World of Wong Kar Wai

[RobertB]

I had major problems with Fallen Angels and Days of Being Wild. Amazon help chat person couldn't understand why I complained when it was more than a month since I bought the box. All films you buy from Amazon should be returned within a month, no piles of unwatched films allowed! But after half an hour he agreed I could return the box. I should get a new box next week. I hope the discs play better. I have also updated the firmware on the player, so that may help. But I did find the picture on Criterion disc of Fallen Angels not to be as good as the old Kino BD anyway. And that won't improve...

[trobrianders]

I had major problems with Fallen Angels and Days of Being Wild. Amazon help chat person couldn't understand why I complained when it was more than a month since I bought the box. All films you buy from Amazon should be returned within a month, no piles of unwatched films allowed! But after half an hour he agreed I could return the box. I should get a new box next week. I hope the discs play better. I have also updated the firmware on the player, so that may help. But I did find the picture on Criterion disc of Fallen Angels not to be as good as the old Kino BD anyway. And that won't improve...

Criterion are sending out packs of six replacement discs for the small number of those six discs that have experienced problems.

[tenia]

Here's what we need from you to ship out your replacements:

Confirmation of your name and a US or Canadian mailing address that will be valid for at least the next 1-4 weeks
If the discs need to be sent internationally, please send $10 to store@criterion.com via PayPal to offset some of our shipping costs
A photo of the six or seven defective discs with your name and date written on the front/art side (using a sharpie or paint marker - you can write this info on the lighter portion of the disc, and take a photo against a light source so your name and date are visible).

Looks like Criterion are having more replacement programs than ever these past months and decided to have some fun with it by NEVER asking the same things from customers as proof of purchase.
Also, they really need to sort out how they're handling international customers : first, they only mention "US or Canadian mailing addresses", and then, they freaking ask $10 to cover some of the shipping costs to send replacement discs ? So, international consumers have to... pay to get discs that properly play back. That's just silly.

[trobrianders]

Here's what we need from you to ship out your replacements:

Confirmation of your name and a US or Canadian mailing address that will be valid for at least the next 1-4 weeks
If the discs need to be sent internationally, please send $10 to store@criterion.com via PayPal to offset some of our shipping costs
A photo of the six or seven defective discs with your name and date written on the front/art side (using a sharpie or paint marker - you can write this info on the lighter portion of the disc, and take a photo against a light source so your name and date are visible).

Looks like Criterion are having more replacement programs than ever these past months and decided to have some fun with it by NEVER asking the same things from customers as proof of purchase.
Also, they really need to sort out how they're handling international customers : first, they only mention "US or Canadian mailing addresses", and then, they freaking ask $10 to cover some of the shipping costs to send replacement discs ? So, international consumers have to... pay to get discs that properly play back. That's just silly.

You're right. It's all a bit muddled. And in the case of my Kane replacement Disc 1 they're sending me a $10 voucher which of course I can't redeem from here in the UK. Perhaps they should have kept it and used the saving to avoid hassling an international purchaser of their WKW set for the $10 contribution towards postage.

[Shanzam]

I remember reading somewhere Chungking Express was filmed while taking a break from shooting another movie (Ashes of time, if I recall correctly). And a lot of the screenplay was improvised. I don't understand how a screenplay for a movie with such a non-linear structure can be improvised and turn out to have as much meaning. Perhaps it's the voice-over that adds to the general idea and connects those (4 I think) sub-plots into a whole, or the visual aesthetics telling the story more than the dialogue or characters. Not exactly sure what is meant by improvization here and how much of the written material did they have before they started filming.

[cdnchris]

The deleted scenes for Chungking Express offer an entirely different plot for one of the storylines, suggesting they were really just winging it. I can't recall anything from the features (and they were so slim I wouldn't be surprised if there was nothing specific to this film) or Rayns' commentary, so it could be covered there, but I'd have to guess they had the characters and then just made up what they did and how they relate to one another as they filmed.

The documentary around Happy Together contains a lot of deleted material and it clearly shows that the story was made up as they went, starting out (if I recall correctly) as Leung's character going to Argentina to find his dead father's lover and then morphing from there, the story changing more and more the longer they stayed in the country, drawing inspiration from the region and the people there. There were a lot of abandoned sub plots and characters.

