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India Press Store - My Blueberry Nights (The Miriam Collection)
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List Price: $19.98
Our Price: $12.78
Your Save: $ 7.20 ( 36% )
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
Manufacturer: Weinstein Company
Starring: Jude Law, Norah Jones, Chad R. Davis, Katya Blumenberg, John Malloy (III)
Directed By: Kar Wai Wong
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Audience Rating: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
Binding: DVD
EAN: 0796019813464
Format: Color
Label: Weinstein Company
Manufacturer: Weinstein Company
Number Of Items: 1
Publisher: Weinstein Company
Region Code: 1
Release Date: 2008-07-01
Running Time: 95
Studio: Weinstein Company
Theatrical Release Date: 2007
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: Could have been so much; became so little...
Comment: I really wanted to like this movie. I remember when the buzz surrounding this movie started flooding in during the beginning of 2007 and everyone was predicting it for all kinds of awards beings that it was Kar Wai Wong's first English language film and the casting of singer songwriter Norah Jones in the lead role was particularly interesting. I waited patiently for the buzz to turn into full-fledged madness but it seemed as if no sooner did the buzz begin then the buzz died and before I knew it the film wasn't even being released for a wide release and I had to wait until it was available on DVD before I could see it. Regardless of the fact that it managed only one nomination (at Cannes mind you) I still really wanted to see this film, and so I did, and now that Cannes nomination baffles me, because `My Blueberry Nights' is very disappointing.
`My Blueberry Nights' gets off to a sour start. In fact for the first twenty minutes or so absolutely nothing happens. We see Elizabeth, a frantic stalker-type ex-girlfriend going in and out of a bakery where she continues to ask the owner Jeremy if he has seen the man she was last in there with and they eat some pie and she watches some surveillance videos and cries and she gives him her keys to give to her ex and then she picks up and leaves town. I know that sounds like a lot, but it's not when you watch it. It's slow moving and rather vapid.
In fact the whole movie feels rather vapid.
There are a lot of critics who talk about Kar Wai Wong's infatuation with lovesickness, but I really didn't gather that here. I saw glimpses of it, sure, but overall the feeling I was left with was more empty than fulfilled. Sadly this was the first Kar Wai Wong film I have seen (but I do have `In the Mood for Love' in my Netflix queue) and I am left a little confused as to why this director is so lauded. I will allow his other films to change my mind though.
The acting is decent for the most part, excels in some areas and falls flat in others. Norah Jones is beyond doubt a phenomenal singer and musician. Her music touches my soul. Her acting is uninspired and bland. There is a part in the film when Faison's character says quite frankly to Weisz's character that he doesn't know what her ex-husband ever saw in her. As he was speaking those words I was thinking the same thing, but about Jones's character, wondering how anyone could find her remotely interesting. Her eyes are dead and she embodies no real emotion. Jude Law is charming across the board; a little obnoxious in some areas but overall strong. David Strathairn is stronger still as the alcoholic police officer Arnie. His subtle outbursts within his own skin are far too good for the movie he inhabits. Rachel Weisz is probably the most entertaining thing about this movie in the way that Thandie Newton is the most entertaining thing about `Crash'; a little uneven but uneven to perfection. Natalie Portman is entertaining yet nothing impressive. Her performance is decent, but doesn't really add anything to her character.
I also found the incessant, repetitive use of Norah Jones's music throughout the beginning portion of the film to be rather unnecessary and annoying.
By the time the film was wrapping up I was wondering what it was all about, what the whole purpose of this exercise was. Sure, Elizabeth was supposed to find herself out on the road with all these people she doesn't understand and eventually realize that Jeremy is the one she wants to be with, but that point could have been delivered a little clearer and a little more interestingly. I just found `My Blueberry Nights' to be a waste of talent and concept and apparently director, unless all of his films are like this and I'm just not intelligent enough to `get' them.
Customer Rating:
Summary: I want my money back.
Comment: I rented this from Blockbuster and should have taken heed to my instinct to put it back on the shelf when I read the sticker proclaiming it to be a Blockbuster exclusive rental.
I was lured in by the cast and the art house feel. Ten minuted into the film, however, I found myself wondering: "is this it???". I kept waiting for it to begin but it never did. Jude Law and Natalie Portman were really the only interesting characters in the movie and their bits were so minute compared to the entirely lackluster Nora Jones that I kept wondering to myself if the rest of the cast would add this film to their shame list and forget they ever participated in this disaster.
As for the arthouse feel, think in terms of the cinemagraphic tricks used in music videos and video snapshots of subways in New York where everything seems purposely sped up and blurred for effect. Now imagine an entire film of that. It's exhausting.
As to be expected with such a gifted lead, though, there was some lovely music to keep me company throughout the numbing dialogue and impersonal directing. Other than that, it's painful.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Diners, Trains, Gamblers, Love in Slo-Mo
Comment: "My Blueberry Nights" represents Wong Kar Wai at the peak of his craft. Not the stylistic transition I had expected as much as a translation of a directors vocabulary into a different spoken language. Which seems to make little difference, as Mr. Wong speaks a cinematic language that is both all his own and universal.
Each slow-mo blur and obstructed frame has as much poetry in it as a line of Shakespeare. Wong motifs abound-- Trains, clocks, diners, female gamblers, policemen, the down on their life and luck and looking for love. (Is the similarity of the names Su Li-Zhen and Sue Lynn mere chance?) From "Days of Being Wild" to this latest film, Wong's work is connected by a thematic thread. It is to his credit that repetition, even if deliberate ("In the Mood for Love" and "2046" come immediately to mind, as do the fraternal twins "Chungking Express" and "Fallen Angels"), does not indicate a lack of invention, a creative rut but rather a prevailing vision.
