The movies of David Cronenberg inspire strong opinions. Here’s the blurb they put on the video box for “Crash,” released in 1996: “‘… sex and car crashes …’ — Janet Maslin, New York Times.”

Yup, that’s “Crash,” all right. Maslin might have added “… a film …,” but basically, she captured it. And really, what else can you say about that flick, which cataloged the adventures of people who stage serious auto accidents for erotic stimulation? Well — you could call it hypnotic; creepy; fascinating; repellent; pornographic; tedious; bizarre; very stylish; a tour de force; a complete waste of time and money. Only please, try to remember which Cronenberg movie you’re describing — when summarizing critical reaction to the 13 feature films he’s made over the past 25 years, the adjectives tend to be interchangeable.

What to do with David Cronenberg? A Canadian who never went south, an exploitation horror king who revealed himself to be a genuine auteur, a B-movie Fellini who jumped to the A-list while pursuing the very same themes that once saw him reviled in the Canadian Parliament as a public menace.

The local video store doesn’t know what to do with him: “Crash” sits on a shelf right beside La Toya Jackson’s Playboy video. Hollywood couldn’t figure him out: After Cronenberg seemed at last to be going mainstream by filming Stephen King’s “The Dead Zone” in 1983, he received offers to direct “Flashdance,” “Top Gun” and “Beverly Hills Cop.” One can’t help wondering what a different world we’d be living in if the director had accepted any of those offers. And critics can’t make up their minds, either. “In Cronenberg’s hands,” wrote critic Stephen Schiff about the 1979 film “The Brood,” “horror is no longer a disreputable bastard genre but a new avenue of expression, gleaming with possibility.” “Halliwell’s Film Guide” called the movie “idiotic and repellent.”

Born in Toronto in 1943, with a freelance writer and a dancer for parents and a home filled with books and art, Cronenberg enjoyed an enlightened upbringing rare for that straight-laced time and place. (Since Louis St. Laurent was Canada’s prime minister from 1948-57, this period is known in Canada as the Eisenhower era.) Cronenberg admits that he was not your average tyke. “When I grew up,” he told interviewer Chris Rodley in the book “Cronenberg on Cronenberg,” “most other kids weren’t into watching praying mantises eating grasshoppers.”

His early interests were fiction and science. He never saw them as incompatible. “I had a great English teacher and a great science teacher,” he tells Rodley. “I went into science to begin with [at the University of Toronto] because I thought you couldn’t be taught to write but you needed to be taught science.”

However, Cronenberg soon found himself hanging out on the far side of the campus with the much livelier arts students, and before the year was out he had dropped science in favor of English. A friend named David Secter made a short film called “Winter Kept Us Warm,” using people and campus locations familiar to Cronenberg. For the future director it was a road-to-Damascus experience. “I was stunned. Shocked. Exhilarated,” Cronenberg said. “That won’t happen to kids now because they’ve got video cameras and everybody has made 12 films by the time they’ve reached puberty. But then it was unprecedented. I said, ‘I’ve got to try this!’”

Cronenberg’s first effort was a 1966 short film called “Transfer,” about a psychiatrist being stalked by a patient. Next came “From the Drain” — two veterans of a mysterious war sit in a bathtub until one of them is strangled by a plant that grows out of the drain. Definite sequel potential, but it was never followed up.

Inspired by the Film Co-op of New York, Cronenberg formed the Toronto Film Co-op with Bob Fothergill, Iain Ewing and that noted independent radical, Ivan “Kindergarten Cop” Reitman. But in the late ’60s, independent filmmaking was not the well-established tradition it has since become. In order to get a Canada Council grant to finance his first serious project, a 62-minute film called “Stereo,” Cronenberg pretended to be writing a novel. He submitted a sample chapter, got the money and started making the film. “Stereo,” released in 1969, and the 1970 follow-up “Crimes of the Future” earned Cronenberg a bit of attention in art-film circles.

