My Blueberry Nights



Written and Directed
by Wong Kar Wai

It's a truism that every major director winds up making films in English eventually. After all, the American market counts for half of all tickets sold, and if you can make it anywhere, you can make it here. Wong Kar Wai has decided that the only way he can make it in the big time was to make an American film, and this is it.

Jeremy(Jude Law) owns a café in the Russian section of Brooklyn called little Odessa, Elizabeth(Norah Jones) goes in one day looking for her boyfriend in order to give him back his key, they're breaking up. They talk. He tells her about pie and how various types sell. IT seems that nobody likes blueberry, so Lizzie gets a slice.

She comes back, and a possible, tentative romance develops, then she decides to leave New York and heads off to Nashville, Tennessee, where she befriends a drunken cop named Arnie(David Strathairn), who's in mourning for his lost love Sue Lynne(Rachel Weisz), who's very much still there and having a wonderful time in the same bar where Arnie is drinking himself to death.

Then after the tragedy, Lizzie moves to Nevada, having an adventure with a gambler named Leslie(Natalie Portman)
all the while, Jeremy is back home waiting for her.

This isn't exactly a plot-driven movie, but rather a series of character studies. The problem is that the characters the director is studying aren't particularly interesting, and with boring people leading boring lives of quiet desperation there isn't really much entertainment value. The acting is fine, but with a paper thin film like this, you have to have more than pretty faces looking sad. Oh well, maybe when it comes to cable.