters who are instantly identifiable, who play the roles and experience the dynamics that all couples go through in the course of a relationship. Lusty tango bars, the salsa music of the La Boca sidewalks, and a hypnotic visit to the nearby Iguazu Falls give further dimension to the tensions growing between the two lovers.

Wong Kar-Wai (CHUNGKING EXPRESS, FALLEN ANGELS) has made with HAPPY TOGETHER his most accomplished work: A modern film, made by an auteur with a distinctive signature, which contains equal amounts of cinematic beauty and penetrating drama. Here Kar-Wai has crafted a rare art film that cements his international reputation as a world-class director.

Special Features:

"Buenos Aires Zero Degrees"
(59 min, Color, in Cantonese with English subtitles) A fascinating and revealing documentary about Wong Kar-Wai and the making of HAPPY TOGETHER.
A Wong Kar-Wai Trailer Gallery
Stills Gallery AND Filmographies
A Print Interview with Wong Kar-Wai
Optional English subtitles o Enhanced for 16x9 TVs

pete

I'm only after that Happy Together disc.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

Rudie Obias

2046 french trailer:



also kino is releasing DAYS OF BEING WILD in america:

http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/daysofbeingwild.html

plus the wong kar-wai dvd collection

october = rudie's wong kar-wai wet dream!!
\"a pair of eyes staring at you, projected on a large screen is what cinema is truly about.\" -volker schlöndorff

kotte

I haven't seen many of his films, only two actually.

Chungking Express and In The Mood For Love.

What I appreciate with this type of filmmaking or these types of films are it's subtle approach to love-stories. It demands that everyone in the audience has loved and lost in love, had their heart broken.
Only then can you appreciate and sense the intoxicating spirit. That's intelligent cinema for me. When the film demands something.
How Hollywood film romances work is that if you don't know love you are forced to engage because of the beautiful people, flattering lighting and the over-produced orchestrated score.
When films demand something it's a much more intimate experience, like it talks to me individually. I think this is what Charlie Kaufmans talked about, communicating with every person in the audience individually, not with the audience as a group.

grand theft sparrow

Quote from: kotteWhat I appreciate with this type of filmmaking or these types of films are it's subtle approach to love-stories. It demands that everyone in the audience has loved and lost in love, had their heart broken.
Only then can you appreciate and sense the intoxicating spirit. That's intelligent cinema for me.

You need to check out Wong's Happy Together immediately.

Two Lane Blacktop

Found this online, for a song called "6 Days" by DJ Shadow, and it's directed by Wong Kar Wai.  It looks like scenes from a movie-  anyone recognize it?  I've only seen 2046, and it's not that.

2LB
Body by Guinness

Pubrick

Quote from: Two Lane BlacktopFound this online, for a song called "6 Days" by DJ Shadow, and it's directed by Wong Kar Wai.  It looks like scenes from a movie-  anyone recognize it?  I've only seen 2046, and it's not that.

2LB
it's just a music video. jb likes it.
under the paving stones.

SHAFTR

I just watched Days of Being Wild, yet another great Wong Kar-Wai film.  I just have As Tears Go By, Ashes of Time and 2046 left.
"Talking shit about a pretty sunset
Blanketing opinions that i'll probably regret soon"

Rudie Obias

Quote from: SHAFTRI just watched Days of Being Wild, yet another great Wong Kar-Wai film.  I just have As Tears Go By, Ashes of Time and 2046 left.

ASHES OF TIME is not so great.  you may be disappointed as i was when i first saw it...
\"a pair of eyes staring at you, projected on a large screen is what cinema is truly about.\" -volker schlöndorff

Rudie Obias

2046 comes out on august 5th in the US.  for some reason i believe it may win the oscar for best foreign film award.

here's the trailer:
http://www.apple.com/trailers/sony/2046.html
\"a pair of eyes staring at you, projected on a large screen is what cinema is truly about.\" -volker schlöndorff

modage

saw Chungking Express last night.  i liked it, probably more than i should've.  the first story was okay but i really liked the second one.  i liked the guy in the first one but i HATED the girl.  but the second one had tony leung!  AND faye wong who is the asian shannon sossamon!  (or vice versa).  but anyways, it was crazy how they kept playing the same song like 1000 times and again i preffered the mamas and the papas much more than the reggae-ish one in the first story.  the writing seemed a little immature/film school-y and the blurry camera stuff was a little much.  but it still left me with a good feeling.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

pete

yeah I think filmmakers like Wong KarWai prove that the rhythm of the film can be so important that if it has a good pace/ rhythm the audience can forgive a lot of pretentiousness and indulgence and lack of logic.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

MacGuffin

Hong Kong's poet of regret
Witness to relentless change, director Wong Kar-Wai contemplates memory and missed opportunities.
By Scott Timberg, Times Staff Writer



The impassive Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai, blinking behind sunglasses that almost never come off and shrouded in his own cigarette smoke, tends to pause before speaking. He offers slow, thoughtful answers about film and filmmaking in accented English.