But neither the artsy crowd nor the unsuspecting Canadian public was prepared when the director’s first feature film slithered onscreen in 1975. “Shivers” (aka “The Parasite Murders” and “They Came From Within”) is the story of a parasite, designed to help ailing human organs, that goes out of control with sickening results. It’s full of the straight-from-the-subconscious imagery for which Cronenberg would later become famous. Gory flesh effects were provided by Joe Blasco, who told Cronenberg that his apprenticeship in horror make-up was the stint he put in on “The Lawrence Welk Show.” “Shivers” originated from a dream Cronenberg had about a spider emerging from a woman’s mouth and was made for a Montreal soft-core porn outfit called Cinepix. “Sleazy distributors,” Cronenberg called them. “My kind of people.”

Canadian politicians and critics were not amused — particularly when they discovered “Shivers” was partly funded with government grant money. Robert Fulford’s article in the influential magazine Saturday Night was titled “You Should Know How Bad This Film Is. After All, You Paid For It.” (Decades later, British critic Alexander Walker responded to “Crash” with a review titled “A Film Beyond the Bounds of Depravity.” Cronenberg hasn’t lost his touch.) Fulford suggested that if movies like “Shivers” were necessary for the development of a Canadian film industry, it would be better for the country not to have one.

“Shivers” made money. Grateful taxpayers were reimbursed. A star was born.

More arty shockers followed — “Rabid,” “The Brood” and, in 1981, Cronenberg’s first commercial breakthrough, “Scanners.” The latter film’s infamous exploding head scene briefly pushed it to the top of Variety’s box office charts (a feat the filmmaker has yet to repeat, despite having since had bigger hits).

Cronenberg’s first real dance with Hollywood came in 1983 with “Videodrome,” the tangled tale of a sexually violent TV channel that begins to alter people physically (James Woods develops a huge vagina on his abdomen that accepts videocassettes). Universal provided some funding and distributed the picture, which meant focus groups. Or rather, one focus group, in Boston. After the screening, a lot of the response cards were retrieved from the floor. “I hated your fucking film,” said one. It spoke for many.

Luckily, Cronenberg’s next job was already lined up. It was by far his biggest stride toward the mainstream — an adaptation of Stephen King’s “The Dead Zone,” starring Christopher Walken. For the first time Cronenberg was working from someone else’s source material, and for the first time his own grotesque subconscious was not immediately evident on screen. Cronenberg became almost respectable. Fans were worried. (Despite this mainstream acceptance, “The Dead Zone,” released in 1983, may contain Cronenberg’s most outrageous scene ever. A gunman attempting to assassinate a presidential candidate is shot in front of a room full of reporters and falls to the floor, dying. All the reporters rush out of the room. It’s Cronenberg’s most bizarre vision yet.)

His next movie would demonstrate that, however briefly, his particular obsessions could dovetail with commercial filmmaking and produce a bona fide hit. After struggling with producer Dino De Laurentiis on 12 drafts of a “Total Recall” script, the two parted company and Cronenberg found himself desperate for work. He quickly snapped up “The Fly,” a rethinking of the Vincent Price B-movie hit from 1958 about a scientific accident that blends a man with a house fly. Jeff Goldblum and Geena Davis co-starred as the doomed scientist and his lover (Goldblum called it his favorite role).

Notwithstanding his left-field independent splash with “Scanners,” Cronenberg now had his first solid hit (even producing a legitimate catch phrase in “Be afraid. Be very afraid.”). And he accomplished it without moving away from his habitual obsessions. Here were the standard Cronenberg themes and images — mutinous flesh, morbid sexuality, the blending of machines with living organisms, the nature of mind and body, bugs. But this time there was more. There was an honest-to-God love story with an emotional core — not just (as with James Woods and Debbie Harry in “Videodrome”) the healthy respect a man pays to any woman willing to burn her own breasts with cigarettes.

