In which I will pan a movie I’ve never seen
Yes, I consume movie reviews with the best of them and will grant that rapturous notices will make me curious about a film I otherwise had no intention of seeing. What else made me decide to see this geekshow that I squirmed through for the first half-hour in a terrible fit of self-recognition but that ultimately left me saying “awwwwww”, this zombie movie that I laughed and cried through, and the movie that restored my faith in Jim Carrey and Charlie Kauffman’s high-concept antics? But anytime a movie is reviewed as “luscious,” “sensuous” and “poetic” you sort of figure that the reviewer is confused because he hates the film but, hewing to some unwritten consensus on the director’s genius, knows he has to say something nice. So he tosses out some innocuous adjectives that sound pretty but don’t say much. For instance, this well-reviewed flick bored me out of my skull and I had to stop watching after half an hour despite my love for Andy Lau.
The latest Wong Kar-Wai film is going into limited release in the US, and the adjectives are flying fast and furious: “another visually stunning, atmospheric, and melancholy movie on unrequited love and loneliness”, so you just know those wags left the screening room with tears in their eyes … from yawning for two hours. Known locally as “that five-years-in-the-making movie”, I prefer the way it was written up in a Hong Kong magazine: “The movie starring everybody but understood by nobody”. However, the ever-dependable Joe Morgenstern and Anthony Lane tell it like it is.