Every month Bil Antoniou curates an article picking a collection from The Criterion Channel and sorts its contents into categories – Must-See, Worthy, For The Curious and Skip It. This month the collection was AI.
2046 (Wong Kar-Wai, 2004)
Dakota Arsenault: Back in the year 2000, Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai made his magnum opus, In the Mood for Love, where Chow (Tony Leung) and Su (Maggie Cheung) realize their respective spouses are having an affair together. Chow and Su team up to try to understand how their partners could betray them so brazenly and, despite falling in love with each other, decide they are better than their cheating lovers and will not succumb to such temptations themselves. Four years later, Wong followed that film up with this quasi-sequel that once again stars Tony Leung as Chow, who covers the pain of losing Su by becoming a man about town, always with a different female companion. Chow is a writer and uses his profession as a way to deal with heartache in a way he refuses to do so in real life. The film stars a who’s who of legendary female Chinese actors including Ziyi Zhang (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers), Faye Wong (Chungking Express), Gong Li (Mulan, Memoirs of a Geisha), Carina Lau (Days of Being Wild, Infernal Affairs 2 and 3) and reprising her part from In The Mood For Love briefly is Cheung. These women come and go from Chow’s life, some wanting to settle down with him, which he refuses to reciprocate and others he wishes to be with but his love is unrequited. The AI aspect comes from the fact that Chow wrote a story called 2046 about a special train that takes passengers to moments stuck in time, from when they were their happiest. Chow’s character is the only person to ever want to leave 2046 and on his lonely train ride back, is accompanied by female androids (based on the women in his life). The film deals with loneliness and the inability to change who a person fundamentally is, no matter how hard they try. For Wong completists, this movie is another stunning masterpiece. For people unfamiliar with the director’s work will likely struggle with his non-linear storytelling and disjointed plot. It is a bit of a curious inclusion compared to harder sci-fi films in the same collection.
Dark Star (John Carpenter, 1974)
Dakota Arsenault: Legendary genre director Carpenter made what he called the most impressive student film ever made, and managed to get distributors interested in it, investing more capital which allowed Carpenter to shoot more scenes and pad it out to feature film length. Co-written by Dan O’Bannon, who also stars and would later go on to the original Alien movie and Total Recall, it depicts the crew of the ship Dark Star going around blowing up dead planets. They’re on year twenty of their mission and things keep going wrong, their original commander dies after being electrocuted by his chair and is now kept frozen but has the ability to still talk to crewmembers. Pinback (O’Bannon) has kept an alien as the ship’s mascot in a storage closet but it gets out and terrorizes him in the ship’s hull (which certainly sounds a lot like another movie written by O’Bannon mentioned above). The ship keeps malfunctioning and one of the bombs meant to be dropped on a target starts giving the crew attitude and refuses to acknowledge potential malfunctions. You certainly see the low budget in areas, the alien is just a giant beach ball with claws, space suits are just kids’ toy helmets and buttons on the console are ice cube trays with lights, but the film is pretty charming and funny in a stoner kind of way. There is little here to predict the future genius of Carpenter we would get with the likes of The Thing, Halloween or Escape From New York, other than the terrific score. If you are a Carpenter completist, you likely have already seen this film, if you’re not, it isn’t the end of the world to skip it.