Whether he’d planned it or not, Cronenberg was an A-list director now. It’s a career turning point at which busloads of promising filmmakers have taken that right turn into cozy hackdom. But Cronenberg was still based in Toronto, still willfully separate from the L.A. milieu. And while people’s perceptions of him may have changed, his cinematic agenda had not, a fact that would quickly become clear.

“Dead Ringers,” released in 1988, based on the real-life tale of the Marcus brothers, twin gynecologists who were found together in their New York apartment, dead from barbiturate withdrawal, had actually been in the works for years, delayed by various problems. If anything, Cronenberg’s new success simply meant better actors were available for casting consideration. For a while, at least. “From Al Pacino to [James] Woods to William Hurt to Jeff Goldblum to Kevin Kline,” Cronenberg told Saturday Night in 1996 (apparently the magazine had forgiven him for destroying Canada’s moral fiber in the ’70s), “they all turned it down. Pacino couldn’t even get past the word ‘gynecology,’ that was it for him.”

Eventually the dual role in “Dead Ringers” was played — beautifully — by Jeremy Irons. No one knows how many women dragged boyfriends to see the latest flick starring that dreamy English actor, only to suffer through the most uncomfortable date of their lives, complete with numerous gynecological exams and a grotesque set of medical tools designed for “mutant women.”

Perhaps it was the new cinematographer (Peter Suschitzky, replacing longtime collaborator Mark Irwin) or perhaps just the director’s own development, but “Dead Ringers” felt like the dawn of a new, more sophisticated, far more stylish era for Cronenberg. No squishy monsters here — just psyches unraveling in an understated, terrifying, thoroughly compelling way.

Any doubts about Cronenberg’s continued dedication to maverick filmmaking were dispelled by “Naked Lunch,” his 1991 attempt to translate William Burroughs’ novel for the screen — sort of. “A literal translation wouldn’t work,” Cronenberg insisted in a widely reported remark. “It would cost $400 million to make and be banned in every country of the world.”

“All that is carried over” in the movie, “Halliwell’s” says, “is the title and lack of narrative coherence.” True enough, but it’s a fascinating cinematic experiment, Cronenberg’s most fully realized alternative universe yet.Burroughs’ (as played by Peter Weller) journey into the hallucinatory dimension called Interzone may even constitute a whole new genre — the literate creature feature.

1993′s “M. Butterfly” (with Irons again) was neither a commercial nor critical success. “I saw it as the story of two people composing the opera of their lives,” Cronenberg said in an article by Denis Sequin. “Sexuality is an invention, it’s a creative thing … ['M. Butterfly'] is an extreme version of this inventing, but the extreme illuminates the ordinary version of what each of us does.”

Then, in 1996, “Crash,” based on J.G. Ballard’s story of people turned on by accidents and their physical aftermath screeched into cineplexes. Many called the movie pornographic — even more were busy trying to figure out why. The fabled link between sex and cars had never been spun quite this way before, and the toughest part for some viewers was figuring out whether they were outraged or just puzzled. Still, where cars are concerned sex is never far from the metallic surface, particularly for a man of Cronenberg’s age. As he told Susie Bright in a 1997 interview, the ’50s-era kid with a car was always possessed of very practical sexual power. “I was very envious,” he recalled. “I took the streetcar. You could not have sex on a streetcar — it was not allowed.”

Love it, loathe it or just go “Huh?” but the jury at Cannes probably got it right when they awarded “Crash” a prize for “audacity.” (In a further sign of that nutty French brand of respect, Cronenberg was jury foreman at last spring’s festival. “I just about fell over,” he told Maclean’s magazine.)

For those who were unaware of it, Ted Turner is not French. As the owner of Fine Line, the company with U.S. rights to “Crash,” Turner held up stateside release of the film for months while loudly decrying this new attack on American morals (alas, despite Robert Fulford’s best efforts it was already too late for Canada).

