In a word, Wow!

I just saw In The Mood For Love for the first time. Wow. I am now completely in love with Wong Kar-Wai (The Director) I just had to go add everything Netflix has of his to my queue. It's about these two folks who move in next door to one another and over the course of their residency fall in love but they can't act on it due to their circumstances. It's fantastic. The director uses some amazing devices to focus all the attention on the two main characters. Everyone else in the movie is a prop. I can't say enough good things about it I finished the movie last night on the train home and immediately started it over again. Also the lead woman wears about twenty different dresses throughout the film. All of which are amazing to look at. Absolutely fantastic. I love this movie. Not only that but he turns out to be the director of Chunking Express which I've been looking for, for quite some time now. I encountered it accidentally because Faye Wang is in it and I was searching the net for some lyrics to her songs. Then I encountered this great review of the movie but figured it was fanboy (or girl) talk and while I planned on seeing it at some point I didn't put much stock in it. But I kept encountering these great reviews over and over again. So recently I borrowed a few movies from a friend of mine from Beijing. While I'm there picking them up we talk a bit about the like three Chinese movies I know up till this point. I mention I'm looking for Chunking Express. She doesn't have it but she used to. So then a friend of hers comes in. They enjoy the fact that I'm going to watch these Chinese movies together for a minute and when the friend learns that I'm looking for Chunking Express she turns to me and says she's seen that movie five or six times. You don't get much better of a review than that. It's got four and a half stars on Netflix. I can't wait. So I expect that I'm going to be seeing a lot more of these intrapersonal relationship movies as mf friend describes that as pretty typical of "Asian" movies. This is fine by me I'm into the sappy crap. She say's that these movies touch your soul. There’re new studies that are putting forth the theory that perhaps this is true that Asians are more sensitive. At least Chinese and what Thai? Anyone who grows up speaking a tonal language. It's said that the artistic side of your brain develops sooner. No tones in Japanese or Korean (those two support the more sensitive with tones theory right there.) But even with this I don't necessarily believe this is why Asian movies are more sensitive. I think in general American movies are just to big. Everything has to be so big even the emotions. We don't care anymore about what happens between two people. About someone who's depressed because they live in a city where nobody is really like them. About two folks who are in love but can't express it because of the situation that they're in. Even the American movies that are fantastic at this have some sort of huge explosive piece to them. I recently saw The Cooler which is a great movie about these two losers in Vegas who fall in love and bring one another up to a better place. But it's a gangster movie right so at some point someone has to be beaten with a baseball bat including graphic blood and bones poking out of limbs. And The Professional (One of my favorites) which is about this middle aged hit man and a young girl in an abusive family who meet and teach one another how to be human, ends literally with a huge explosion (I'm not giving anything away there common it's a movie about a hit man.) Every emotion has to be big. If we make a poignant movie we have to have babies starving in the snow or seven year olds being gang raped in an alley filled with heroin addicts. Subtlety has been lost in American cinema. And I don't think that necessarily we've lost the ability to make the movies but that we've lost the ability to buy them. They don't make money so they don't get made. I'm quite looking forward to the addition of an entire culture's worth of movies. More than one really since china, Japan, etc have much closer ties culturally than we here in the US have with basically anyone they watch one another’s movies all the time. And since the languages are more closely related the dubs hopefully won't be quite as bad. That is to say the Chinese dub of a Japanese movie should be WAY better than the English dub of the same one. Not to mention the fact that the American dub would have to add a bunch more emotion and strife. Speaking of which have you had the opportunity to hear the English dub of crouching tiger. It burns. If you have the DVD you have to turn it on and hear it at least once. I can only handle it for about five minutes at the most before I start to bleed out the ears. Ooh I'm watching one of the best pieces of Together (He Ni Zai Yi Qie which is really more like together with you) the duet between the teacher (piano) and the student (violin.) Nice. Another good Chinese relationship movie about a boy and his dad. Not as good as in the mood for love but ITMFL has rocketed to the very top of my movie list. I think I'm all tapped out now. I think I have to go to the in the mood for love website and click every single link on it.