Word: wong
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...Apparently the great directors don?t care to abandon their favorite themes and stories. Like Herzog, Wong keeps making the same movie; his subject is love, how it hurts, and how beautiful a sight that pain can be. Like Bergman, he has made a sequel to a favorite earlier film. In the 2000 romance In the Mood for Love, Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung Chiu-wai circled each other in slo-mo for an hour and a half, and their almost-touching sparked more erotic heat than a dozen Jenna Jameson epics. In the new film Leung plays a harsher...
...round out the 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...
...RUSSEL WONG FOR TIME...
DIED. ESTHER WONG, 88, no-nonsense proprietor of Madame Wong's, a renowned L.A. music venue in the late '70s that showcased rock, punk and New Wave bands, including Oingo Boingo and the Knack; in Santa Monica, Calif. She auditioned groups by listening to demo tapes in her car; she threw the tapes of acts she didn't favor out the window. A stern disciplinarian, Wong once halted a live set by the Ramones until band members cleaned up graffiti they had scrawled on a bathroom wall...
Movie romance is a snapshot of beautiful women turning grief into glamour, passion into pictures. The camera here (mainly manned by cinematographer Christopher Doyle) monitors their hearts like a fond lover, capturing Gong's fire-and-ice hauteur, Faye Wong's elfin radiance, Zhang's panoply of pouts, flirtations and surrendering smiles. Even if a Chinese movie doesn't sound like your idea of summer fun, give 2046 a chance. Its pearly artistry and gorgeous faces should put you quickly, deeply, in the mood for love. --By Richard Corliss