We've
tended to like most of Wong Kar-Wai's movies, which are generally lush
and exciting and erotic and Tony Leung-y, but early in our appreciation
of the now 52-year old Hong Kong filmmaker, we found ourselves so
furiously bitter over the hours we lost forever to Happy Together -- we know; see ya in the comments -- that we've always taken the extensive praise heaped upon the guy with a pinch of salt.
Well... guess after the widely perceived failures of 2046 and My Blueberry Nights (trailered above), WKW's stock is falling a little. As in: so much so that we've just run across the first full-on takedown of the guy, in Slate Magazine.
After Wong won the best-director prize at Cannes for 1997's Happy Together, he took off in a radical new direction. In the Mood for Love (2000) was an oblique tale of a love affair between Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, and it was to movies what Sting's The Dream of the Blue Turtles. was to rock: a clear marker that we were now in the land of the middle-aged and the married.
OUCH.
It's mean, right, but also -- let's face it -- kind of true, and more
distressingly, points to yet another, even more unsavory possibility:
that years from now, you will be wildly embarrassed by all those
seductions you perpetrated/submitted to using that movie, and possibly
the entire rest of Wong's ouevre. (Well, maybe just submitted to,
anyways.)
Kind of a bummer, huh? There there, let's have a look at The Hire: The Follow,
which you may remember from circa the last Interweb bubble? It
features a yummy and mopey Clive Owen and Adriana Lima, and -- at nine
minutes long -- may be the tightest thing that Wong's ever done. See ya
after the jump.
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