When asked, though, what he might do if he weren't making movies, he doesn't waste time. "I'd like to be a bartender," he said. "It would be very specific: It would have to be happy hour, or else very late at night. People go to bars to speak up — to tell you their stories." Happy-hour patrons would be full of boasting, flirting and good cheer. "And by the time it was late, they would be quite drunk," perhaps overcome by loneliness and despair. "They would tell you something quite deep — or else nonsense."

Wong's career — the last few years of which have been consumed with an odd, exquisite movie called "2046," which opens in Los Angeles on Aug. 5 — has been shaped a bit like a night at the tavern. While much of his work is of a piece, marked by a strikingly un-ironic romanticism, his early films were about fleeting moments — the restless, reckless spirit of being young. And he seems, since 2000's aching "In the Mood for Love," to be increasingly concerned with memory, regret and missed opportunities.

He's become a kind of Hong Kong Proust, combining the kinetic movement and hallucinatory night life of his home city with a ruminative style and a growing concern with our inability to capture lost time.

Wong's films are closer to Italian and French art cinema, crossed with American film noir, than the action movies associated with his hometown: His stories are told through gesture and indirection, and what's outside the frame can be more important than what's in it. Village Voice critic J. Hoberman writes that he is "the most avant-garde of pop filmmakers (or vice versa)" and that his movies work "by subtraction."

Much of Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation," especially its soulful but unconsummated relationship and the woozy, gently psychedelic cab rides through dim streets, was Wong Lite. Coppola, who thanked him as she collected the 2004 Oscar for best original screenplay, is not his only celebrity fan: Quentin Tarantino's company distributed 1994's "Chungking Express" — Wong's stylishly fleeting, Godard-inspired love story, over which Tarantino says he wept with joy on first viewing. Nicole Kidman agreed to work with Wong after likening him to the Creator.

For all his well-placed admirers, Wong also operates in a way — combining spontaneity and perfectionism — that drives his colleagues crazy. He works right up to the wire, sometimes shooting days before his movies are due at festivals, films without permits, and experiences creative "breakups" with key cast and crew. He plans so vaguely that entire characters, subplots and endings drop out of his films by the time they're screened.

While ensconced in a sleek midtown hotel room, the lanky director talks about writing scripts in coffee shops — "I hate the idea of writing," he says, "so I try to make it less official, less formal." But he's also likely dodging his colleagues while making last-minute changes. (Given his films' painterly surfaces and brooding affect, the fact that Wong jokes around, wears baggy jeans, and speaks reasonably openly about his work seems almost shocking.)

"I feel that the films we have done together are jam sessions," says Christopher Doyle, Wong's longtime cinematographer, often credited with the films' distinctive underwater look and sense of pace. "We riff off a theme and we solo from time to time, but mostly we start together and try to end together, and where we lose ourselves in the meantime is what each film celebrates."

Wong's new film, six years in the making, involved getting slightly more lost than usual.

Discoveries in Hong Kong

Wong, 47, tends to set his films in an early-'60s, colonial-era Hong Kong he can barely remember.

"So it's a preoccupation with the world of his parents and their generation," says Chicago Reader film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, "which he probably feels so romantic toward because he feels so cut off from it."

Wong moved to Hong Kong from Shanghai in 1963, at age 5. His Mandarin-speaking parents were outsiders in the British-Cantonese city, and his sailor father, who told great stories of his travels, always assumed the family would return to China.

"We didn't have friends and relatives in Hong Kong at that time, and we lived in an area full of cinemas," Wong says. "So we watched a movie every day." His mother would take him to Errol Flynn and John Wayne features, as well as locally produced Shaw brothers musicals and films of Cantonese operas. "It was like a dream in the afternoon."

He also, soon after arriving in Hong Kong, where he still lives today with his wife and child, discovered music. "In China there was only one radio station," he recalls. "So one of the first things that struck me was that when I got to Hong Kong there was radio everywhere, with different sounds: Mandarin music, Cantonese music, Western music" — this all in a city also full of itinerant Filipino musicians playing Latin styles.

