The Los Angeles Fallen Angels of Anaheim

So, I've been picking up some movies since I've been working at Laser Blazer. Last night, I watched Fallen Angels, a very strange Wong Kar-Wai film from the mid-90's. It was his follow-up to the justifiably well-received Chungking Express, which really made him an international name in cinema the year before.

Angels was a lot like Chungking, but even more haunting and stylish. I'm not sure it was as involving as that other film, and he really overuses this distorted, fish-eye lens that makes everything in the foreground appear disproportionately large. But other than these quibbles, it's an almost hypnotically good movie. You find yourself being sucked into its odd underworld of tormented lovers and killers.

The plot concerns a hitman who works with a female partner he's never seen. She deals with all the logistical work, while he takes care of the actual killing. Also, there's a mute who invades storefronts at night, opening them for business while the owners are away. And a girl in a blonde wig. That's about it. The movie's not about plot at all, but about creating a sort of hyperkinetic live-action comic book bursting with energy and visual ingenuity.

In Ebert's old review, he basically agrees with my take, adding in that he doesn't feel "regular" moviegoers would enjoy this movie. I suppose that I agree, although every once in a while, a truly weird, visionary filmmaker manages to enter the mainstream, even if its only for a film or two. But, yeah, most people would be turned off by Fallen Angels' lack of structure. There is very little narrative momentum. Things happen and then other things happen, and if you're not intrigued by the way the story is unfolding before you, I wager you'd get bored fairly easily.

It's a theme with Asian films I've watched recently. I showed my friend Vineet and roommate Nathan Ichi the Killer, and we had a similar conversation, about how the movie's only a third of a story, really, and watching it is about investing in the world, really "seeing" the universe created by the filmmakers rather than whizzing past it to follow some labrynthine, bogus storyline. And I saw Versus along with my friend Aaron a while back, and had the same conversation with him (although that film is far inferior to Ichi or Fallen Angels). The story in that movie could not be more simplistic if it tried - a bunch of guys walk into a forest and a massive fight breaks out with some zombies.

I wish American filmmakers felt they had some level of freedom to work visually, rather than filling their movies with constant, dull exposition. I mean, I really loved Sky Captain earlier this year, but it would have been even better if there was about half as much storyline and dialogue, and twice as many sweeping shots of animated killer robots.

By the way, I see that Kar-Wai's next film is listed on IMDB as The Lady from Shanghai. Could it be a remake of the Orson Welles classic? He would be kind of the perfect modern director to take a stab at that film, although improving on the finale in the House of Mirrors is pretty much an impossibility.