“There’s a lot of slow-motion. The episodes were running up to 8 minutes under. The only way to stretch them out was with slow-motion. And, we, tried to keep the slow-motion away from the dialogue as much as possible, but anything without dialogue was considered for slow-motion.”
-Dean Lerner
Fire Joe Morgan, a blog that satirizes bad sports writing, frequently chastises writers for excessive use of food metaphors, which are apparently frighteningly common in columns about Juan Pierre’s baseball prowess and the importance of not “clogging the bases.” I’m half-tempted to turn FJM’s lens on the reviews for My Blueberry Nights, few of which could resist using dessert puns to peg the movie (recently out on DVD) as an unsubstantial confection. I resist the temptation because as corny as they are, most of them are still pretty accurate.
This is a Kar Wai Wong film in which the lovelorn leave keys at restaurants and eat food immediately before it’s supposed to expire. This is not the first Kar Wai Wong film in which the lovelorn leave keys at restaurants and eat food immediately before it’s supposed to expire. That would be 1994’s Chungking Express, the film that (along with In the Mood For Love and 2046) established Wong as a pared-down romantic with a feel for loosely structured stories and moody, colorful visuals.
The light and airy shades of Chungking are replaced here with heavy red and black brocade, smothered in velvety musical layers of Norah Jones and repeated douses “Try A Little Tenderness” (soundtrack on Blue Note!). Kar-Wai filmed Chungking in 23 days as a break from another film, and it’s characterized by a spontaneity that leaves specific interpretations to the audience. My Blueberry Nights is the opposite, with heavy-handed letter-writing narration that tells the viewer exactly what protagonist Elizabeth (Norah Jones, in her acting debut) is feeling.
Jones herself is actually a respectable blank slate for Wong to slop with cinematic oil paints, but it doesn’t help that she’s upstaged by a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it film debut by fellow singer Chan Marshall (Cat Power) as the one who got away. Jones also doesn’t get much traction playing against Rachel Weisz, Natalie Portman, and Jude Law, who all go over the top and sport ridiculous accents in this film. I’ll admit that my skepticism of Law’s Manchester accent is secondhand, as I am far too much of an American original rube to distinguish between a London and Manchester brogue; I feel a bit more confident in thinking Weisz’s “oh mah gawd” Memphis femme fatale and Portman’s southwestern gambler could only have been greenlighted by a director from halfway around the world.
Visually the film makes more than a few interesting cinematography decisions, and more than a lot of extraneous, terrible ones. The worst are the incredibly distracting speed-change camera effects that produce a sort of stuttering action and, in their frequency, remind me of the explanation from the late, great Darkplace, quoted at the top of this post.
Tags: Cat Power, Chungking Express, Darkplace, Fire Joe Morgan, Food Metaphors, Kar Wai Wong, My Blueberry Nights, Norah Jones, Ridiculous Accents