“At a certain point,” the director said in “Cronenberg on Cronenberg,” “I realized that what I liked about the classic filmmakers of the 1960s and 1970s, like Bergman and Fellini, was that you entered a world of their own creation when you went to see their films. That world was consistent from film to film.”

Rent Cronenberg’s most recent film, “eXistenZ,” and the world you enter is immediately familiar — weird, yet familiar. In some ways “eXistenZ” feels like a step back to the B-movie feel of earlier Cronenberg movies — a lighter (for him) and more coherent reinterpretation of “Videodrome.” But as Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law disappear into the maw of an all-enveloping video game, any regular Cronenberg watcher will recognize the turf.

Cronenberg listed his own themes to Rodley as: “Disintegration, aging, death, separation, the meaning of life. All that stuff.” He has spoken of a pool of imagery and metaphor that he draws from repeatedly, and in fact there’s no mistaking certain Cronenbergian touches. Typical is the organic gun from “eXistenZ,” constructed from the flesh and bones of an exotic meal and using teeth for bullets. Likewise the “eXistenZ” game pods, not constructed but hatched from amphibian eggs — players do not so much switch them on as excite them by rubbing fleshy nipples. It’s reminiscent of the bug typewriters in “Naked Lunch,” which become orgasmic when a choice phrase is typed, which in turn is reminiscent of God knows how many other of the director’s trademark visions.

That these cinematic nightmares contrast mightily with the man’s placid exterior and staid domestic status (his sister, Denise, does costumes for his films and his daughter Cassandra, a second unit and assistant director, has helped Dad behind the camera on several) is not lost on Cronenberg. “The reason I’m secure is because I’m crazy,” he told Rodley. “The reason I’m stable is because I’m nuts. It’s palpable to me.”

Aside from being one of the most articulate directors around — “Cronenberg on Cronenberg,” compiled from interview transcripts, amply demonstrates the point — Cronenberg seems to maintain a playful sense of humor about his work. He helped promote a Canadian cable channel’s week-long celebration of his movies by taping a spot in which he is seen phoning the station to complain about his disgusting films. Cronenberg also dabbles in acting, in his own movies and those of others (he’s the assassin in “To Die For”), and journalism — “eXistenZ” was inspired partly by an interview he did with Salman Rushdie for Shift magazine.

Long dogged by critics, Cronenberg rejects claims that his work exhibits misogyny and sexual disgust (although he doesn’t disagree with his pal Martin Scorsese who, having read many Cronenberg interviews, told the director that he obviously doesn’t understand his own films).

“You make a movie to find out what it was that made you want to make the movie,” Cronenberg told Rodley.

Many would be afraid — be very afraid — to hear the answers.

Guy Ritchie’s “Sherlock Holmes” is entertaining in a glossy, mindless way — every corner of it is packed with hyperkinetic life, which is not to say that it’s likely to stick in your memory for more than a few hours after you’ve seen it. The screenplay and story are credited to no fewer than five writers, and that’s not even counting Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who created the characters — and brought them to life with his elegant prose — in the first place. Ritchie seems to think that a detective-and-doctor team who solve crimes by, oh, thinking about them just isn’t dynamic enough for the screen, so he turns Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson — played by Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law — into action heroes: They kick, punch and karate-chop their way through various scenarios in which the cutting is fast, even when the motion is slow, and the computer-generated effects are plentiful.

I’m not the only one to consider “A.I. Artificial Intelligence” a very great and deeply misunderstood film; others as disparate as Andrew Sarris and the late Stan Brakhage have more or less agreed with me, as well as my friend and favorite academic critic, James Naremore. (Click the link above to read my full review.) But it’s also clear to me that any ordinary auteurist way of processing cinema can’t begin to handle this masterwork adequately: Reading it simply as a Spielberg film, as most detractors do, or even trying to read it simply as a Kubrick film, is a pretty futile exercise with limited rewards, even though the fingerprints of both directors are all over it. Seeing it as a perpetually unresolved dialectic between Kubrick and Spielberg starts to yield a complicated kind of sense — an ambiguity where the bleakest pessimism and the most ecstatic kind of feel-good enchantment swiftly alternate and even occasionally blend, not to mention a far more enriching experience, however troubling and unresolved. As a profound meditation on the difference between what’s human and what isn’t, it also constitutes one of the best allegories about cinema that I know.

