The Grandmaster (Wong Kar-Wai, 2013, 108-minute US version) — This was
Ashes of Time Redux redux for me. Wong in these films is just too much of a tinkerer for me. He doesn't have a clear final vision for these films (the varying cuts being the most obvious evidence of that). Critics like
David Bordwell can try to argue that deficit into an asset — "Since Wong makes his movies out of pieces that can be recombined in many ways, each film is like a kaleidoscope. Shake it, and the pieces reconfigure." — but I don't buy it. It starts at the shot-level for me. Wong seems to be a visual fetishist who wants each shot to be perfect, so he micro-manages them in post-production, slowing them down to just the right speed to fit the tempo of the moment (with that really hideous, stuttering slow motion of his) — but without seeing the forest through the trees in his editing. Bordwell, again, treats this visual "fragmentation" as something to be objectively celebrated, but his arguments really read like academic apologism to me. Subjectively, I hate it in this film. Chopping up Philippe Le Sourd's cinematography here is like having Michael Bay edit a Fred Astaire dance number. Some people might like it, but I'm not among them. I don't know why Wong even bothered to shoot on film here since he digitally over-processes the images in post to the point where the celluloid is unrecognizable. And I really don't know how
The Grandmaster won a Filmspot for Art Direction since 85% of the film is shot in close-up, with the bulk of the art direction out of focus.
Anyway, enough ranting. It's not a horrible film, but one that's falls short of being successful for me. Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi both look their usual pretty and cool selves, but it's really only Wang Qingxiang who carries a true cinematic presence here and doesn't look like he's just in a Rolex commercial. I assume the international cuts are superior because the linearity of the US cut (aided by subpar narration and mometum-arresting intertitles) highlights the film's biopic nature in all the worst ways.
Grade: C+
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