Yashua Kimbrough (jimniexperience) "Chungking Express No. 2"Ultra cool, punk, rock hard; with intimacy, sentimental, with tales of partnership and love. Follows two tales: The Assassins: A cool couple (with hidden intimate motives) rob domino tournaments - one scouts the place the other shoots it up. But the man wants out the business and a true partner of love - and runs into a former flame, Blondie, who ignites his inner soul . Of course , this doesn't sit well with Lady Assassin, and now somebody has to pay …..Prisoner 223: An escaped convict spends his days of freedom running after-hour businesses without the owner's permission, and "rubbing shoulders" with the locals of land in hopes of making friends or confidants. He has a regular customer, and falls in love with a dating helpless woman using him for a shoulder to cry on. He makes a home video for his sick father and has random encounters with Lady Assassin from time to timeTwo men who are opposites: one is lazy one is active, one needs others to make his decisions and one makes his own choices, one is popular with the ladies and one struggles with the girls, one is a killer and the other is gentle-heartedFilmed the same way as 'Chungking' ;; up close, hand-held, bright colorful lighting and palettes, freeze frame editing .. sexy .. but a slower pace7.5/10

tiagodna Let me start by stating that I'm a true Kar-Wai Wong fan. I've seen "In the mood for love", "Chungking Express" and "My Blueberry nights". I know his films are different and are not made for the "mainstream consumers", they must be analyzed differently.I was looking forward to watching this movie because I do love his art and so far I had never been let down.This movie definitely has some of the typical Kar-Wai's trademarks (e.g the deep and awesome soundtrack, the slow motions, the amazing colors, the cruel portrait of Hong Kong, the intriguing characters). But it stops there.The movie is boring, tiresome and the plot is very weak.If you're a fan I would recommend skipping this one and trying another one of Wong's masterpieces.

DICK STEEL I've got a strange affinity with Wong Kar-wai's movies, and they seem to somehow present themselves in reverse order to me, where often I find myself visiting his earlier works backwards. Like watching 2046 first before In the Mood for Love, or right now, watching Fallen Angels before Chungking Express, where I have both movies on DVDs sitting on the shelves, but decide to pick Angels before Chungking, knowing jolly well that this one came after, and was like the film that expanded itself so much that it had to break away and stand alone on its own two feet.Deciding between Chungking Express and Fallen Angels also boiled down to pure laziness on my part to want to pop a Region Free DVD into my default player, hence the latter. And I can't help but to chuckle at how Leon Lai's killer character Wong Chi Ming paralleled this laziness of mine, in wanting things on a sliver platter, of getting the preparation work all set out for him, and he just enters the scene with his swagger as the executioner. And the woman behind him acting as his agent and cleaning lady, is played by Michelle Reis.As his agent, she gets the contracts, does the legwork to draw up plans, and with time as she hangs out at his apartment to clean it up, she nurses an aching heart, knowing that perhaps in their profession, to fall in love would spell doom. And it doesn't take one too long to identify with such longing, of being so near yet so far, and she exorcises her unrequited passion by either visiting the places he visits just to hang on to his lingering presence long after he's gone, or by pleasuring herself on his bed. Kinda kinky, don't you think?While Chungking Express dealt with the relationship issues that two cops had to experience (from my fuzzy knowledge of it anyway), Fallen Angels seemed to be its evil twin, again dealing with relations of the heart, but now from the viewpoints centered on two criminals, one in Lai's character, and here the other in Takeshi Kaneshiro (who was also in Chungking Express) with his mute He Zhiwu, who breaks into shops and plays plenty of make belief. In his story arc, his unrequited love stems from his chance encounter with Charlie Young's Charlie, who too suffers a broken heart, but goes over the bend. In fact, I would have thought that Eating Air took a huge leaf out of certain aspects of their courtship, especially with the lovers on a bike careening through Hong Kong's underground highways. And Charlie Young I thought did substantially more than the flower vase roles she's more famous for perfecting.While Zhiwu can't speak, it is perhaps this arc that has a lot to say about love in classic WKW pathos. We listen in to the thoughts of Zhiwu as he narrates them in Mandarin voiceovers, such as topics of relationships having their expiration date, and the keeping of someone's memory alive. With Chi-Ming, he consciously rejects someone who takes an extreme liking of him, to go for a random, temporary lover in the form of Karen Mok's Blondie, who again might be another throwback to a similar character back in Chungking Express. But being cautionary here, is yet again the tale of not incurring the wrath of the wrong woman, though I chose to interpret the events in his story thereafter as being one of a set up, or a fix, versus just being a case of coincidental bad luck.And you cannot get away with not talking about frequent WKW collaborator Christopher Doyle's cinematography in this film, with its obtuse angles like a fish eye twitching all around with plenty of kinetic energy, boasting of shots within shots with its use of captured mirror images. Time lapse also gets used quite frequently, giving it a sense of broad fast forwarding motion, with the devil in the details treated quite casually. With a variation of Massive Attack's Karma Coma by Roel Garcia featured in an eclectic soundtrack, it already bowled me over with its collection of songs featured, whereLove stories that don't go anywhere except to serve as personal reminders, familiar pathos as presented by WKW, a star studded cast and excellent visuals and music, easily make this film one of my firm favourites. I suppose I shouldn't waste too much time before embarking on my journey onboard the more illustrious Chungking Express.

