My Blueberry Nights (2008)

Caught this at the Charles a few weeks ago with a friend who's also a big Wong Kar Wai fan. So we were both pretty excited for the director's first english language outing. Some foreign directors score big time with english debuts (Wim Wenders' The American Friend) and some don't (John Woo's Hard Boiled?) This was somewhere in between for me. My bud liked it and I was just kind of okay with it.

Something seemed off, and a lot of it was the dialogue between Jeremy (Jude Law) and Elizabeth (Norah Jones), which felt too self-consciously metaphorical. Like when he tells her that at the end of every night the apple and peach pies are totally eaten, but there's always an entire blueberry pie left. "There's nothing wrong with the blueberry pie. Just... people make other choices. You can't blame the blueberry pie, just... no one wants it.", Jeremy says. A lot of conversations were like that, hammering us over the head with introspect and symbolism. I liked it better when these kind of ideas were treated more playfully, as in Chungking Express and Happy Together.

But it could also be that Wong Kar Wai's dialogue feels better, like more poetic, when subtitled as in his other films. It didn't seem to have the same effect on me hearing it in English. The lines sort of felt incongruous to the character's mannerisms and actions, especially the David Straitharn/Rachel Weisz section. They played the parts to a T, but the script kept those scenes from being completely believable for me.

I liked all the acting, except for Norah Jones, who was pretty flat. There's also just something really wrong with watching Norah Jones make out with a guy while a Norah Jones song is playing in the background. Throw one more Norah Jones in there and we're in, like, some tunnel that leads to Norah Jones' brain or something.