Film Salon has invited a group of special guests to write about their favorite film(s) of the 2000s. To read the entire series, go here.

The Weinstein Co.

Jude Law and Norah Jones kiss in “My Blueberry Nights.”

You can argue that the Chinese-born, Hong Kong-based filmmaker Wong Kar-wai was jumping off a cliff by making “My Blueberry Nights” — a movie written in English, shot in the United States, and starring an untested pop singer with no acting experience — but you can’t argue it was the first time. In eight feature films spread over two decades, Wong has made a violent gangland drama, a period romance, a 1960s coming-of-age picture, an elliptical science-fiction epic and a tale of bohemian gay lovers shot in Argentina. It’s difficult to say whether any of his pictures belong to the same genre as any of the others, but they’re all defiantly Wong Kar-wai films that seem to fuse the traditions of Western and Eastern art cinema, languorous dreamlike experiences where plot is secondary to mood and where the beauty of each episode, each face, each room and each moment is paramount.

Having seen two versions of “My Blueberry Nights” — the cut that was screened at Cannes last May, and the slightly shorter, less complicated edit opening this week in the U.S. — I’ve pretty well concluded that it’s a noble experiment that doesn’t quite work. (If anything, I liked the first version better. Or else it was just Cannes, and I was drunk on good wine and louche atmosphere.) Fans of Wong’s now-classic Hong Kong films, from “Days of Being Wild” and “Ashes of Time” to his international hit “In the Mood for Love” and the incoherent but gorgeous “2046,” will likely find “My Blueberry Nights” lightweight and sentimental. On the other hand, anybody who shows up to see Jude Law and Norah Jones in a love story may be mystified by Wong’s near-plotless Americana road movie, which contrives improbable means of keeping the central couple apart as long as possible.

As I wrote when I reviewed the first version at Cannes, you need to detach yourself from any desire for plausible reality if you want to enjoy “My Blueberry Nights.” More than that, you have to survive the film’s awkward and embarrassing first 10 minutes, because it gets a lot better after that. The New York coffee shop run by Jeremy (Law), where heartbroken Elizabeth (Jones) starts showing up to drown her sorrows in late-night coffee and slabs of left-over blueberry pie, has nothing to do with the real New York of 2008. It’s a vision drawn from 1940s films and Edward Hopper paintings, infused with Wong’s trademark midnight-fluorescent colors. (As Wong explained in our conversation, he used a restaurant in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood and various exteriors in Brooklyn and Queens.) If there are some similarities between this film and Wong’s 1994 shopping-mall romance “Chungking Express” — still my favorite of all his movies — “My Blueberry Nights” is even closer to Alan Rudolph’s wistful 1984 indie hit “Choose Me.”

Jones is a lovely woman and a likable screen presence, but not much of an actress; she plays Elizabeth as a good girl with bad posture who doesn’t quite realize that she’s beautiful. Both Elizabeth and Jeremy, a cheerful Mancunian expat who’s somehow become a diner proprietor, are presumed to be so dense, and so damaged by their respective broken hearts, that they don’t notice how movieland-perfect they are for each other. (As ever, Law is a total ham. I always wonder why his slightly self-mocking pretty-boy shtick doesn’t bug me more than it does, but I always like him.) On one hand, this plot element is pretty damn far-fetched, but on the other, it underscores how stilted and inert the film’s early scenes are, and how devoid of sexual chemistry the Jones-Law pairing is.