[Shanzam]

Chungking was one of my favorite films in my early 20s, I'm not sure what I'd think about it these days. The characters were intriguing, layered and all connected by isolation and loneliness. I don't know too much about Hong Kong and whether the characters were also used to portray a broader picture and feelings of (emotional, political, economical, etc) dissatisfaction of its inhabitants. Perhaps it's the emotion that kept the narrative going. Even if the improvisation was a success, I'd say it's more of an exception than a rule.

[shiftyeyes]

Wong likes to start filming with an idea and a cast and tries to find the movie along the way. Actors are sometimes cast in one role and end up switching halfway through or having their character altered entirely or even excised from the final cut. It's a miracle that his films are as good as they are. There are loads of outtakes from his movies that look nothing like the final product. The greatest trick has to be In the Mood for Love, which feels so measured, controlled and deliberate, but the production was apparently rather chaotic and took well over a year.

[feihong]

Everything I've ever read or seen about Wong's style of improvisation is that he works a little like Hong Sang-Soo, writing scripted scenes to film the next day, and after filming these scenes, writing others to follow them for the days after that. There are diary excerpts from Chris Doyle where he describes waiting on set for Wong to deliver the day's script pages. It sounds like sometimes he just has props or a set or some music to play on set and he and the actors start determining what they'll do from there. But I think it isn't likely he does the kind of actor improvisations you see in method and post-method acting in the west. The dialogue in Chungking Express feels precomposed to me, it feels written, but perhaps loosely written––as opposed to the dialogue in My Blueberry Nights, which feels so preconceived it holds you in a grip like a vice. More likely, Wong procrastinates on the script, and he gives the actors very little time to prepare––and I would imagine he accepts a wide range of timing and line readings and dialogue changes from his actors.

A nicer way to say it would be he lets himself respond in real-time to the material he's just created––but you could easily make the case that he doesn't really know what he's doing a lot of the time––hence the increasingly long filming schedules. But I would say the reason a film like 2046 is any good at all is because he took the time in which many filmmakers make 4 movies to make the one. So you could say that he makes a good movie in every 3 or 4, but that he discards the other films on the cutting room floor. Thinking of it that way, his egregious home video changes to his work make a lot more sense––though it's still hard for me to entirely appreciate.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

This is how I understand it too, with the difference that Hong Sangsoo actually uses most of what he writes, only rarely reshooting an earlier scene if it ends up contradicting something he writes later. He also doesn't use B-roll—there's not really any place it could go, given that his films have been almost entirely sequence shots for awhile now—whereas Wong shoots tons of footage of local scenery, actors walking around and looking off into space, etc. etc., without having any real idea how or if it'll be used in the final cut. (This is also alluded to in Doyle's Happy Together diary, where he writes of acting as a second unit and just shooting random stuff with the actors while Wong tries to come up with the next scene.)

Something else about Wong's "method" is that he supposedly doesn't even set foot in the editing room until William Chang completes a first cut. Then Wong will watch it, request changes—Chang says he doesn't ask for many, which throws an interesting light on Wong's habit of post-release tinkering—and shoot additional footage if he thinks there's something missing. Only after the picture edit is more or less locked does Wong write the voiceover, meaning the narration is tailored to Chang's cutting and not the other way around (ditto the music). Chang is always present during the shoot since he also serves as art director, costume designer, and various other roles on an ad hoc basis, so he knows very well how the plot has developed and isn't inventing it from scratch in the editing. But given the level of autonomy with which he cuts the films, the way he repurposes footage in ways that surprise even Wong himself, and the fact that Wong writes part of the film to match what Chang assembles in post, I feel he could almost be considered a co-writer.

With Chungking Express specifically, I 've yet to watch One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart, which apparently has some heretofore-unseen outtakes, but the deleted scenes on the old Japanese DVD are interesting for how they represent the film's two sections. The deleted scenes from the second part don't actually change the narrative in any significant way and are there either for atmosphere (some additional interactions between Faye and her co-workers) or to elaborate on plot points in the final cut (a scene where 663 notices a sleeping pill in his drink, which Faye plays off as a clump of sugar). The only "new" plot development is a minor addition where the Midnight Express owner returns the flight attendant's letter to her.