This collision of sounds led to a fascination with music and an eclectic, remarkably effective use of it in his films since "Chungking Express": Several of his movies use Anglo-American songs for their titles — though with characteristic Wong elusiveness, "In the Mood for Love" is not heard in the film to which it lends its name — and he makes powerful use of sources as disparate as Argentine tango, Nat King Cole and Bellini opera.

Mostly, he says, "Music gives a sense of rhythm to a film."

Old music also helps Wong recover lost time. "We're trying to create a history for Hong Kong," he says. "Because this city has changed so fast, it's eating its own history. It's impossible to shoot any exteriors for Hong Kong in the '60s anymore because the city has totally changed." Much of "Mood" and "2046" was shot in Bangkok and elsewhere.

Wong's fascination with 1960s Hong Kong led to the journalist character played by Tony Leung in both "Mood" and "2046" — a repressed married man in the first who becomes a jaded Lothario by the second.

"Everybody says, 'There's no literature in Hong Kong, no writers,' " Wong says. "But it's not true. They were a very colorful, interesting group of artists," serious writers who ended up penning popular martial arts stories, women's melodramas, and horse-racing stories to stay fed.

"Almost all of the great Chinese directors are dealing with history," says Rosenbaum, "which becomes all the more precious because it almost doesn't exist in Chinese culture — where history is built on quicksand. And film is an art that involves time and the passage of time."

Wong's interest in time and history, though, goes beyond his obsession with a specific time and place. "All of his films could be described as period pieces," the critic says. "Even those that are set in the present."

The same, in fact, could be said of his new film, some of which takes place in the future.

Even by Wong's standards, the process of making "2046" was complicated.

The movie, the director's eighth, continues the story of Leung's character, Chow, as the aspiring novelist breaks the hearts of a series of lovely women. Though the title refers to a speculative novel that Chow sets in 2046, and the movie was originally imagined as a "futuristic opera," the finished film is more an oblique love story than sci-fi film.

Conceived about the same time as "Mood," the movie was intended to be shot at the same time because of its busy cast. "It was very difficult to work on both projects at the same time," says Wong. "Like falling in love with two women."

But the Asian financial crisis repeatedly undercut funding for both films, the "Mood" shoot took seven months instead of the few weeks allotted, and the SARS crisis slowed things further. As the 2004 Cannes film festival approached, Wong was still shooting and cutting.

He delivered "2046" a few hours before its screening, with an escort of French police. (It went on to be nominated for the festival's Golden Palm.) Then, in the following months, Wong cut it significantly before its theatrical run. It's only now, six years after its opening shoot, getting a U.S. release.

"I have never met someone who had such a strong willpower and persistence to devote himself to making the films he wants," says filmmaker Kwan Pun Leung, who helped shoot "2046" and made a documentary about Wong. "I think either he loves movies so much, or he's nuts."

Wong thinks too much has been made of what's often described as his ragged, improvisatory shooting style. (Similarly, he doesn't see his unabashed romanticism and glamour to be as unusual as the English-language press does.) It's the way independent films are made all over the world, he says, and entirely typical of movies in Hong Kong.

There, he says, films often have release dates even before they're shot, and they have to be made quickly and for small budgets. He doesn't always have the patience to get permits when he shoots, and his actors have busy schedules, which lead to both rushing and delays. Because the script is always changing, cast and crew get only small sections at a time.

"I always start working on his film without much idea about the character I play or the story line," says Tony Leung, who has worked with Wong on six films. "Because I trust Kar-Wai, we never start out with a full script." Leung notes that "I know little of Wong Kar-Wai the person" but working on his films is like going home.

When one of the actors in 1997's "Happy Together" — a doomy, Manuel Puig-inspired gay love story shot in Buenos Aires — had to return to Hong Kong for military service, Wong's crew came to the base pretending to be family and taped a voice-over. As last-minute script changes led to actors' being cut from the film after flying halfway across the world, the cast was jokingly dubbed the "casualty list." The film, for all its angst, won Wong best director at Cannes.

"More or less, most of the independent filmmakers in the world work like this," Wong contends. "If you look at the story of Cassavetes, it's the same thing: It's always been like this.

"Unless you're working in Hollywood, in the industry. But if you want to be independent, you have to be flexible."

Luis Buñuel, he points out, shot two actresses as the same character in the legendary "That Obscure Object of Desire" only because one was not originally available: The gesture has since been taken as an inspired Freudian or surrealist leap.

"And why does Godard come up with jump cut?" Wong asks of the New Wave signature. "He made the films too long, so he had to take out some of the shots randomly. So you have to be flexible. And sometimes those restrictions become the source of your inspiration."

Doyle, who has had several legendary fallouts with Wong, isn't so sure the process is quite so typical: "Thank God there is no one else in this world who works this way."

