My Blueberry Nights (DVD)

Among the art-house circles of film snobbery I often find myself enamored, Chinese director Wong Kar Wai has a reputation for making beautiful, stylized films like 2046 and In the Mood for Love. I don't think I've ever heard a bad word said about any of his work. Want to know something else I've ever heard anyone point out? Wong Kar Wai makes films exclusively for middle-aged NPR listeners who want to seem "hip" and "avante garde". This piece is essential to understanding My Blueberry Nights, his miscarriage of an English debut.

Revolving around the morose Elizabeth (Norah Jones, whose acting is just as boring as her music) and her soul-searching odyssey across the country, My Blueberry Nights is little more than a series of lush images which, while admittedly beautiful, just don't add up. Kar Wai seems to be trying to use the images to capture the feeling of falling in love, but it doesn't work for him. Directors like David Lynch excel at this storytelling technique, but they actually manage to provide substance to be eventually uncovered. Even at their densest, there is still a point somewhere. Kar Wai forgets this, and if it were not for the clumsy diner book-ends where Jude Law's Jeremy serves Elizabeth pie, My Blueberry Nights would be little more than a mess of human suffering. David Strathairn, Rachel Weisz, and Natalie Portman are all wasted as various miserable plot devices that serve no function other than to move Elizabeth onto the next set of pretty images. Needless to say, this shit gets pretty old pretty fast and I have a hard time imagining the kind of people that would be legitimately satisfied by My Blueberry Nights. It's a mess.

The special features are just as bad as the movie. A making of and a Q&A with Wong Kar Wai will satisfy the pretentious but will bore the people who can see that this emperor has no clothes. Lastly, a still gallery and theatrical trailer make the back of the DVD case look less empty.

Despite its artsy pedigree, My Blueberry Nights is a complete misfire of a movie. It may be visually interesting (never stunning) on occasion, but the overall effect is much more like having far too much candy than anything else. You'll feel sick, and the people who tell you otherwise will just be lying.