The deleted scenes for the first part, though, include a completely abandoned storyline where the Blonde is actually a movie star who retired at the peak of her fame—obviously a reference to Brigitte Lin's then-impending retirement—and 223 tries to convince her to help the cops deal with some Indian hostage-takers who have apparently requested a meeting with her. There's also a sultry, rather music-video-like sequence of Lin (sans the wig) singing a cover of the Cantopop standard "Star," which may or may not have been intended as a flashback. I suspect Wong had a better idea of what would happen in the second story because he'd been thinking about it for awhile—it was actually one of the ideas he pitched to Alan Tang when he was offered the chance to direct his first movie, which Tang unsurprisingly turned down in favor of what became As Tears Go By. The kidnapping subplot in the first story was also a very late addition, and according to Chang it wasn't present in the original Hong Kong cut simply because it wasn't ready in time.

[feihong]

...Hong Sangsoo actually uses most of what he writes, only rarely reshooting an earlier scene if it ends up contradicting something he writes later. He also doesn't use B-roll—there's not really any place it could go, given that his films have been almost entirely sequence shots for awhile now...

I met Hong Sang-Soo in 2004 or so, when he came to the UCLA Cinema & Television Archive to do a Q&A for On the Occasion of Remembering the Turning Gate; there were a lot of "film student" kind of questions for him. Somebody asked him what the reason was he didn't do shot-reverse-shot camera setups. He had the translator pose the question to him again, and responded by saying he didn't really know what "shot-reverse-shot" meant, he just positioned the camera where he thought it would look good and he tried to make it so they didn't have to set up the camera and the lights again.

Another thing he said at that time was that he wrote two scenes per day, each taking the film in different directions, and that they would usually shoot both scenes, decide which one felt right to them, and then he would write two more scenes emerging out of that direction––eventually leading towards something like a conclusion. He said he often used things people said to him or ideas or things he read as starting points, and then would write scenes with that in mind as a theme (Turning Gate apparently emerged out of the statement the movie director tells the actor in the beginning of the film, "let's try not to become monsters"). You do see him using some of those alternate scenes they did shoot in the early films––especially The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, which has those different ways the story plays out, and the dream sequence in The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well. I have to admit the last Hong Sang-Soo film I watched was Woman on the Beach––they had started to seem repetitive by then.

—whereas Wong shoots tons of footage of local scenery, actors walking around and looking off into space, etc. etc., without having any real idea how or if it'll be used in the final cut. (This is also alluded to in Doyle's Happy Together diary, where he writes of acting as a second unit and just shooting random stuff with the actors while Wong tries to come up with the next scene.)

You can tell, I think, that this is happening to an extra degree in Happy Together. The visuals in that film are a lot richer with incidentals and moments than what's in Fallen Angels. To be clear, the narrative-based photography looks great in both films. But there is just a lot more visual material that seems to be there in Happy Together. The characters in Fallen Angels seem to be alone in their city, and perhaps deprived of any sense of culture around them, as well ; whereas in Happy Together the characters seem alone in a lively, bustling place, isolated even as they participate in the activity at work in Buenos Aires. I remember reading Doyle stayed behind in Buenos Aires to film some extra material after Wong returned to Hong Kong.

Something else about Wong's "method" is that he supposedly doesn't even set foot in the editing room until William Chang completes a first cut. Then Wong will watch it, request changes—Chang says he doesn't ask for many, which throws an interesting light on Wong's habit of post-release tinkering—and shoot additional footage if he thinks there's something missing. Only after the picture edit is more or less locked does Wong write the voiceover, meaning the narration is tailored to Chang's cutting and not the other way around (ditto the music). Chang is always present during the shoot since he also serves as art director, costume designer, and various other roles on an ad hoc basis, so he knows very well how the plot has developed and isn't inventing it from scratch in the editing. But given the level of autonomy with which he cuts the films, the way he repurposes footage in ways that surprise even Wong himself, and the fact that Wong writes part of the film to match what Chang assembles in post, I feel he could almost be considered a co-writer.

With Chungking Express specifically, I 've yet to watch One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart, which apparently has some heretofore-unseen outtakes, but the deleted scenes on the old Japanese DVD are interesting for how they represent the film's two sections. The deleted scenes from the second part don't actually change the narrative in any significant way and are there either for atmosphere (some additional interactions between Faye and her co-workers) or to elaborate on plot points in the final cut (a scene where 663 notices a sleeping pill in his drink, which Faye plays off as a clump of sugar). The only "new" plot development is a minor addition where the Midnight Express owner returns the flight attendant's letter to her.

