Chungking Express

5/16/2018

A week has passed since I watched this film. I wanted to let it sit with me for a bit before watching it again and giving it a proper response. Films like this, which are hyped to an unbelievable degree, end up sending an audience to end up watching it with elevated expectations, only to be ultimately disappointed afterwards. It’s a fact that many films suffer considerably from this aspect of our cinephile culture, I’ve experienced it with many films before. _Chungking Express_ has a reputation that I think may be beyond what it intended, with it being an Out-of-Print title at Criterion, the prices for the Blu-ray being obnoxiously high, and the constant barrage of exuberant reactions from many who’ve seen the film. This kind of superficial intrigue alone can set me up with expectati

8/26/2023

This is probably my favourite film from Kar-Wai Wong. It tells the stories of two Hong Kong Police officers. The former, the dashing Takeshi Kaneshiro, who is struggling to come to terms with his recently ended relationship of five years. By way of a means to closure, he purchases a tin of pineapple each day with the expiry date of May 1st (then he will be 25 years old). Either they will have reconciled by then, or he must look for a new love - and perhaps an enigmatic, somewhat shady, lady in a raincoat and wearing a blonde wig might offer a solution? The second features the slightly older regular with this director, Tony Leung, who has also split from his long-term partner only to find a new girl working at the stall he gets his meal from in the evening. She is equally enigmatic - and ha

1/30/2024

Filmed into the post production of two years of filming the Wuxia epic "Ashes of Time", with low resources, this movie is another example that we don't need millions of USD to make a masterpiece. Wong Kar-Wai have a personal style of using melancholic characters distorted stories, using elaborate soundtracks in the background. This movie show two drama and crime stories about two lovesick policeman and their search over his relationship with a woman, always in a 0,01cm encounter of distance between them. The first story stars Takeshi Kaneshiro as a cop obsessed by his breakup with a woman named May (replaced emotionally with letters and old pineapple cans), and his encounter with a mysterious drug smuggler. The second stars Tony Leung as a police officer roused from his gloom over t

2/11/2024

A total surprise, in the negative sense. The story was very random with little logic in it. Weird characters that also made little sense, and the conversations were poor and uninteresting. It was more like a Japanese anime story because of its randomness, but then not even interesting to watch. One soundtrack kept being played over and got me to the point that further watching was giving me a headache. I tried to finish it, but had to turn it off at 3/4 progress, for the sake of my mental health.