Reality Cinema 2002 - 2006 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 31

Thirty-first chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

The first clip contains footage from inside the World Trade Center on September 11, and the third includes images of a violent bus hijacking in Brazil. Neither contains graphic content, but as with the Rodney King footage from Chapter 27, it may not be something people are comfortable watching in this context.

View "Chapter 31: Reality Cinema"

Reality Cinema

This was the age of ubiquituous "reality" - reality TV of course, but also a slew of film documentaries, a form that had never been more popular or prolific. This entry contains more documentaries than any other, from historical subjects to on-the-spot current affairs to raw cinema-verite-style concerts. Some of the non-documentary clips reflect this fascination with reality as well, from ultra-low budget "home movies" to the stylized humanism of a prolific and creative Asian cinema.

Yet there's an element of escapism too, not the old-fashioned bang-bang kind, but something more ethereal and moody - a sort of impressionistic daydream stylization reflecting the era of iPod and internet, in which inner space expanded to swallow up a whole generation. Sometimes the two trends (impressionism and realism) merge, as they do in the last clip, a sad and brilliant sequence mirroring the first clip across an unbridgeable gap of time and space. To a certain extent, today's chapter plays like a fitful waking dream, mixing fragments of memory, fantasy, and reality.

Before reverting to a more straightforward title, I considered calling Chapter 31 "Screening Reality" as a play on words, because this was a time not only of reality onscreen but filters and strategies applied to take the edge off of it.

(continued below, along with NSFW warnings)

2046

Writing about Wong Kar-Wai can feel like dancing about architecture, or more accurately, trying to draw a blueprint based on an inexplicably moving dance. Through slow-motion, gorgeous color, music for which the word "evocative" doesn't begin to do justice, exquisite sound design, rhythmic editing, and the sympathetic and often beautiful faces of his actors, Wong's films weave a web of seductive grace, leaving you too bedazzled to resist the narcotic bite of the director. He has us at hello, or rather, at the moment Nat King Cole beckons in his honeyed voice and Zhang Ziyi casts a fleeting, teasing glance in our direction.

Actually, 2046 (2004) is only the third Wong Kar-Wai film I've seen, but there were moments which proved more dreamily overpowering than anything else I'd witnessed in his work (or that of most other filmmakers'). Ultimately, though, I find In the Mood for Love (2000) his richest and most satisfying work overall, and at times 2046 lurks in its shadow. This is appropriate enough given that the latter film is in fact a sequel, or "sequel" as my Netflix sleeve describes it, to Mood. The quotation marks are actually appropriate, as 2046 is often entirely tangential to the earlier film, though more often it is not. Dancing through several lovers, across different genres, and over concurrent late-sixties Christmases, but sticking closely to Mood's protagonist Chow Mo-Wan (Tony Leung) and the hotel in which he stays, the film has its ups and downs, but oh, those ups...