The deleted scenes for the first part, though, include a completely abandoned storyline where the Blonde is actually a movie star who retired at the peak of her fame—obviously a reference to Brigitte Lin's then-impending retirement—and 223 tries to convince her to help the cops deal with some Indian hostage-takers who have apparently requested a meeting with her. There's also a sultry, rather music-video-like sequence of Lin (sans the wig) singing a cover of the Cantopop standard "Star," which may or may not have been intended as a flashback. I suspect Wong had a better idea of what would happen in the second story because he'd been thinking about it for awhile—it was actually one of the ideas he pitched to Alan Tang when he was offered the chance to direct his first movie, which Tang unsurprisingly turned down in favor of what became As Tears Go By. The kidnapping subplot in the first story was also a very late addition, and according to Chang it wasn't present in the original Hong Kong cut simply because it wasn't ready in time.

What I think is often overlooked by more recent fans is that Wong the writer has a long, long line in goofy and implausible scenes, and silly comedy––and Wong seems to encourage people to look away from this aspect of his work. The script to Haunted Cop Shop gives a preview of the silliness of material from Wong's early career. His script to Final Victory is full of goofy material––that it was supposed to make part of a sequence of stories alongside As Tears Go By is fairly instructive as to Wong's predilection for silliness. But since he started directing himself I think Wong has been self-consciously editing that material out of his movies. That doesn't mean he doesn't film those kind of scenes still, though. The deleted scenes from In the Mood for Love include the "you-don't-look-like-my-husband-and-I-don't-look-like-your-wife" scene, with its deliberately funny, awkward framing, and the one where Chow Mo-Wan argues with the hotel manager about trying to bring a live chicken to room 2046 in order to make a stew there. By the time In the Mood for Love emerged, the original, food-based romantic tryst story had been completely removed, in favor of a sensitive, and I would say, a self-consciously "classy" romantic yearning only ever sort of negligibly fulfilled. My Blueberry Nights, with the Weinsteins demanding a script beforehand and asking Wong to adhere to the lines he wrote, comes across far goofier than any of Wong's more recent movies, with Natalie Portman and Rachel Weiss's tortured line deliveries––and Norah Jones' central character is notably missing any plausible driving motivation behind her storyline. Her disjointed, impulsive characterization does draw to mind previous goofy, thin characterizations in Wong's work, like Charlie Yoeh's character in Fallen Angels, the "Mimi" character in Days of Being Wild (which comes off better, I think, mostly because Carina Lau is an actress with much greater reserves of depth than Charlie was at the time), and the all-over-the-place Ping in Final Victory. Looking at the way In the Mood for Love began as a ribald triptych about eating suggests to me that Wong's ideas often start out pretty goofy, and that he streamlines them as he loses faith in their believability during shooting. I think the idea that the blonde in Chungking Express is a movie star in hiding, getting involved in a criminal event, probably eventually seemed like too much of a stretch to Wong, and also a little incongruous next to the second story––which was so much more intimate and working-class in it's milieu. It makes perfect sense to hear that the Faye Wong story was an early idea of Wong's he pitched as its' own movie previously––it has a lot of the goofiness of his early scripts––and yet, it's a story which is much more credible than some of Wong's even goofier ideas. I remember Tony Rayns saying that Chungking Express came together quickly and seemed to "work" well right from the start (probably especially in comparison to Ashes of Time, which Wong was shooting at the time, and which he clearly felt conflicted over even decades afterwards). Tony felt that Wong's longer shooting schedules stemmed from Wong's chasing to recapture the success of Chungking Express by trying to replicate the same working conditions, the same feeling of spontaneity. That also makes a lot of sense to me. And I think through this lens we get a decent glimpse of a filmmaker so uncertain of what he has made he constantly looks for ways of changing it long after the fact. I always tell my comics students not to redraw what they've already done––that if they want a better drawing, to apply that knowledge to the next drawing they do, rather than revisiting the previous one. I feel like Wong could learn that lesson. But thinking about all this more cogently, and especially reflecting on the way you say William Chang is essentially assembling the film before Wong ever tries to do so himself, I can see why Wong might be insecure enough about his material to want it substantially changed.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

He said he often used things people said to him or ideas or things he read as starting points, and then would write scenes with that in mind as a theme (Turning Gate apparently emerged out of the statement the movie director tells the actor in the beginning of the film, "let's try not to become monsters"). You do see him using some of those alternate scenes they did shoot in the early films––especially The Virgin Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, which has those different ways the story plays out, and the dream sequence in The Day a Pig Fell Into the Well.

Hong used conventional scripts for his first three films—Turning Gate was the first time he didn't write one, but he continued to write treatments until Oki's Movie. The best recent-ish interview I've seen on his writing/working methods is from Cinema Scope at the time of Right Now, Wrong Then.

