Lovesusti The Worst Film Ever

Jeanskynebu the audience applauded

AshUnow This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Kimball Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

Jithin K Mohan "In the Mood for Love" showcased a hopeless love story, that which is lost even before its inception. "2046" portrays the hopeless attempts to overcome the repression of emotions by the repression of identity. Chow's idealized love for Su, which he lost, lead him into a state in which he can't stay true to his emotions. So he moves on without looking back only to look back at those who reminds him of his lost love, which ultimately leads to the realization that he needs to let go of the past. Chow's thoughts are further explored in the sci-fi world of his novel "2046". As each of the characters in his life is portrayed as a character in the novel, his real emotions towards them are exposed, as the writing progresses, even to him.Yearning for love is a basic human emotion that has always been a consistent theme in Wong films. Even when doing action/biography films like "The Grandmaster", the film ends up more or less about love. "2046" portrays the chaos of lost souls who are looking for love from all the wrong places and their suffering when they can't let go of the love they found or get hold of. Like every Wong film, "2046" is also at its best when the visual and musical motifs lead the viewers to feel what the characters are going through.Read full review at www.asianfilmvault.com/2017/07/2046-2004-by- wong-kar-wai.html

eo (muligens) Up until this point I was a massive Wong Kar-Wai fan.My first exposure to WKW was Fallen Angels, which blew me away. Chungking Express is a bit disjointed but great at its best and very interesting at its worst. Happy Together was almost painful to watch at times, but it certainly left an impression. In the Mood for Love is one of my all time movies; hauntingly beautiful.So to say I was looking forward to 2046 would be an understatement. But somehow it leaves me cold. It has the beautiful cinematography that's the hallmark of a Wong / Doyle collaboration but it doesn't do anything with it. The plot, such as it is, is disjointed and goes nowhere.To be fair, this movie is more about the development of Chow mo-wan as a character rather then the events that form him and therein lie much of my complaint with the film. I just don't like the way he is developing.Perhaps I'm hampered by being too much of a fan of In the Mood for Love. I adore his (and Maggie Cheung's) character there and was happy to leave them in the state they were in at the end of that film. A sequel feels entirely unnecessary and especially a sequel that takes them to places I don't appreciate. Like seeing a sequel to E.T. where he returns to invade the earth and ravage the population. It somehow seems to cheapen the original experience. It's almost enough to make me wish I'd never watched this movie at all.But that would be going too far. Because despite its flaws, the movie isn't a total loss. There is beauty here as well, and interesting characters. The highlight for me would be the futuristic scenes, supposedly set on a train in the year 2046, where a man struggles with his feelings towards a machine. Now there's a Wong Kar-Wai film I'd like to see! 6 stars out of 10.

chaos-rampant Watching 2046 I now understand why I couldn't like In the Mood for Love. At first I thought it had something to do with WKW growing up, merely spectating in painterly detail what he used to rigorously throw himself at. I realize now I didn't like it because it's only the first part of Vertigo, where Judy is not yet Madeleine, a film in desperate search for its doppelganger by and to which it will become the mirror. It's the process by which a soul is clogged and haunted, 2046 on the other hand is the transcedental meditation, thoughts past and present coming and vanishing again until there is peace and the mind is empty. By the end of 2046 Tony Leung is no longer in the mood for love, he's ready for it and it'll never be too early or too late again.A friend whose taste I trust told me she didn't like 2046 because it was too vulgar, and there's a time when 2046 maybe is vulgar. There's a time in the film when Tony Leung is a prick. I thought we were seeing a Mr. Chow in name only, a sequel in the loose sense of the term. Mr. Chow is still the same though, merely thwarting through horrible behavior a situation that wound him in the past. I like how WKW sets him up for another unrequited love, with the same girl another love had remained unrequited in Chungking Express, but this is his chance to learn and eventually "that was the best summer he ever had". The sci-fi angle, where trains leave every hour for 2046 (the place of lost memories, from where no one comes back), is another mirror by which Mr. Chow can find himself, by which he can begin to acquiesce to the idea that sometimes you're not loved back because the other still loves someone else. At times, it seems even WKW is looking himself at that mirror to see or describe to himself what kind of movie he's making.The journey is very clear here, it could have been a very ordinary premise, the masterful touch being that we get inside the mind of the protagonist to experience the change like you can't experience a train moving until you get in one and look out the window. You can sit at the station and look at them go out every hour or you can sit at one and look at them arrive every hour but it's the existential middle of the process that makes the journey. In the end Mr. Chow remembers differently, he's not leaning on the shoulder of his old flame in that almost-b/w flashback shot, like a quintessential WKW character at film's end he's alone, but he's ready to be with others again. I like how the feelings experienced here are rendered with Cassavetian intimacy, how images hum with quiet intensity. I haven't seen My Blueberry Nights to see what he did next, but I feel WKW is still developing a language (one of the most interesting around for me) and I've great hopes because he's entry in To Each his Cinema is yet on another level. I was sorry to see WKW's marvelous visual vocabulary be reduced to the "slow tracking shot" in Mood for Love, here WKW picks it up again and he soars.

wonderdawg Hong Kong director Kar-Wai Wong's recent film 2046 is actually a continuation of the story he began in his 2001 art-house hit In the Mood for Love. Well, sort of, because while In the Mood had a fairly straightforward narrative everything in this new film is open to interpretation. Asian superstar Tony Leung is back as Chow Mo Wan but this is not the gentlemanly journalist we met in the first film. This Chow spends his days writing pulpy erotic fiction and his nights gambling, drinking and womanizing. In a voice-over narration Chow tells us about a sci-fi story he is working on. It's about a young Japanese man (Takuya Kimura) riding a train through time to 2046 where he hopes to recapture his lost memories and achieve emotional closure. The movie toggles back and forth between the writer's real life in 1960s Hong Kong and the futuristic fictional world of his imagination. Gradually Chow realizes he is writing about himself. Like his affair with carnal next door neighbour Bai (Crouching Tiger/Flying Daggers martial arts babe Ziyi Zhang as you have never seen her before), his unspoken feelings for Jing Wen (Faye Wong), the landlord's lonely young daughter and his liaison with an inscrutable lady gambler dubbed the Black Spider (Li Gong). None of these relationships last. "Why can't it be like it was before?" asks a heartbroken Bai and those words stay with him as he walks away because the women he meets in real life will never be able to measure up to the idealized perfection of the lost love who lives on in his memory. And so, like the character in his story, Chow will keep on travelling towards a place that only exists in his mind. If this sounds confusing you're not alone. "Actually we don't have an idea of what the story is about," Leung tells a French TV interviewer in a DVD featurette. Wong's films are not noted for their crisp linear plotting. He is all about mood, atmosphere and emotion. The camera-work is almost voyeuristic, shooting through windows, peering through peepholes, catching reflections in a mirror. The pace is languid, almost dream-like, the music on the soundtrack suffused with a gorgeous melancholy. A bittersweet sense of regret lingers in the eyes of these characters, like smoke curling lazily from a cigarette, creating an aura of sensual intrigue. Call it romantic noir. Some reviewers has likened Wong to a modern day Asian equivalent of the late great Federico Fellini and if that sounds appealing this may be the flavor you have been missing.But be warned: like many foreign delicacies this film can be an acquired taste.