Word: wong
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...fashioned film moguls, having built indie studio Miramax from the ground up, Weinstein and his quieter brother Bob are known in the biz for their flash and their foresight. They make bold choices - such as producing Quentin Tarantino's edgy Pulp Fiction in 1994 and bringing Hong Kong visionary Wong Kar-Wai to American screens in 1996 - that are considered brilliant and inspire packs of copycats...
...past winners. Finally, it doesn't help much to imagine which of the competing films the jury president would like best. In 2002, when David Lynch was president, the winning film was Roman Polanski's very traditional The Pianist. Last year, ultra-hip auteur Wong Kar Wai gave the Palme d'Or to Ken Loach's political epic The Wind That Shakes the Barley. Go figure...
...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...
...There are two differences, though. The first is that the people in the Wong-Doyle films (Chungking Express, 2046 and the others) are professional actors, wonderful ones, who find interior life in their characters; Nevins, who's not an actor, doesn't have that skill, for all his photogenicity. The second difference is that those films weave a romantic spell about their dreamy characters, one that puts the audience in the mood for love. Your Alex is just a mopey, angst-ridden kid, cocooned in the misery of the immature, connecting with no one. Granted, he has plenty to fret...