The characters in Fallen Angels seem to be alone in their city, and perhaps deprived of any sense of culture around them, as well ; whereas in Happy Together the characters seem alone in a lively, bustling place, isolated even as they participate in the activity at work in Buenos Aires. I remember reading Doyle stayed behind in Buenos Aires to film some extra material after Wong returned to Hong Kong.

Yep, this is mentioned in the diary too. He also writes that they filmed the Iguazu Falls scene without Wong, and shot it two ways—once as a dream, once as "real"—because Wong still had no idea how it would play in the actual film. The diary also mentions Wong and Chang simultaneously working on editing, Wong on an Avid and Chang on a Steenbeck (Chang did switch to digital on In the Mood for Love).

What I think is often overlooked by more recent fans is that Wong the writer has a long, long line in goofy and implausible scenes, and silly comedy––and Wong seems to encourage people to look away from this aspect of his work. The script to Haunted Cop Shop gives a preview of the silliness of material from Wong's early career. His script to Final Victory is full of goofy material––that it was supposed to make part of a sequence of stories alongside As Tears Go By is fairly instructive as to Wong's predilection for silliness. But since he started directing himself I think Wong has been self-consciously editing that material out of his movies.

I've thought about this too and find it interesting that Jeff Lau, who is now pretty much exclusively considered a "comedy" guy, flirted with WKW-ish romanticism on Days of Tomorrow (from a concept Lau originally devised as a potential sequel to Days of Being Wild) and the Jacky Pang-produced Love and the City. I once joked that there's an alternate universe where Jeff Lau became a Cannes-lauded director of "art" films and Wong Kar-wai made his directorial debut with The Haunted Cop Shop III. To some extent I think Wong channels his taste for silliness into his projects as a producer—not just the Jeff Lau films but also First Love: The Litter on the Breeze, which is basically Wong Kar-wai producing a parody of his own movies, and even Miao Miao, which is ostensibly a drama but goes off into some very weird directions. And I'm pretty sure the reason Fallen Angels seems so divisive among Wong's fans is because it's the closest he's ever come as a director to embracing his goofiness, unless you credit the claims that he ghost-directed See You Tomorrow.

My Blueberry Nights, with the Weinsteins demanding a script beforehand and asking Wong to adhere to the lines he wrote, comes across far goofier than any of Wong's more recent movies, with Natalie Portman and Rachel Weiss's tortured line deliveries––and Norah Jones' central character is notably missing any plausible driving motivation behind her storyline.

Where'd you hear that about the Weinsteins? From what I can tell they weren't involved with the film until they picked up their distribution rights in late 2006, after principal photography was already finished. There was definitely a proper screenplay, but Wong still changed it as he went along; there used to be a blog somewhere by an American member of the crew (who was apparently unfamiliar with Wong and his working style) expressing a lot of bemusement at how on some days the cast and crew would stop shooting hours early (or even not shoot at all) because Wong was reworking the script. There were also some specific details about how the story evolved, including the original ending where Elizabeth makes it the Pacific coast as she intended, which Wong tossed out once the shoot reached Las Vegas. I've tried a few times over the years to find that blog again, but it seems to have disappeared into the ether.

I haven't watched My Blueberry Nights since it came out, not because I hated it but because it just seemed uninteresting ("thin" is a good word to describe the whole thing, I think). In my memory it didn't play as particularly goofy, so now I'm curious enough to rewatch it when I have some more free time.

[feihong]

Hong used conventional scripts for his first three films—Turning Gate was the first time he didn't write one, but he continued to write treatments until Oki's Movie. The best recent-ish interview I've seen on his writing/working methods is from Cinema Scope at the time of Right Now, Wrong Then.

I see. I suppose I assumed he was speaking about a general working method when he talked about Turning Gate. He didn't reference the change in method, but he seemed to talk about the method for Turning Gate as if this was always how he worked. I guess I misinterpreted this.

What I think is often overlooked by more recent fans is that Wong the writer has a long, long line in goofy and implausible scenes, and silly comedy––and Wong seems to encourage people to look away from this aspect of his work. The script to Haunted Cop Shop gives a preview of the silliness of material from Wong's early career. His script to Final Victory is full of goofy material––that it was supposed to make part of a sequence of stories alongside As Tears Go By is fairly instructive as to Wong's predilection for silliness. But since he started directing himself I think Wong has been self-consciously editing that material out of his movies.

