Chunking Express or Fallen Angels..
Which is the best...
shareChungking Express without fail!
Fallen Angels.
Chungking is overrated.
There were a few things I thought about Fallen Angels that were off with me.
Blondie being too one dimentional and annoying haha.
Leon Lai's hitman seemed too babyfaced and studenty, I wasn't convinced or engaged by him sadly. It should have been Tony!
I think just having Tony's presence would have made Fallen Angels on equal footing for me :)
I can't imagine how Chungking Express would be overrated. It was done in such a short time and was more of a side project of wong kar wai, so it is meant to be simple because it was made simply by WKW.
Fallen Angels was a bit more ambitious than CE but unfortunately, while great in it's own right with incredibly touching scenes (the last scene, the father-video camera scene) I felt Chungking Express was better simply because it was more succinct and didn't seem to jumbled, which Fallen Angels did at times.
Furthermore, Kaneshiro is fantastic in FA, but Reis and Lai didn't do it for me so much. Reis' character was engaging, but you didn't really see enough of her to get a sense of who she was. Lai's character was dark and brooding, which hooked me from the start, but like one poster stated earlier, his babyfaced-look and persona didn't quite match with the viciousness of his character. Not that they weren't good performances, but compared to the threesome of Leung, Kaneshiro and Faye Wong from CE, it doesn't really compare.
Overall I liked FA, but in comparison to other WKW films, i was a little disappointed. It brought itself up at the end, and ending i actually liked better than CE's, but overall, CE was a much better film simply on the fact that it didn't go all over the place too much like FA.
I guess all over the place was why I prefer Fallen Angels, and my favorites are 2046, Days of Being Wild and Fallen Angels.
What I love about WKW's films is that his films seem to have empathy for people who deserved to be loved, are capable of loving, but are never at the right place, or, when they do, it's not the right time. It's during those shifting that we starts to see how one character could be a perfect match for another unrelated story. Or when they do cross over each other's story and meet, the characters had already changed, and they're meeting a different person, which, won't work.
And it's this juggling of fate of people, time and space that I find alluring, and uniquely WKW.
Same for me.
shareChungking Express. FA kind of loses momentum halfway through. Still, plenty of pretty images and music there.
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