The Incredible Shrinking Man, 1957, Jack Arnold, U.S.Anatomy of a Murder, 1959, Otto Preminger, U.S.You will fall in love with that song (if you haven’t already) after watching this movie. California Dreamin by the Mamas and the Papas. There’s Something About Mary,1998, Bobby and Peter Farrelly, U.S. Available On Streaming Rental or Purchase.Diabolique (Les Diaboliques), 1955, Henri-Georges Clouzot, France.Tenth Avenue Angel, 1949, Roy Rowland, U.S.Gone With the Wind, 1939, Victor Fleming, U.S.Strangelove: or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb That Old Feeling: Secrets of the All-Time 100.Two heartsick Hong Kong cops (Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung), both jilted by ex-lovers. The whiplash, double-pronged Chungking Express is one of the defining works of 1990s cinema and the film that made Wong Kar Wai an instant icon. Isn’t it lovely, then, that Wong Kar-wai is always in that mood? Wong Kar Wai, Hong Kong 1994, 102 min., Cantonese with English subtitles. The love story is a genre inexplicably ignored by both art-house and commercial directors. With his two essential collaborators, cinematographer Christopher Doyle and designer William Chang, Wong weaves a tapestry of longing and seduction that puts both the characters and the audience in the mood for love. It’s a set because the film tells two stories: one of young Takeshi Kaneshiro falling for ageless Brigitte Lin, the other pairing Hong Kong cop Tony Leung Chiu-wai with the elfin beauty Faye Wong. That ritual will end on May 1 - his twenty-fifth birthday - which if she does not return to him by then, he will come to the conclusion that it is not a joke and try to move on without her.
He goes through a daily ritual to deal with the news, he hoping the break up is a joke seeing as to the day she tells him. Wong might have gone higher with the Eastern Western Ashes of Time, and deeper with that aching epic 2046, but we’ll choose the more lighthearted Chungking Express as an admirable starter set. On April 1, 1994, May, his girlfriend of five years, breaks up with him. It is atmosphere used to create the most fleeting or lasting emotion, a mix of longing gazes, swirling cigarette smoke, double-printed slo-mo images and the Colony’s most gorgeous actors. The epitome and apotheosis of art-house romance in the 90s, Wong Kar-wai developed a style like no other director -though, as his renown grew beyond China, dozens tried.
Cast: Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung Chiu Wai Get This Movie Wong Kar-wai’s cinematic touch in ‘Chungking Express’ and ‘In the Mood for Love’.