Review of My Blueberry Nights (2007) by Alexandrion D — 09 Jun 2009

3: I feel about the same after the second viewing as I did after the first. Part of the issue may be that I'm examining the film under the microscope of an avid fan. Kar Wai and Almodovar are essentially the only contemporary geniuses for me (Michael mann is pretty good as well).

This means I am both incredibly critical and incredibly deferential to his work. This truned out to be a minor disappointment to a Kar Wai fan, but luckily I wasn't expecting too much after the film's critical reception.

This film would work fine for a director accustomed to stepping far outside their own comfort zone (i.e. a director that works in varied genre's). In the hands of another director it would be mediocre or normal.

However, Kar Wai makes extraordinarily beautiful and moving pictures of a certain type. He has strayed too far from the familiar here. It's not just the language; there is something else a little off as well.

The concepts and ideas are the same, but the setting is so radically altered as to remove from the rarefied atmosphere one typically associates with his films. The cliche characters, postcard American settings, occasionally clunky dialogue, uncharacteristically flat music, etc all indicate Kar Wai is out of his depth.

The film still has its moments, but they rarely achive the brilliance one expects from the master. You should only write and film what you know and what comes from the heart. This is particularly true with a visionary artist.

The film doesn't quite ring true. There are still some revelatory scenes and images and it still looks like a Kar Wai film for the most part. I do think the absense of Doyle had a significant detrimental effect on the film.

Most significantly for me though, it does not sound like a Kar Wai film. I'm used to his films blending sound and image like no other and transporting the viewer to another realm rarely experienced in the theater.

Here he seems tied down with music he seems to think fits in with the settings and the characters. He's trying to hard to make an American picture. His spanish language love ballads didn't obviously fit with 60's hong Kong, but it worked.

He needed to do the same here. He was too tied down to making it sound like Mamphis, Vegas, etc. He could also use a bit more help making the dialogue work better (comparing the dialogue here to that in The Savages, which I watched the next day, was a bit laughable).

I still enjoyed it immensely, but it's certainly in the lower quarter of Kar Wai films, down with Ashes of Time and As Tears Go By, which I'm about to what again. It's still an admirable work from the master, but I'm hoping his next piece is more customarily brilliant.