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Give Me Arty
by PRAVAT J. GURUNG
| FROM ISSUE # 168 (December 2009) | IN THIS ISSUE | |||
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Commercial movies may have taken over but there still is space for those arty movies that a certain niche craves for. If you're sick and tired of watching crazy commercial films, WAVE this month has three arty recommendations for you. Not only are these movies worth your time but if you're interested in film making, you can actually learn a lot from them. Deceptively simple these movies may be, yet they're powerful in every sense from camera work to script to cinematography.
In the mood for love 
Director: Wong Kar Wai
Language: Cantonese (with English subtitles)
Run Time: 98 minutes
Rating: 4/5
The movie's slow, no doubt about that, and you might even fall asleep but Wong Kar Wai's work in this movie is highly appreciated by both critics and viewers. In the mood for love is a complicated love story between a married woman and a man. The settings, lighting and the props are aptly used and the camera movements are very simple yet intriguing.
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Director: Yôjirô Takita
Language: Japanese (with English subtitles)
Run Time: 130 minutes
Rating: 4.5/5
Whoever's gone through a phase in their life when they've lost a loved one can instantly connect to this movie. A Japanese movie, Departures, won the Oscar for best foreign language film last year and there's a reason for it. The movie's plot follows the encoffination ritual and how corpses come to life. Sounds interesting? Buy the DVD right away and watch it.
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Director: Wong Kar Wai
Language: English
Run Time: 95 minutes
Rating: 4.5/5
Wong Kar Wai's first all English-language movie, My blueberry nights stars Norah Jones for the first time and Jude Law. Like all Wai's work, this is a film that's romantic, sad and gorgeous to look at from beginning till the end, even if the director was criticized by some who felt it was too commercial. The movie score Ry Cooder adds to the power and emotion of the movie. All in all, a movie worth watching.
My blueberry nights is the most horrificly bad film that Wong has ever made. Compared to the beauty and subtlety of his older films like Chungking Express and In the Mood for Love, My blueberry nights is just plain drivel. Norah Jones is a horrible actress. The only thing worth watching about this movie is Wong's stylised shooting style. But if you want that, it'd make a lot more sense to just watch something older, something else.
i SUPER AGREE with pranaya. MBBN is just plain awful. Chungking express is the best wongkar wai movie. period.
ashes of time? not really into wuxia. but its a good movie. a lot better than my blueberry nights, i'd say.