Fallen Angels

Rating:
Summary: The most experimental movie I've ever seen
Review: This is one of Wong Kar-Wai's finest films. It is the ultimate exercise in style. At the same time, the film breaks with every cinematic convention. Wong manages to get terrific performances out all of his actors (even Leon Lai) If you want an exciting but challenging film. This is it.

Rating:
Summary: Incomprehensibly comprehensible
Review: This movie moves along without notice of the audience. It appears frantic and desperate in its storytelling. We are expected to jump right in and take a ride with the various characters. The two main characters work with each other as assassins and they are only seen together once through the whole movie. However, there is a kind of love story in their relationship, because the two of them seem so perfect for each other. Yet, fate keeps them permanently apart. The story diverts immediately and we start to learn about an ex-con, who is mute and very funny and for a while takes your mind of the almost monotonous tragedy of the other two characters. An unrequited love story begins between our male assassin and a woman he knew long ago and forgot about and meets again by chance in a McDonald's restaurant. Just like the mute this woman offers humor in an otherwise bleak story.

I loved the music which helped move the story along. If you closed your eyes and listened to the music(because you couldn't understand the language without the subtitiles) you could tell what part the movie was playing. A delightful movie, that left me hoping one of our characters would find love even though they seemed so hopeless.

Rating:
Summary: The Best Movie I've Ever Seen
Review: Very deep, sorious story from Hong-Kong. People who watched it - they love it. But - yes - it is very hard for understanding what't going on there. But take your time - watch 5 times more - and you'll love it. It's not a joke - it took me 6 times to understand it.

Rating:
Summary: One of the most sexy films I've ever seen from Asia.
Review: Was Wong kar wai inspired by Freud's theory of infant's oral stage? It seems like there are a lot of oral activities going on through out the whole film- smoking, drinking, eating,etc. Good selection of music for soundtrack. If I would have to categorize this film, I would say it is an experimental romantic comedy with a splash of Hong Kong style action. I also recomend you to see Chunking Express, if you haven't. The story lines from both films are related,if not, the dialogues are.

Rating:
Summary: not crazy about it
Review: Wasn't feeling the chemistry between them.

Rating:
Summary: Awsome
Review: Watch this movie. It is one of the best, most original films ever to come out of Hong Kong. Wong Kar-Wai at his best.

Rating:
Summary: A beautiful, hilarious and stylish drama!
Review: With beautiful cinematography by Australian Chris Doyle, this is Kar-Wai Wong's best ever. Michelle Reis shines with the excitement of a Chinese Mira Sorvino while Duchovny-like Lai plays the hit-man better than most Western actors. Karen Mok is incredible as the howling, crazed, jilted lover. The other story with the mute son (played by Takeshi Kaneshiro) and his father is touching and so is his attraction to the Alanis-like pop tart Charlie Yeung who can't see how much he cares for her. The very-rare version of Massive Attack's #2 Karma Coma is one of the most moving theme songs I've heard in a long time. Excellent and more stylishly done than a lot good number of Western films. A keeper!