That said, once Elizabeth hits the road and becomes a bystander to other people’s doomed love stories instead of a protagonist in her own, Wong’s film — shot by Darius Khondji, instead of his longtime collaborator Christopher Doyle — begins to exert a peculiar charm. Elizabeth tarries in Memphis awhile, befriending an alcoholic cop (a simply great performance from David Strathairn) who can’t let go of an evil, evil woman (Rachel Weisz, in a traffic-stopping role). Later, in rural Ely, Nev., Elizabeth explores a Thelma & Louise friendship, possessing an infinitesimal lesbian undertone, with a trashy tomboy gambler played by Natalie Portman. Both these episodes are arguably much more interesting than the question of when Elizabeth’s getting back to New York, or whether Jeremy will still be there waiting for her. (Chan Marshall, aka the singer Cat Power, is terrific in a cameo as Jeremy’s ex-girlfriend. And see if you can find Tim Roth, in an uncredited role as a sleazeball in a Hawaiian shirt.)

I had to resist the tendency to pick these characters and settings apart, but they’re not meant to be naturalistic. They’re snippets of American archetype, picture postcards mailed from a Chinese director’s road trip through our collective past. After discussing the film with Wong, I’m inclined to view it more generously, and not just because he was charming and his wife made me a cup of tea. The fact is, it’s awfully easy to sit in the audience and snicker knowingly at the most ungainly aspects of “My Blueberry Nights,” as a handful of younger critics were doing at the screening I attended last week.

If this film is in certain respects a failure, it’s an ambitious one, belonging to the same noble species as other intermittently terrible and thrilling films about America made by international directors, from Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point” to Emir Kusturica’s “Arizona Dream” to Andrei Konchalovsky’s “Shy People” to Bruno Dumont’s “Twentynine Palms” … one could go on. Without those kinds of failures, maybe you don’t get the other kind of American films made by foreigners, like, say, “It Happened One Night” and “Vertigo” and “Sunset Blvd.”

I guess what I’m saying is that Wong Kar-wai has earned the right to jump off any cliff he damn well pleases. You can fall in love with the lighter-than-air, imagined-America sweetness of “My Blueberry Nights” or you can write outraged Internet screeds against it, as some offended Wong cultists have done. But it might also be wise to wait and see where Wong’s idiosyncratic journey takes him next. (Reportedly, that will be a long-delayed remake of Orson Welles’ 1947 “The Lady From Shanghai,” and there’s nobody better to take it on.) I met with Wong in his New York hotel room, a few hours after his arrival from Hong Kong. He speaks fluent English, but his grammar and syntax are not perfect; here and there I’ve cleaned up the transcript for clarity.

(You can listen to a complete audio podcast of this interview here.)

You’ve spent much of the last year going around the world talking about your decision to make a film in America, and in English. So I bet you’ve got a really good answer to that question. Why was this an important thing for you to take on in your career?

First of all, it’s because of Norah Jones. Obviously I cannot make her speak Cantonese, so I have to make the film in her language. The second thing is, I think, after “2046″ — a film I spent five years making — I tried to do something which is very different than that. I thought it might be a very nice idea to shoot in English, to shoot in a country where I’ve never worked before. It was something I wanted to do at that point.

I guess you can say that all of your films have been different — formally different from each other and in different genres. So in that sense it was truly what you’ve always done, take on something new with each new project.

I think so. The only difference is here, the language is so different and it is not a language with which I am familiar, which I can command. The process at the very beginning is a bit difficult but it also gives me a chance to open myself up. That means I have to ask my crew and my cast to collaborate with me. This film, in a certain way, is almost like a student film. We worked together instead of saying, “I have an idea and I want everyone to do it this way or that way.”

I know you co-wrote the screenplay with Lawrence Block, the New York mystery novel writer. How did that come about? How did you meet him?

I’m a big fan of Larry and I like his work, especially the Matthew Scudder series. At that point, I had been discussing with Larry to work on something, maybe to adapt one of his books. Then somehow I had a meeting with Norah and then we decide to make a film together. The story is based on a short film that I made a few years ago. I wrote it myself and then I needed someone to help me, so I proposed [the idea] to Larry. At first I proposed that he write the New York chapter, but he really understood most of the characters so I asked him to help me with the whole story.

