Word: kar
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Take the opening attraction, Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights. Much heralded as the Hong Kong master's first English-language feature, and starring pop diva Norah Jones in her acting debut, this fable of a lovelorn woman's jaunt across the U.S.-from New York to Memphis to Las Vegas and back again-lurches in and out of plausibility without ever quite weaving the slo-mo magic Wong brings to his homegrown fare. But then, just as the viewer's patience is being tried by the relentless despair Jones' character appears to live in, Natalie Portman shows...
...there's nothing wrong with the camera falling in love with its subject. Star quality is an essential factor in movie mystique. Directors are also free to show a lovely face in slow motion, as you do endlessly with Nevins'. The Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai has built a brilliant career on that technique. You selected Wong's longtime cinematographer, Christopher Doyle, in part because he would know how to work a similarly glorious magic...
...Wong Kar Wai also loves Cannes. The Hong Kong writer-director has been here a half-dozen times, including last year's stint as president of the Festival Jury that awards the Palme d'Or on closing night (a week from Sunday). And the Festival likes Wong enough to have chosen his new film, My Blueberry Nights, as the opening night film at a black-tie ceremony later this evening. He'll be there with his star, Norah Jones, the pop singer making her acting debut in his first American movie - a very mixed bag, with some fine scenes...
...Wong Kar Wai, a film is not one big thing - not the Hollywood notion of movies as snowballing sagas of a world in jeopardy and the heroes who save it - but many little things, an accretion of textured images and vagrant impulses. He's a master miniaturist, a creator of wistful anecdotes featuring, over and over, the same sort of people: fatalistic men and moody women who, for a poignant, painful, precious few moments, connect. He cocoons these beautiful losers in his distinct visual-emotional style. The mix of cigarette smoke and step-printed slow motion, furtive glances and liquored...
...Jones, a very appealing performer in concerts and interviews, is herself half-Asian (her father is the celebrated Indian sitarist Ravi Shankar), and thus fits snugly into the Wong Kar Wai iconography. We see her, chin on hand, staring sadly into the middle distance; and Wong shows this not-very-much-happening in his patented dreamy slo-mo. Jones also has a similar background to many performers from Wong's Hong Kong films: Leung, Leslie Cheung, Faye Wong, Andy Lau, Leon Lai and dozens of others were Canto-pop stars before they were accomplished actors...