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[bryant]

Speaking of Wong Kar Wai, turns out the Brattle is running a Wong Kar Wai retrospective in April. They're showing everything but 2046. Note that Ashes of Time, the only Wong Kar Wai movie unavailable on DVD in the US (OK, yes, but Sony seems to have the rights to 2046 and it'll be out by the end of this year, I bet) is playing on Sunday, April 10th.

Comments

[mgrasso.livejournal.com]

I might be down for a few of those movies... which would you suggest for a relative Wong Kar Wai newbie?

[bryant]

Come to Days of Being Wild next Saturday. (Imagine me, here, using my hypnotic eyes upon you.)

[kabael.livejournal.com]

I was planning on hitting a bunch of those movies myself as well. I stumbled across the Brattle schedule yesterday and was rather pleased to see those on the docket.

And I've got a copy of Ashes of Time and 2046 if you want to see those again sometime. I also grabbed the Kino Video releases of several of his movies, but I didn't know that they were all out in the US. I'll have to track the other ones down.

[bryant]

Yeah -- Kino did a nifty boxed set with Fallen Angels, Days of Being Wild, As Tears Go By, Chungking Express, and Happy Together. Then Criterion has a lovely In The Mood For Love.

I would love to borrow either or both of Ashes and 2046.

[kabael.livejournal.com]

I bought Fallen Angels and Happy Together from them when I nabbed the Dead or Alive box set - and found out about the special Wong Kar Wai boxed set when my shipment came with their catalogue :( Ah well.

As for the other flicks, they're on the compy, so I'll have to burn 'em for you or you can visit sometime. Either's cool with me.

[foreign-devilry.livejournal.com]

Ashes of Time is fabulous. Chungking Express was actually completed while the post-production on Ashes was going on, because it took so damn long. Here's a couple paragraphs on the film (no spoilers!) from my "arthouse wuxia" article that'll be coming out in PUSH vol. 1:

The development of a new form of “arthouse wuxia,” the form in which the genre would explode across Western consciousness, started in the mid-90’s with Wong Karwai’s The Ashes of Time (Dong Xie Xi Du, 1994). Unlike the Fifth Generation directors, Wong Karwai came from a background in design and still photography, not movie-making. Striking out on his own, he created films that depicted moods instead of delivering straightforward narrative. His first two films, As Tears Go By (Wang Jie Ka Men, 1988) and Days of Being Wild (A Fei Zheng Zhuan, 1991), developed the style of cinematic montage that would come to full fruition in The Ashes of Time and its companion film, Chungking Express (Chong Qing Sen Ling, 1994), created during Ashes’ long post-production.

Though it is based on the novel Eagle-Shooting Heroes (She Diao Ying Xiong, c.1959) by Jin Yong, an icon of highbrow wuxia literature, Wong Karwai spends most of the film questioning the major tropes of the genre, especially the xia swordsman as the epitome of masculine virtue. The film supports a rather impressive cast, including Brigitte Lin, Leslie Cheung, Maggie Cheung, and Tony Leung, who together create a look at the less-than-glamorous problems of burnt-out heroes. Ashes, is a wuxia movie in which the martial element (wu) is subdued and the heroes (xia) are impressively unheroic, leaving a fascinating emotional slowburn, unquestionably grounded in the genre but exhibiting few of its defining characteristics.