You’ve said the starting point was Norah Jones. She’s obviously a beautiful woman and a talented performer, but she had not acted before. Why were you so convinced that you could make a movie with her?

First of all, it’s basically instinct, because casting is really like love at first sight. You look at the face and you have a sense that this is something worth working on and this is a person that is very interesting. You can create a story out of her. Also, Norah has been performing since she was 15, so I had no doubts that she could act.

The story begins and ends in New York but along the way it’s a road movie. In that sense it’s a very classic American film genre.

To tell you the truth, the original story took place in New York, in that diner. It’s almost like a “Nighthawks at the Diner” story. But shooting the whole film in New York became too expensive for the production so we decided to move part of the story out of New York. We decided to shoot this film fairly quickly, and I thought the best way to do that, just because it was Norah, was a road tour, like a band. So we traveled across the country and ended up back in New York.

Once the Norah Jones character hits the road with a broken heart, the first place she lands is Memphis. I think that’s my favorite section. Did you actually shoot in Memphis?

That’s Memphis. We took three trips across the country to decide where we were going to shoot the rest of the film. I thought we should definitely have something from the South. We went to New Orleans after Katrina, like a week after Katrina. At that point, Louisiana was offering very good rebate for film productions, but I decided not to do it because the film had nothing to do with Katrina and I didn’t want to take advantage of that. So we moved on to Memphis and I remember the night we got there, the first place we went was to the bar [that became a location in the film]. In most towns, the first way to understand the town is to drop by the bar. The people there will tell you a lot about the place. I was amazed by the structure of this corner because right across the street there’s another diner and there’s the streetcar passing by. It reminded me of all those Tennessee Williams stories. He’s one of my favorite writers so it was interesting to make a stop in Memphis, to have all these blue, Tennessee Williams elements in it.

The Memphis story is about a busted-up love affair, with David Strathairn as an alcoholic cop and Rachel Weisz as the femme fatale who has broken his heart and maybe still loves him. It’s definitely very Tennessee Williams, archetypal.

For Norah, even though in this chapter she seems to be someone looking on from the side, in both characters — David and Rachel — is a reflection of herself. At first she identifies with David because he’s being cheated on and betrayed by the partners. But then she sees the perspective from the other side, from Rachel’s long conversation with her.

Later in the film, we get to Nevada, another place where lots of films have been set, and then you get the Western landscape. You have the story about Natalie Portman as a professional gambler, this tomboy, butch kind of woman. Did you need to find a story that was very specific to that landscape?

In fact, it was really by accident. We went to this small town called Ely, Nev., which is like five hours out of Las Vegas, because we got lost in the desert. We get to this small town and the first thing we notice is that in the gas station there is a Korean woman running a grocery store. It’s very strange. I speak a little bit of Korean and we became very friendly. She explained the background of this town, and it was really interesting. I felt like if Norah Jones’ character dropped by this town and spent some time there, it could be interesting, instead of going to Vegas, which is more or less expected.

There’s a tradition of great international filmmakers coming to America and making, with lesser or greater success, films about America, films that engage the archetypes of America. There are the obvious immigrant directors like Billy Wilder and Frank Capra, but I’m also thinking about Antonioni, Emir Kusturica, Wim Wenders, Bruno Dumont and other people. Did you think about that at any point?

I think no matter where we live, we all grew up with fragments of American culture. I think the most interesting and joyful aspects of making this movie was the joy of revisiting those fragments and paying homage to them. It’s very hard for me to think like an American. No matter how many trips I take, it’ll take a lifetime. I can only be a visitor or a traveler.

Some reviewers have called attention to logical inconsistencies in the plot: Why does Elizabeth travel all the way across the country to buy a car and drive back? I wonder if you would argue that asking those questions is to miss the point of what you’re trying to accomplish in the movie, what you want the viewer to see?