A reunion of sorts

In some ways, "2046" marks the end of a chapter for Wong. The movie draws from characters and situations from "Mood" and 1991's "Days of Being Wild," though it frustrates a strictly literal connection. (Wong says his fragmented and dreamlike narrative style, which sometimes uses several point-of-view characters, comes from Latin American novelists like Puig and Gabriel García Márquez.)

Wong compares the film to a reunion party at which you see old friends, who will mostly disappear at the night's conclusion. While it's not necessary to know the earlier movies, Doyle describes "2046" as an attempt to "complete some of the sentences we have started in other films."

It's hard for a director so critically acclaimed, and whose films are so beautiful — thanks in part to production designer/editor William Chang, who could have worked for Sirk or Fassbinder — to fend off Hollywood forever. Wong says he's already turned down lucrative offers from major studios.

"If people give you $80 million to make a film, you'd better be careful," he says. "I always give this advice to young filmmakers: You will have some success and you will be given a lot of money. If you make a film for $80 million, you have to cater to a huge audience. Will you be able to do that?"

To make a film that large, he says, you enter a different system. "All through the years we've developed our own habits; we're like a creature of habit. So it's not 'Can we cope with them,' it's 'Can they cope with us?' "

Still, Wong is not opposed to working with stars. His next project is "The Lady From Shanghai," in which he'll direct Kidman and write the script with English-speaking collaborators. (Despite his elastic relationship to the written word, Wong's first movie job was as a scriptwriter.) All he'll say about the film is that it will not resemble the Orson Welles-Rita Hayworth movie of the same name that is famed for its shattered-mirror conclusion: Wong chose the title for its evocative power.

"Lady" may be one of three English-language films he'll develop independently (though not necessarily direct or produce) for release by Fox Searchlight. The films will be co-financed and co-distributed by the indie and by Wong's company, Block 2, and probably made in Asia.

Claudia Lewis, Fox Searchlight's executive vice president for production, says the company was drawn to Wong's individual take on style, mood and storytelling. The director's spontaneous way of working, Lewis says, "didn't scare us away. We respect and respond to people's creative processes." The company's deal with him, she says, is unusually loose.

As to his other ambitions, with Fox or elsewhere, Wong won't say, though he's spoken of a film in which Leung portrays Bruce Lee's kung fu teacher.

When Wong looks at the state of U.S. cinema, he sees more films but fewer choices. He enjoys a wide range of movies, including "Batman Begins" and the "Star Wars" sequels, but says American film has been narrowing for two decades. "That's why when I look at 'Jackie Brown' I really, really like that film — more than 'Kill Bill' or 'Pulp Fiction.' Because there's a certain tenderness about those characters which we haven't seen in American cinema for a long time. Today everybody has to be so smart and so clever." He misses the work of his favorite mid-century directors — Otto Preminger, John Huston, Alfred Hitchcock — whose characters were "forthright" instead of smarmy.

He doesn't despair entirely, though. The development of China, where serious cinemas are now being built outside the big cities, will be good for all filmmakers, especially Asians.

As for the making of poetic, philosophical movies like his: "I think it will happen — always," he says. "Because don't forget, the first reason people are attracted to this business is their passion for expressing themselves through images. Some of them will make it and some of them won't. But we know those people are always there."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

pete

that was some of the most bullshit snobby interpretations of wong karwai I've read.
"Tragedy is a close-up; comedy, a long shot."
- Buster Keaton

MacGuffin

Wong Kar-Wai to head Cannes film festival jury

Director Wong Kar-Wai will head the jury for this year's Cannes Film Festival, making him the first Chinese chairman of the panel in the event's history, organisers said on Wednesday.

The Shanghai-born director of "In the Mood for Love" and "2046" won the Cannes festival's Best Director prize for "Happy Together" in 1997.

Wong made clear he saw the job as a challenge.

"Each city has its own language," he said in a statement. "In Cannes, it is the language of dreams. Yet it is difficult to judge a dream, much less compare it to another one."

Wong, who will preside over the 59th Cannes Film Festival from May 17-28, follows in the footsteps of directors such as Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese and David Cronenberg.

The president of the 2005 jury, Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica, cast a shadow over the annual cinema extravaganza in the French Riviera resort city last year, saying the quality of movies at the festival had fallen short of expectations.

"There is an old Chinese saying: One can never expect the wind, but should always keep one's window open," said Wong.

"Along with my fellow jurors, I look forward to sharing the dreams created by some of the most gifted talents in contemporary cinema. And our goal will be to keep our windows open as wide as possible."
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks