Cinema Suckers
Now that M.’s released from obligations to Project Greenlight, we can devote our leisure time to pure entertainment, except whenever I watch a movie now, I’m thinking about how many takes to get the different shots and what the director and cinematographer were thinking in setting up and executing the shots the way they did, and even noticing editing, something that was always too mysterious to even bother about, and all of that can be a bit intrusive, especially when I’m trying to follow the subtitles in a movie like 2046, which is a shame, in one sense, because the film is beautiful and a little difficult. The story’s simple enough, really, I suppose – a man who’s treated women rather shabbily and now feels trapped by his choices, trying to find a way to express and perhaps change what might have been in a way that would allow him to regain progress and purpose – but it’s complex in its delivery, a real movie-goer’s movie. This isn’t Star Wars, but a movie that leaves you thinking about its content and structure as a movie as much as just the usual narrative. There’s a Chinese scholar in the family whose impressions I’d like to hear, because I did leave the theatre wondering if the subtitles hadn’t left out important nuances, a sense I don’t always end up with from non-English experiences. Unlike Hero or Crouching Tiger (and I may yet get around to seeing House of Flying Daggers), there are such subtleties in the visuals, the colors more muted, the shots framed just off from expectations, such implications in the story that I have to wonder if language fails in translation. I’ll need to go back to the DVD’s now, to see other Wong Kar Wai movies, particularly In the Mood for Love, which has been frequently cited in reference to 2046, referring to the latter as a kind of sequel to the former.