I've thought about this too and find it interesting that Jeff Lau, who is now pretty much exclusively considered a "comedy" guy, flirted with WKW-ish romanticism on Days of Tomorrow (from a concept Lau originally devised as a potential sequel to Days of Being Wild) and the Jacky Pang-produced Love and the City. I once joked that there's an alternate universe where Jeff Lau became a Cannes-lauded director of "art" films and Wong Kar-wai made his directorial debut with The Haunted Cop Shop III. To some extent I think Wong channels his taste for silliness into his projects as a producer—not just the Jeff Lau films but also First Love: The Litter on the Breeze, which is basically Wong Kar-wai producing a parody of his own movies, and even Miao Miao, which is ostensibly a drama but goes off into some very weird directions. And I'm pretty sure the reason Fallen Angels seems so divisive among Wong's fans is because it's the closest he's ever come as a director to embracing his goofiness, unless you credit the claims that he ghost-directed See You Tomorrow.

I remember Jeff Lau credited for some work on Mahjong Dragon, along with Cory Yuen and David Lai. There were some kind of artsy scenes in that movie––one of my favorite scenes in Hong Kong cinema, where Zhao wen Zhuo stares reproachfully and Josephine Siao after she confesses she wants more from him than what was in their original paper marriage agreement (just really good acting, in my opinion, from both of them), and the romantic ping-pong scene, which I thought Jeff Lau might have directed. Then again, there's a lot of goofy comedy in the film which I think Lau must have directed. He's one of those filmmakers, like Patrick Tam, whose career has sidled up close to Wong Kar-Wai's (reading Grady Hendrix's article in Film Comment, it sounds like Lau is the one who sort of discovered both Tam and Wong), and I think the contrast is always instructive. One of the three becomes the international arthouse director, and both other careers suffer in different ways, I'd say, from there being no consistent local outlet for more films like Chungking Express and Days of Being Wild. The romances of 80s and 90s HK film have to be heavier, more on-the-nose. I think Jeff Lau tacks in that direction more readily, and Patrick Tam kind of quits making films because there's no place for those kind of pictures. Wong meanwhile gets some other kind of production deal, and he gets chance after chance to make these movies until Happy Together and then In the Mood for Love launch him onto the international stage. I haven't seen Days of Tomorrow or Love and the City, but thanks to you I mean to correct that soon. It's interesting to try and imagine what Jeff Lau would do with an international arthouse career. I've got to see those movies before I can get a real picture of that. The first Haunted Cop Shop is, I think pretty arty for the sort of Mr. Vampire clone that it is. I remember some very elegant dolly shots and expressive lighting in the film, which reminded me a little of Po Chi Leong's He Lives by Night.

My Blueberry Nights, with the Weinsteins demanding a script beforehand and asking Wong to adhere to the lines he wrote, comes across far goofier than any of Wong's more recent movies, with Natalie Portman and Rachel Weiss's tortured line deliveries––and Norah Jones' central character is notably missing any plausible driving motivation behind her storyline.

Where'd you hear that about the Weinsteins? From what I can tell they weren't involved with the film until they picked up their distribution rights in late 2006, after principal photography was already finished. There was definitely a proper screenplay, but Wong still changed it as he went along; there used to be a blog somewhere by an American member of the crew (who was apparently unfamiliar with Wong and his working style) expressing a lot of bemusement at how on some days the cast and crew would stop shooting hours early (or even not shoot at all) because Wong was reworking the script. There were also some specific details about how the story evolved, including the original ending where Elizabeth makes it the Pacific coast as she intended, which Wong tossed out once the shoot reached Las Vegas. I've tried a few times over the years to find that blog again, but it seems to have disappeared into the ether.

I haven't watched My Blueberry Nights since it came out, not because I hated it but because it just seemed uninteresting ("thin" is a good word to describe the whole thing, I think). In my memory it didn't play as particularly goofy, so now I'm curious enough to rewatch it when I have some more free time.