First-time actor Nora Jones (I must admit I winced at the prospect when I first read the news) acquits herself with charm and grace and the rest of the cast performs flawlessly, with David Strathairn perhaps being the standout. When one takes into account that, despite the crediting of two screenwriters, much of the dialogue is improvised by the the actors, as is Wong's wont, the strength of the performances stands out in greater relief.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Plot does not deliver
Comment: You would think with such a powerful cast..Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Norah Jones and Natalie Portman that there would be a script that could complement their talents. Norah Jones is a woman trying to find herself and goes cross country before discovering that what she wanted was where she left it in NYC. Jude Law does nothing more than smoke a few cigarettes, wipe bar tables and serve Blueberry pie. This movie drags along and has a predictable ending. There are much better rentals than this one. Definitely do not buy!! Have you ever watched a romantic comedy that did not make you laugh? I'll never try Blueberry pie again!!
Customer Rating:
Summary: Neon Bright Infusion
Comment: There is much in Wong Kar-Wai's first all English production to admire, but the cast, the dialogue, and the translation of Asian aesthetics unto accent-dimmed performances is so pronounced we have no option but to enjoy the movie solely for its artistic merit while lamenting its prosaic shortcomings. The usual antics and brilliance of the director are all deployed to a whimsical effectiveness, if sometimes deliberately indulged. The usual close-ups and askance visual is present frame after frame, with opaque intrusions, slantwise peering, obstructed lavishness, and aided by the diner/pub setting the movie is infused with neon latency. In fact the plot is simple and very bleak. Action hardly ever takes place during the day, save for the occasional interlude which seems to be a way to mark as pronounced the comparative glare that the night offers. At times we have the camera slide its intensity along a bar or a table, stolidly stuck on a fork pricking through a slice of pie, or meandering about the outskirts of a bar, column after column, shadows crawling senselessly through a disorderly tension that seems innocent enough to hide behind the crevices of our visual. Overall the very Asian aesthetic quality of the camerawork tellingly foreshadows a candor that has us become voyeurs more so than spectators. In Asian culture it is best not to invade one's private space and here it is carried out to such beauty that it offers a sense of indiscreet respect.
Where the movie falters however is in its casting, of which some are excellent artists used in a middling unfortunate fashion. Jude Law and Natalie Portman are sensational actors but oddly cast in the drama. Their intensity is unique but too forceful for the narrative introspective layover. The graceful Norah Jones is very mediocre. She has promise but the flick rests too much on her inner turmoil to be successful since she cannot be the keystone of the narrative in a way to match the intensity and bravado of her colleagues. The story is very simple. Elizabeth is stuck on her boyfriend whose just broken-up with her. She will have to labor through her incredulousness and inability to let go. The diner's owner, played by Jude Law offers her a shoulder and an ear while terribly straining the poetic attitude of the atmosphere by introducing a dialogue that metaphor driven closes the doors it chances to open. In fact while observing the action from behind window panes or timidly joining the session while tip-toeing about a door left ajar we discover a tenuous delicacy of touch that is as fragile as Norah Jones' performance.
David Strathairn, cast as Arnie, the alcoholic policeman who cannot let go of his wife, strikes a rapport of morbid proportions with Lizzie. While on a lovelorn escapade to Memphis, Lizzie nurses her loss and begins to recover, but in the process as she learns to give up, somehow that same sense of absence transfers to Arnie who is separated from a wife who wants nothing to do with him. The perfection of his character study and depth only highlights the misses of the others, including Arnie's estranged wife Sue Lynne (Rachel Weisz). Arnie gives up on a night of madness and overglowing anger but determines to commit suicide. Enters Natalie Portman, a southern vixen with a penchant for gambling.
The neon-hued camerawork receives added sheen from a trip to Vegas on a brand new Jaguar, only to find out that the every win is also a loss. Ultimately that is the upshot of the narrative which is brightly demented by the braggadocio devil-may care sensibility of Leslie (Natalie Portman). The death of Leslie's father causes a reunion between Lizzie and the diner's proprietor Jeremy, who functions as the jar of sweets everyone is sure with due time Lizzie will find her way to. Time spent through glowing hues that distil an aura of hopeless references and tame performances that jarr all the more because uninspired while beset by the contrasting tenderness of the visual.
A movie worth watching, because of the addictive intensity provided by the camerawork of Darius Khondji, but the elegiac tone of a "Chungking Express" or "In the Mood for Love" is affected by the sobering vapidity of a plot that plays with the notion of loss and gain by using a maudlin dialogue and a cloyed, exhausted attempt at allegorizing by way of sappy, overburdened poetics.
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Editorial Reviews:
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Oscar® nominee* Jude Law (The Talented Mr. Ripley, Cold Mountain) and Grammy® Award-winning singer Norah Jones star in this "ravishing triumph... [of] pure romantic sensibility" (Armond White, New York Press). Law plays a big-hearted owner of a small New York diner who tries to soothe Jones' jilted heart with his blueberry pie. But only after going on a year-long cross-country odyssey does she realize love was right at her doorstep all along. Gorgeously filmed by award-winning director Wong Kar Wai (In The Mood For Love) and featuring Oscar® winner** Rachel Weisz (The Constant Gardener) and Oscar® nominees*** Natalie Portman (Closer, Garden State) and David Strathairn (Good Night, and Good Luck), My Blueberry Nights is an optimistic ode to love and "one of the best movies of the year!" (Andrew Sarris, New York Observer).
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