Word: wais
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...action. Two of Asia's best cinematographers?Peter Pau and Christopher Doyle?split time behind the camera, and each creates distinct visuals. Pau shoots the baroque hotels and classic Bund streets of Shanghai with a warm and romantic eye, all burnished greens, blues and browns. Doyle, Wong Kar-wai's longtime collaborator, gives Sun and Lin's flashbacks a gray, wintry look, as if we're peering through a window on which memory has accumulated like ice. The melodies in the musical may range from fair to forgettable and neither Zhou nor Kaneshiro have Broadway-class voices?though Cheung compensates...
Want to see a great kiss? There's one in 2046, between Tony Leung Chiu-wai and Gong Li. He stands her against a wall and presses mouth to mouth. He moves back, and we see her lipstick violently smeared. A tear courses down her right cheek, another down her left. It's an avalanche of a kiss; it has crushed not just her lips but also her heart...
Director Wong Kar-wai is an art-house fave for his slo-mo studies of Hong Kong's lost souls. But the secret reason for the success of his avant-noir films is simple: he's the world's most romantic filmmaker. His iridescent images detail love's anguish and rapture. Great-looking women throw themselves at cool guys, and the men often step aside. Love, the playwright Terry Johnson wrote, is something you fall in. Wong's films make art out of that vertiginous feeling. They soar as their characters plummet...
Thank God for Tony Leung Chiu-wai. The best actor working in Asian cinema today can redeem any scene and endow even the most artificial plot with a few degrees of soul. Like Chow Yun-fat before he disappeared into Hollywood, Leung seems able to rise above his material and effortlessly make off with any film. It's no surprise that he plays such an accomplished thief in his latest project, the diverting Seoul Raiders...
...equivalent of a red packet of lai see money. But it's Leung's laid-back attitude that makes this trifle go down easier, as he walks around Seoul with a Cheshire cat's grin. After four years of surviving endless takes by meticulous Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai, who worked with him in the recent 2046, Leung deserves a New Year vacation away from his home city-and from self-serious filmmaking...