I'm sure you're right about this. I recall reading this in an article in the L.A. Times. I used to read these kind of articles all the time there, and I'm beginning to suspect that a lot of what I read there was pretty inaccurate. I do think there's a lot of goofy stuff in My Blueberry Nights––Rachel Weisz's whole performance, with it's "dinner-theater-Tennessee Williams" tone, the soppy, awkward exchanges between Norah Jones and Jude Law...it may have been the execution more than the actual plot that seemed silly to me. But I do think Norah Jones' character's relatively unmotivated jaunt cross-country seems kind of aimless and toothless in the way of some of Wong's less-serious story devices, and the bits with David Strathairn's genteel alcoholism seemed in a similar vein. I kind of view My Blueberry Nights in a similar way to you––it's thin––but it was also one of the things which, following after the hideous Redux of Ashes of Time, really shook my faith in Wong Kar-Wai as a filmmaker. It was surprising to see how poorly I thought Wong's tropes and concepts and dialogue––how all of his style worked in an English-language context. The film seemed so foolish and inauthentic to its' settings and to the people it was trying to portray (I remember only the scene between Jude Law and Cat Power seeming pretty good), it made me wonder what it was like to comprehend Wong's movies in their native language––were they equally stupid-sounding in their original conception? Did watching the films in translation lend them a classiness and a seriousness that wasn't really there? Ultimately I decided My Blueberry Nights just wasn't a very good movie. But Ashes of Time Redux and the recent revisions for the remastered films have probably more effectively shaken my faith in the filmmaker––that and discovering and appreciating more of the films of Patrick Tam, who I think is both a little more awkward and a little more earnest as a filmmaker, and whose work I think illustrates more clearly some of the conflicts and struggles inherent in trying to make artful, personal films in an aggressively commercial environment. I still like Wong's movies––especially the run from Days of Being Wild through In the Mood for Love, but I find them harder and harder to watch now, as if all of Wong's changes had left a bad taste in my mouth. I don't even have the Criterion set, I'm just talking about watching my Kino and earlier Criterion blu rays, the Mei Ah dvd of Ashes of time, and the HK blu ray of Days. But still, I find there are other filmmakers whose work I'll put on in the background of whatever I'm doing during the day, and I tend to avoid Wong's films now.

[gap]

I made a start on this set this week. Absolutely loved As Tears Go By and really enjoyed (although it's a bit of a downer) Days of Being Wild. The former was glitch free but there was a slight issue with the latter.

I know all about the pixeling/freezing issues so have been ready for it to happen. At the 1hr 20min mark, it froze for a second (like a really bad layer change) and then continued on perfectly. For anyone who had a freezing disc, was it more than a second or two or like this?

[RobertB]

1.20 is where it happens. Some discs just froze for a second for me, some (Days of Being Wild being one of them) stopped playing. Maybe it's depending on the BD player how bad it gets stuck. My new box from Amazon wasn't any better. Should get the checked discs from Criterion this week. So if you find it irritating, contact Criterion and get new discs.

[Rupert Pupkin]

I would like to know if the documentary "One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart" is a part of the bonus of the Criterion Wong Car Wai box set.
It is dated from 2021 and, if this is not the case, I wonder if this will be release separately on blu-ray.

or perhaps it is on the Criterion bonus, but "split" into several video excerpts ?
"Deleted scenes, alternate endings, behind-the-scenes footage, a promo reel, music videos, and trailers"

this amazing documentary contains alternate ending of several WKW movies, including the unseen footage of the 1999 year scene (a parallel world?) with Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung, a scene which will become later a part of My Blueberry Nights but unfortunately the In The Mood For Bluebberry Nights "kiss" scene is not included in this documentary; but another "alternate future" opening scene.
This part happens in an alternate future (and turned out to be the first day of shooting - marked "Day One")
So far, I had only seen it described (with a photoshoot) on a blog (see my previous post here *) and it was seen just once in France. I don't remember if this was a re-edit of "In The Mood For Love".
I have seen the documentary One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart" and this is wonderful to see this footage. I wonder if some fan-edits including this scene and some others are "around"....

I wonder, if Criterion missed this opportunity if some other X4 restoration of "In The Mood For Love" in other countries will have this wonderful exclusive footage.

*

Did someone ever seen some video snippets or photos of this third part which WKW called it "In The Mood For Love 2001" - apparently he would have shown this as a short movie in France in 2001.

AFAIK this was only shown once in 2001, when Wong did a masterclass at Cannes. depp91's excellent website (mentioned at length a few pages back) has a page on it with what is apparently the only publicly-available visual material. It also has an account of its origins and a convincing theory about why Wong hasn't given it any public screening outside of that single masterclass (essentially, that Wong regards it as a mistake and only showed it as an example of how much gets set aside as a result of his improvisatory methods).

thanks. Too bad it was only shown in 2001. The three film strips from In The Mood For Love 2001 is priceless (I was able to grab it in high-res thank to the internet wayback archive); this look really familiar to My Blueberry Nights indeed. I wonder why for a tremendous box set like Wong Kar Wai world, this third part which has been edited as a short movie is not part of the bonus.

