We've tended to like most of Wong Kar-Wai's movies, which are generally lush and exciting and erotic and Tony Leung-y, but early in our appreciation of the now 52-year old Hong Kong filmmaker, we found ourselves so furiously bitter over the hours we lost forever to Happy Together -- we know; see ya in the comments -- that we've always taken the extensive praise heaped upon the guy with a pinch of salt.
Well... guess after the widely perceived failures of 2046 and My Blueberry Nights (trailered above), WKW's stock is falling a little. As in: so much so that we've just run across the first full-on takedown of the guy, in Slate Magazine.
After Wong won the best-director prize at Cannes for 1997's Happy Together, he took off in a radical new direction. In the Mood for Love (2000) was an oblique tale of a love affair between Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung, and it was to movies what Sting's The Dream of the Blue Turtles. was to rock: a clear marker that we were now in the land of the middle-aged and the married.
OUCH. It's mean, right, but also -- let's face it -- kind of true, and more distressingly, points to yet another, even more unsavory possibility: that years from now, you will be wildly embarrassed by all those seductions you perpetrated/submitted to using that movie, and possibly the entire rest of Wong's ouevre. (Well, maybe just submitted to, anyways.)
Kind of a bummer, huh? There there, let's have a look at The Hire: The Follow, which you may remember from circa the last Interweb bubble? It features a yummy and mopey Clive Owen and Adriana Lima, and -- at nine minutes long -- may be the tightest thing that Wong's ever done. See ya after the jump.