I love the stupidity of holding on to what has moved on.

I love the smallness of the biggest emotion we know.

I love the pain that doesn't seem to leave but you know somehow it will.

I love seeing love.

And I love how Wong Kar-Wai manages to capture all of the above and mold it into a piece of visual poetry, instilled with the melancholy, pain, joy, frivolity and promise our species' most powerful four letter word possesses.

Even in isolation, Wong Kar-Wai manages to find love in two completely different tales, that pass within 0,01 cm of each other briefly giving the other a glance of desperate recognition. Chungking Express is about our need for companionship, the…

...Chef’s Salad...

Today, it is raining again and I am feeling lonely. Every time this feeling comes, I put on Chungking Express. Why? Because it feels better to dive into the colors of raindrops that lonesomely tap against my windowpane. Pineapples and rain probably suit the mood, right? Look at that fast-paced rhythm, blurry and indistinct images moving in dizzying motions, inanimate faces of pedestrians walking by, gliding through each frame. They might look familiar but you don't know them - even though you think you do - while desperately trying to reach out for a 0.01 cm grasp. Yearning’s breeze passes us like a slight sip of red wine on sleepless nights; the taste’s a bit warm at first,…

I first saw Chunking Express a year or so ago. It was my first Wong Kar-Wai. While I liked it, particularly the second story, I wasn’t blown away. Shortly after that I saw 2046, and fell in love with Wong Kar-Wai. Going through the Days of Being Wild / In the Mood for Love / 2046 trilogy only cemented this emotion. My wife bought the Criterion Blu of Chunking, so, we thought we’d give it a re-watch before further exploring the Wong filmography.

What can I say, I was giddy with happiness. What didn’t impress or move me the first time certainly did on this re-watch. I felt absolutely transfixed.

What I noticed in this viewing was the emphasis on…

not sure if there’s any other contemporary, generally lauded filmmaker whose idea of romance is as boring and cloying (in an unwittingly questionable way, no less!) as little ole Mr. Wong, but i’m at least pleasantly surprised that this is one hundred times better than In the Mood for Love. many of his stylistic tics i still find very irksome—i love gestural camerawork and editing, but the action scenes and time-lapse stuff are just so goddamn ugly—though i’m actually somewhat sympathetic to the unfortunate fact that the budget didn’t allow for the rights to more than only three songs repeated ad nauseum*. moreover, this one is directed by an actual human instead of a intro to visual metaphors handbook, and…