[Calvin]

I would like to know if the documentary "One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart" is a part of the bonus of the Criterion Wong Car Wai box set.
It is dated from 2021 and, if this is not the case, I wonder if this will be release separately on blu-ray.

It isn't

[shiftyeyes]

Unfortunately they didn’t announce that “documentary” (feels more like a TV special ) until after the Criterion set was released.

[swo17]

I just went through all my discs and didn't find any issues, though I thought it worth mentioning for those less familiar with Happy Together that there are a couple moments that intentionally look like the image freezing up at around 1:10:30 when Leung's character shakes another man's hand in a bathroom (it's actually when the handshake starts and ends)

[cowboydan]

"One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart" is a nice watch. Lots of great easter eggs (figuratively and literally). One of which was Tony Leung and Faye Wong in 2046 at an old dusty train station. Faye is dressed kind a strange and "futuristic", while Tony looks more old fashioned, to me. I had always felt like there should've been a scene like that in 2046, for its function as part of the mythologization of the place "2046". But the way it looks to have been executed, doesn't really fit in with the rest of that film. So I'm not surprised it was cut.

There was some "In the Mood For Love" footage kind of confused me. The main section we see is from the first day of shooting ItMFL. Its pretty much a full scene shown, and its clearly from the "In the Mood for Love - Day One" that was sold as an NFT (lol). It exactly matches the still and the clip here https://theplaylist.net/wong-kar-wai-in ... -20210907/.

Later in the film, there's another ItMFL outtake moment, where Maggie is asleep in the cafe with pie frosting on her lip, and Tony leans in to kiss her. I remember reading that this was in the separate short film "In the Mood for Love 2001". So I went to go look at that blog post https://web.archive.org/web/20181011194 ... -love.html, and the three film strip of that same scene with the kiss.. it's totally different! Different clothes on both Maggie and Tony, different colors on set, Maggie is seated leaning the opposite direction, and the close-up is differently composed. So this was from a separate shoot I guess?

From that blog, which sourced it from the book "WKW: The Cinema of Wong Kar Wai"


From "One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart"

[shiftyeyes]

Later in the film, there's another ItMFL outtake moment, where Maggie is asleep in the cafe with pie frosting on her lip, and Tony leans in to kiss her. I remember reading that this was in the separate short film "In the Mood for Love 2001". So I went to go look at that blog post https://web.archive.org/web/20181011194 ... -love.html, and the three film strip of that same scene with the kiss.. it's totally different! Different clothes on both Maggie and Tony, different colors on set, Maggie is seated leaning the opposite direction, and the close-up is differently composed. So this was from a separate shoot I guess?

This seems to line up with the stories of Wong just reshooting the same scenes over and over again in different locations, costumes, etc until he's happy with it.

[Rupert Pupkin]

I've seen the "One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart" documentary too. It's really sad that this is not appearing in the Criterion box set for a matter of "bad timing". Besides the In The Mood Of Love outtake there are several amazing footage from other WKW movies.
The photoshoot scene (which I think it's from an "alternate - possible future" for the 2 lovers in In The Mood For Love and this scene was reworked later for My Blueberry Nights) is not shown in this documentary, but as stated in this great blog (link in your post) this footage was shown in France in a small theatre, but only once. And I was not there.

The footage in the documentary "One-Tenth of a Millimeter Apart" is the Day One shooting with Maggie Cheung and Tony Leung. Apparently this belongs also to the "alternate/possible future" scene, but this is not the photoshoot scene with the kiss which will be reworked later for My Blueberry Nights.

[yoloswegmaster]

Koch is releasing a 4K UHD of Fallen Angels later this year and they interestingly have the AR listed as 1.85:1 instead of the 2.35:1 that was found on the Criterion disc. I'm wondering if they made a mistake on the listing or if they were somehow able to change WKW's mind.

[senseabove]

Get yourself some $5000 ITMFL perfume

[yoloswegmaster]

Koch is releasing a 4K UHD of Fallen Angels later this year and they interestingly have the AR listed as 1.85:1 instead of the 2.35:1 that was found on the Criterion disc. I'm wondering if they made a mistake on the listing or if they were somehow able to change WKW's mind.

Nevermind, the Koch website has it now listed as 2.35:1.