My Blueberry Nights.

"A big deal no one is making: the first Western-language films by the two most inimitable, imitated Asian filmmakers of our time are opening in New York on the same day." So, on the same page, the L Magazine's Mark Asch reviews both Hou Hsiao-hsien's Flight of the Red Balloon and Wong Kar-wai's My Blueberry Nights, "a film as American as apple pie, and as out-of-time iconographic as that phrase implies."

"If I was a snarkier writer, I'd say that this is a love story to New York from someone who's still afraid of Manhattan subways," blogs David Lowery. "Which is true, as evidenced by some of the dialogue in the film, but Wong's foreign perspective on Americana isn't necessarily a problem; nor is it the English delivery that makes his dialogue so bad, or Norah Jones's lack of acting experience that makes her lovelorn monologues so cloying. It's just that it's all so damn trite, a problem exacerbated by a serious case of self-importance."

Updated through 4/5.

"Wong Kar-Wai's script may exist in strange parallel universe contained wholly in the all-night diners and dives of a fantasy America, but it's forgivable," writes Josh Tyler at Cinema Blend. "His film is so beautiful and the performances he gets from his actors are so brimming with quiet power and life that it doesn't matter if we're in the real world or on the set of a badly paced soap opera. It works."

Update, 4/1: "A refresher, deep-breath after the fractured convolution in production and final result of his last film, 2046, My Blueberry Nights has more than a passing resemblance to the early career break Wong took during the epic task of making Ashes of Time - a little ditty called Chungking Express that made the director's name in the West," writes Daniel Kasman. My Blueberry Nights can be seen as a somewhat pathetic if nonetheless gorgeously inlaid figment of a larger idea Wong has gathered, defined, and elaborated through his other work."

Nicolas Rapold profiles Jones for the New York Sun. And John Jurgensen talks with her for the Wall Street Journal.

Nate Chinen reviews the soundtrack for the New York Times.

At Cinematical, Peter Martin comments on those $95 T-Shirts.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Update: "[W]hile Wong's application of his style to an American landscape underscores just how many commercial and video directors have been biting his style over the past 15 or so years - e.g., you've seen a lot of this stuff before - now and again he hits on something new and startling," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "One hopes that, having possibly purged his romanticized preconceptions about the US, Wong comes back sometime, gets comfortable with his setting, and forges a unique vision."

Updates, 4/2: "The disappointment here doesn't have much to do with Wong doing America - he's been doing America for years, even in Chinese - but with Wong doing Wong, and not up to his own standard," writes Michelle Orange in the Voice. "Toward the end of Happy Together, Wong's other road movie, Tony Leung's character says, 'Turns out that lonely people are all the same.' Not quite."

"Wong and [cinematographer Darius] Khondji's attempt at a signature image for the film - a close-up of vanilla ice cream melting into hot blueberry pie - must have sounded good on paper, but on the screen it's kind of revolting," writes Alonso Duralde for MSNBC. "Which perhaps makes it a perfect metaphor for My Blueberry Nights itself."

"Was this the strangest all-time mismatched-celebrity elevator ride?" Andrew O'Hehir realizes, "Not all competing universes are meant to be harmonized."

Benjamin Crossley-Marra profiles Wong for indieWIRE.

Update, 4/3: And here's Andrew O'Hehir's full interview for Salon - video, audio and text.

Aaron Hillis talks with Wong for the IFC.

"My Blueberry Nights feels like an abundantly attractive travelogue, the work of an artist who's passing through rather than taking up residence," writes Bryant Frazer. "Unfortunately, while Wong's synthesis of western cinema traditions with a notably eastern sensibility established him as one of the most boldly contemporary of filmmakers, his take on the US feels blandly traditional, from his reliance on too-familiar character stereotypes to his attachment to throwback pop/jazz artist Norah Jones as his latest muse."

For the New York Press's Armond White, My Blueberry Nights is "a ravishing, triple triumph.... What possessed the Cannes Film Festival correspondents whose reports last year ridiculed My Blueberry Nights! (It's a thousand times superior to Cannes prizewinner 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days.)"

Online listening tip. Wong and Jones are guests on the Leonard Lopate Show.

Updates, 4/5: Grady Hendrix looks back over Wong's oeuvre and finds a slow slide into stagnation. In Slate: "He still has the potential to be the world's most transcendent director, but wake me up when he stops repeating his past movies and attempts something - anything - new."

"[T]o complain about the evident artificiality of Mr Wong's variation on the Great American Road Movie, which has shed around 20 minutes since opening the Cannes Film Festival in May, is to risk missing the point," writes AO Scott in the New York Times. "Not only because in post-Hollywood America, as every self-respecting French philosopher knows, the simulacrum has eclipsed the thing itself. But also because Mr Wong, whose previous films have occasionally strayed as far from his beloved Hong Kong as Cambodia and South America, has never been especially concerned with verisimilitude.... For this director a sense of place is useful only insofar as it conjures a state of feeling, and geographical coordinates are, above all, indices of atmosphere and mood."

"Thirty years from now, My Blueberry Nights may be considered a good film. It may even be considered a great film. Let me explain." Bob Cashill at Popdose.

"It's not so much that Kar Wai doesn't know how to commence this specific tale but, instead, that he doesn't know how to start anew, as his latest proves a minor stateside revisitation (or, perhaps more accurately, a rehash) of his favorite thematic and aesthetic preoccupations," writes Nick Schager at Cinematical.

"The director continues to languish in sexual intrigue and lavishly composed images," writes Meghan Keane in the New York Sun. "But these successes only heighten the absence of what has been lost in translation."

Wong is "still one of the most innovative, fascinating and consistently talented directors in contemporary film," insists Leonard Pierce at ScreenGrab. "Here's five movies that prove it."

Ben Gold talks with Wong for the Reeler.

Posted by dwhudson at March 31, 2008 9:59 AM