Rating:
Summary: Outlaws of Desire
Review: Wong Kar Wai's tag team of blue valentines feels like the grooviest pop hyperballads. Catchy-as-flu and sample-mad. With hooks tasty enough to have for lunch. And hopelessly devoted to the healing power of love. Or, at least, of love songs. 1994's "Chungking Express" was all bittersweet pining and translucent melancholy, "Fallen Angels" is darker, more hallucinatory . Not so much a "Chungking" rehab than an annex, "Fallen Angels" continues to patrol the invisible republic of bad-hair-day lovefools ( a mute, a disillusioned hit man, his lovestruck agent, a punkette ) frantically pursuing romance even as their accelerated cityscape, itself nurturing its own millenial anxieties, threatens to frustrate them. Wong wants to look for answers in the debris of taken-for-granted human interaction--- emotional happenstance, the random collision of strangers, the overlapping of seperate lives. "Fallen Angels", more so than "Chungking" perhaps, is about the friction that happens when worlds collide. Indeed, "Fallen Angels" is the same movie as "Chungking" except it dropped some acid then took the MTR to the seedy side of town. Its vibe is trippier. Its pulse more manic. The film, too , is busier. Wong cranks up his trademark kaleidoscopic density , his Uzi-rapid abstract-expressionism and his gamut-running moodswings. And while all this might seem too dense, it does seem to contemplate the polyglot headiness of its milieu , not to mention giving a dizzying sense of the quiet turmoil of his characters' lives. And the density, finally, is offset by the movie's wistful tone. Sometimes , though, the poetry that shone off the surfaces of "Chungking" slips between the cracks. "Fallen Angels" , like all of Wong's movies, meditates on dilapidated lovelives and big city heartbreak, on the currencies of loss and the persistence of memory. But it is ultimately attached to the most old-fashioned connotations of romance. And its inevitability in the characters' lives, despite all the baggage. To paraphrase Leon Lai's killer-for-hire: every regret is just a stopover in the journey of life. And everybody needs a partner. In Wong Kar Wai's universe, everything is connected. And the tiniest space or a fragment of a second that seperates two people can make a world of difference. These spaces are what he makes hip, seductive and utterly chemical movies, like "Fallen Angels", out of.

Rating:
Summary: Visually bold and angst ridden.
Review: Wong Kar-Wai and Christopher Doyle create a magic film that has simultaneous breadth and depth. Their visual style recalls the French New Wave at its best and puts an idellible stamp of modernism on themes of isolation and interdependence. A keeper.

Rating:
Summary: A Master's Best
Review: Wong Kar-Wai has become my favorite director. He's as talented as Kurasawa, Fellini, Wells, Antonioni, Bergman or Altman. My favorite of his films, maybe because it is the last one I (re)viewed is "Fallen Angels". Wong Kar-Wai has a way of expressing longing that is neither cloying nor sentimental. His films are touching in a deeply profound manner. "Fallen Angels" is the double story of a hitman and his partner and a mute man with a unique business sense. Hilarious and over the top violent at the same time, Wong Kar-Wai pulls this off without a single misstep.
Visually stunning, this film looks like no other, save perhaps "Chungking Express" (which I plan to re-watch this afternoon). It's "Chungking Express" at night. Planned originally as a third episode of "Chungking Express" this film stands alone as a masterpiece of Kar-Wai's art. There are minor illusions to "Chungking Express" which allow the viewer to feel a continuity of spirit and theme. For instance, the mute midnight shop clerk played by Takeshi Kaneshiro mentions in voice-over that he lost his ability to speak after eating a tin of expired pineapple. This will resonate with viewers who have seen "Chungking Express" and bring to mind the character he played in that film. These are blood brothers. Variations of the same love-sick, lonely man.
Kar-Wai's films remind me of Altman in the 70's. You watch his films and wonder why all other directors are so unimaginative and pedestrian. Why does he seem to be the only director doing anything new and unique while even the most celebrated directors just recycle the same old [stuff] you've seen a hundred times before? He's an original. The look, the emotional feel and the grammar of his films belongs to no one else.
Any synopsis of his storyline can only diminish their scope and complexity, so I won't even try. It is enough to know his film resonate for days after viewing. They stick in your mind like something experienced first hand. They are fizzy, giddy, forlorn and hopeful. The final scene of "Fallen Angels" brings tears to my eyes everytime I see it, even though I know what is coming. It is a testament to the complexity and honesty of his vision that an emotional response is assured in the viewer. His characters are so honestly portrayed you wish you knew them in life. You want to call them on the phone and meet for a drink in a smokey, neon lit bar found only in a Wong Kar-Wai film. You end up feeling very protective of these characters, as you would with people you know and cannot quite reach. Cannot quite assure they are alright and worth loving. Cannot assure they deserve happiness.