Fallen Angels
by Wong Kar-Wai
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Charlie Yeung, Karen Mok, Leon Lai, Michelle Reis, Takeshi KaneshiroDirector: Wong Kar-Wai
Brand: Kino International
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Subtitled); Cantonese (Original Language)
Format: Closed-captioned, Color, DVD, NTSC, Original recording remastered, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 96 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-10-19
Audience Rating: Unrated
Studio: Kino Video
Movie Reviews of Fallen Angels
Movie Review: Sundown in the City
Summary: 5 Stars
Wong Kar-Wai is the modern cinema's premier poet of loss and longing. His characteristically enigmatic films capture the erratic rhythms and ephemeral nature of memory and torment: fleeting, fragmented, wandering only to return obsessively to its central foci.
While Wong's debut, "As Tears Go By", was a relatively straightforward commercial riff on Scorsese's "Mean Streets" and the 'heroic bloodshed' style of Hong Kong street opera pioneered by action maestro John Woo, he would establish with "Days of Being Wild" and "Chungking Express" a signature style characterized by visual bravura mixed with interwoven and intensely introspective tales of emotionally isolated young people adrift in the shadow kingdom of urban postmodernity. Eschewing more traditional narrative formats for an ellipitical self-referrentiality that mirrors memory itself, Wong's films are rarely instantly accessible, but reward the patient viewer with intoxicating moods and contemplative brilliance.
"Fallen Angels" was originally conceived as something of a 'nightside' sequal/companion piece to "Chungking Express." Structurally and thematically it mirrors the latter with two seperate plotlines, each centering on a pair of twentysomethings (a hitman and his female 'agent' in one and a strange, mute confidence man and the girl he takes a shine to in the other) in search of love but unable or unwilling to find it in each other. Assorted camera tricks, fish eye lenses, slow motion sequences and the strategic use of a gloriously bittersweet pop soundtrack all help to capture a mood of frantic desperation and the distortions of memory and longing.
Wong also invokes the first of his 'art' films, "Days of Being Wild," returning to its concern with the loss and meaning of identity in an impersonal world. Leon Lai's hitman and Takeshi Kaneshiro's petty criminal both try - and fail - to remake their lives on ths straight and narrow. One of them manages a peace of sorts with his failure - the other goes out out in a bittersweet blaze of glory. Wong also explores the way in which longing (mis)identifies others: his characters view each other through the distorted lens memory and desire - what they see is not reality, but a projection of their own dreams - and when the truth is made manifest, it is always the cruelest blow.
Summary of Fallen Angels
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