The Guardian has a clip from Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, which apparently opens in the UK this week, and it looks TERRIBLE. Well, actually, it *looks* lovely, but the clip is interminable. A smug-faced Jude Law spouting ludicrous pie metaphors, Norah Jones rocking the up-inflected, hand-wringing, school-play style of acting. Luckily when Cat Power starts singing, they stop talking, which is some kind of improvement, but the drippy, moony gazes over the dessert, and the magical realist melty ice cream animation are still awful. Watch it here, and read about the film’s US release date limbo here.

Via The Reeler comes news that Wong Kar Wai’s My Blueberry Nights, the Hong Kong auteur’s English language debut, which opened the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, has been bumped from its Valentine’s Day release date to early April. Release date delays of multiple months are rarely considered a positive sign––especially when we’re talking about a film that was mostly excoriated by the international press at the one and only film festival at which it screened––but in this case, I don’t know.

The Weinsteins haven’t started to promote Blueberry in earnest, so it’s not like they’re throwing away money already spent. There’s plenty of datey competition the first two weeks of February (although, it should be noted, nothing remotely arty or adult), with TWC’s own Diary of the Dead slotted in as Valentine’s counter-programming on the 15th. If nothing else, moving Blueberry to April gives the struggling Weinsteins time to support it without dividing their resources, which is what I blame for their inability to effectively platform either Control or I’m Not There.

But in that case, why not put it at the end of the month and try to relaunch it at Tribeca––a festival that, at least historically, LOVES throwing big, stupid premieres to launch star-studded product? Maybe this is actually a sign that Tribeca meant it when they said they were going to downsize and generally try to be less ridiculous. If so, good news all around!

Bryan Appleyard takes a look at the artists who died in 2007 for The Times, and says a few infuriating things about the state of comtemporary filmmaking in the process. The thrust of the piece is a bit of Summer 2007 nostalgia: “The deaths of Antonioni and Bergman drew painful attention to the lack of great European auteurs.” Post-colonial angst is SO exhausting, but let’s engage with it anyway, shall we?

In assessing the year’s disappointments, Appleyard lumps Quentin Tarantino in with Francis Ford Coppola and Philip Roth as artists “who did not die but, somehow, faded.” He dismisses Tarantino on the grounds that Kill Bill was “dismal” (although, both critically and commercially, it was undeniably successful, at least in the States). Death Proof also gets an unrealistic drubbing. In calling Tarantino’s half of Grindhouse “not so much a film as an act of pathological self-indulgence [which] convinced even some of his most devoted fans that the game was up,” Appleyard ignores the fact that Death Proof, which beat out films like Sweeney Todd, The Lives of Others and Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead in indieWIRE’s comprehensive 2007 critics poll, is widely considered to be the chunk of Grindhouse that could actually stand on its own.

When Appleyard moves on to consider candidates for The New Film Auteur (with a straight face, as if there’s going to be an election, or maybe a competition show on Bravo), his logic betrays even more personal bias.

…Read more

Could there be more chatter out there about Wong Kar Wai’s new film, My Blueberry Nights, which opened the Cannes Film Festival? I doubt it. It’s strange, because I’m not even convinced that people think it’s a great film, but it sure has created a lot of buzz. (Maybe it has something to do with how long people had to stand in line to get in and how many people got turned away and what color their film festival badges were…or it could have more to do with the acting debut of Norah Jones?)

Erica Abeel from the Filmmaker Magazine blog sums up what most people seem to be saying: “…it seems almost sacrilegious to report that “Blueberry,” the Hong Kong auteur’s first English-language production, and his first film set and shot in the U.S., is gorgeous to look at, but not a helluva lot more. In fact, the screening in the packed Salle Debussy was greeted with only a smattering of anemic applause.”

Similarly, from Cinematical: “My Blueberry Nights is so beautifully shot, though, that you’d be excused for thinking that the quality of the performances is almost irrelevant; each scene is a symphony of color and light, each frame exquisitely shaped by the play of pigment and shade. New York is caught in blue, wintry tones; Memphis in deep, relaxed browns; Nevada’s casinos come alive in jittery crimson. It’s too bad that we can’t quite believe in the characters within those gorgeous visions, though.”

And I found this opinion interesting, from Isabella Ho, a film scholar from Taiwan. She observes that two accomplished Asian directors–Wong Kar Wai and Hou Hsiao Hsien from Taiwan–are at Cannes with their first films not shot in their native languages. It made me think of Alfonso Cuaron (Children of Men) and Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritus (Babel), both Spanish-speaking filmmakers with big 2006 hits in English. (I wrote a post a few months back about all the attention being given to Mexican cinema.) Here’s what Isabella Ho has to say:

“I think it’s very sad that these directors are driven to make movies outside their home countries and in other languages,” said Ho, a representative of Taiwan film distributor cum production company CMC. “Their home audience doesn’t seem to appreciate the stories they are trying to tell.”

Is it sad? I can see sad aspects about it, but I don’t know if they outweigh the benefits of Wong Kar Wai being able to just make the film he wants to visually make. After all, it sounds like My Blueberry Nights could be a movie to watch with the sound on mute, anyway.

You can read even more about My Blueberry Nights here on indieWIRE, here on GreenCine Daily, here on the Filmmaker Magazine blog, and here on the Risky Business blog.