Results tagged “happytogether”

Once the beauty and longing of Hong Kong director Wong Kar Wai's films get their hooks into you, it's difficult to break free. And really, who would want to? Gothamist knows we're a willing captive to his emotionally distant characters, sumptuous settings and deliberate pacing.

BAM's Rose Cinema will be showing the films of Wong Kar-Wai starting this weekend, in their program, Living in Dreams: Films of Wong Kar-Wai. Wong's work is romantic, and moves between being hilarious to unbelievably sad. The first film, on Friday, is Happy Together, with the late Leslie Cheung and Tony Leung as lovers in Buenos Aires, and on Saturday, Chungking Express will be shown. Chungking Express is one of Gothamist's favorite films, with two stories in one film, both of which jump out with more life than a month of Hollywood release. And In the Mood for Love, which screens next Saturday, on the 22nd, is one of the best films in the past five years, period. Even less acclaimed films like Days of Being Wild, Ashes of Time and Fallen Angels are great to get more of an idea of Wong's stylization.

The best cop movie Gothamist has seen this year, Infernal Affairs, has been chosen as Hong Kong's official selection for Best Foreign Film consideration for the 2003 Academy Awards (meaning, the Academy Awards that will honor films from 2003, but will be broadcast in 2004). The premise is simple and complicated, as the plot description from IMDB indicates: It's surprisingly sophisticated, given it is from Hong Kong (but that doesn't mean there aren't lapses into cheesy interludes when women are around). Truly, the four main performances, of the undercover, his supervisor, the mole, his mob boss, are what drive the film. And Brad Pitt bought the remake rights to the film, but Gothamist doesn't know what that means.

Leslie Cheung, renowned Canto pop singer and actor, jumped to his death in Hong Kong. It's unclear why, but he did have a suicide letter. He starred in John Woo's A Better Tomorrow as well as Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine and Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together.