MisterWhiplash Wong Kar Wai doesn't play by the rules, and those who respond positively to his films wouldn't want it any other way. While he's recently gone a little more measured and controlled with style (relatively speaking) with In the Mood for Love and 2046, it's mostly in that he's now using things like dollies and steadi-cams. Looking at Chungking Express and, particularly, Fallen Angels, he reveals himself as a filmmaker total in trust with a style that in other hands would be simply amateurish. His camera, led on by Christopher Doyle, follows along these characters like in a slightly feverish documentary, with the accompanied narration adding the emphasis on inner thoughts and details. It's a crime drama, but it's also a fresh way to look at material that has a little bit of quirk, a heap-load of attitude, and at least a good lot of romance, or the lack of it or the pining for it with these characters. It's equally sweet and rough-edged, like an adorable motorcycle.For plot, there's not much: two male characters, one is a hit-man who's starting to feel the pressure of his job (ironically, he describes it as being a good one early on as "I'm a lazy person. I like people to arrange things for me"), and breaks off from his partner, a woman who cleans up his 'messes' of mass destruction, and then falls for a strange blonde girl. The other is a mute ex-con who robs people by being obnoxious at various one-night-stand type of jobs, and in the process meeting a girl whom has a freak-out one night (there's an amazing scene, I should add, where in one shot we see him fall completely for this girl with a soft blues song playing behind him describe this as his first love). At least, that's as much as I gathered from the essentials; there's also a sub-plot with the mute kid, He Zwhiu, and his father as he starts to videotape him all the time. But Wong isn't interested in plot mechanics as two central facets: mood of a scene on technical fronts, and a sensibility that's close to poetic intent.Wong's camera moves in a way that is a little dizzying, and it feels like it should be a shamble, a fiasco of an art-house item that doesn't transition well to the US. But it becomes apparent that its form is, at least, consistent to the intent at hand. We're so aware of the style that the characters are seemingly organic from this urban, post-modern spread. They're more than a little alienated (watch that shot where the woman is in the café, and the fight breaks out behind her without flinching an eyelash to the situation), and they have the tendencies of youth trapped in a situation they can only break out of (for one it's a way of life as work that gets mixed up due to emotions with the partner, the other with his father and going past disrobing the homeless and conning a family with ice cream).Wong Kar Wai presents this amusingly at times, a brisk sense of humor dropped in to let the audience know 'it's OK to laugh here and there, they ARE human after all with all their idiosyncrasies'. But at the same time there's a sorrow to the material that is given life by the hand-held, by the shots of characters in mirrors, by mixed media, by black and white shots thrown in, by editing that cuts off the head of the 180 degree rule here and there, by pumping in sad music and it does come close to diluting the emotional impact of the characters's fates. And yet, Wong has the soul of a romantic at heart, so to speak, and despite the fact that there's some pretty violence scenes in the picture (done in that hyper-speed style that is a little slow, a little fast in a way, as one has seen in many HK crime films) there's an intelligence that steers it from being TOO sloppy.This may be arguable, to be sure, in either direction; some may even call it a masterpiece of post-modernism as well as those who can't stand it period. I don't necessarily think it's even Kar-Wai's best film. But it inspires so many fresh images and thoughts I can't discard it as a warped slip-up from an otherwise avant-garde darling. If anything a film like Fallen Angels lifts up his reputation as the Chinese answer to Godard (minus, of course, the Maoism and the reading excerpts of books on camera).