I think so, because there’s so many ways to explain why and, in fact, it’s not the point. I think the point of this film is about letting go. At certain points, we all have to let go of something which means a lot to us but somehow we realize it’s not that way anymore. It doesn’t only apply to relationships, it can apply to a lot of things. We’re living in a world, in a daily life, that has so many routines. We rely on something, we’re obsessed with something, but sometimes you have to let go.

Continue Reading Close

More Andrew O'Hehir.

• Comments
• Permalink
• Print
• Short URL

Indie box office: Lennon’s assassin a hit, man

"Chapter 27" strong in NYC bow -- and don't miss an ultra-cool doc on L.A.'s hot modern art scene.

• more

  • All Share Services

Arthouse Films

Still from “The Cool School.”

I was tied up in screenings on Monday, and when I wasn’t doing that I was hunkered down, trying to sharpen my mind and harden my spirit, or something of the sort, in preparation for a Tuesday interview with Wong Kar-wai. How do you tell an artist you admire immensely that you think he’s made a dreadful mistake, one that raises a whole range of questions about his entire career? I’ve now seen “My Blueberry Nights” — that’s Wong’s forthcoming English-language debut, an episodic American road movie with Norah Jones, Jude Law, Natalie Portman and Rachel Weisz — twice, first last year as the opening-night film at Cannes, and second a week ago. (It opens in the United States on Friday.) I guess he re-cut it in between or something, but it hasn’t improved.

I think “My Blueberry Nights” now takes its place in the canon of ill-advised American road trips made by international art-film directors. (See also Antonioni’s “Zabriskie Point,” Emir Kusturica’s “Arizona Dream,” Bruno Dumont’s “Twentynine Palms” and the career of Andrei Konchalovsky.) That’s already a lot more than I should be saying before I even meet Wong, but I’m guessing he won’t be up early this morning Googling himself. His publicists might, and in that case, lucky me.

Not much to report from the weekend box office, although Steve Ramos at indieWIRE is on it, as usual. The semi-controversial “Chapter 27,” with Jared Leto as John Lennon assassin Mark David Chapman, opened strongly — but that was at one theater, the Angelika Film Center in Manhattan, which gives us no idea how broadly this little schizo-world picture will draw. (“Chapter 27″ opens this week in Los Angeles, and will reportedly reach 40-plus screens by the end of May.)

A disparate pair of foreign films I reviewed last week, the great Russian director Alexander Sokurov’s oblique wartime drama “Alexandra” and Italian filmmaker Daniele Luchetti’s far more mainstream ’60s family epic “My Brother Is an Only Child,” also had strong one-screen Gotham bows. (Does that sound like trade-magazine writing or what?) “My Brother” will open in Chicago, Los Angeles and Washington over the next couple of weeks, but I don’t know anything about the future of “Alexandra” yet. Christophe Honoré’s odd, winsome French musical “Love Songs” continues to do well after two weeks, but it too has yet to venture across the Hudson River.

Laura Dunn’s gorgeous land-war documentary “The Unforeseen” also had a terrific single-theater weekend, but that theater was in Austin, Texas, which is Dunn’s hometown and the site of its haunting and dramatic tale. It’s great to see that. Maybe all the market segmentation (or niche marketing or narrowcasting or whatever you want to call it) in the movie business is starting to make room for a return to regional American filmmaking, and regional distribution as well. I hear about small movies all the time that find audiences outside the traditional New York-L.A. nexus, and I vow, hear and now, to pay more attention to them.

Morgan Neville’s new documentary “The Cool School” is a fine example of regional history and regional filmmaking, and ought to find its biggest and most loyal audience on the West Coast. Since Neville’s subject is how Los Angeles’ nascent visual arts scene, from the mid-’50s to the mid-’60s, played a crucial role in the history of modern art — and in the birth of what we’d now call postmodernism — it’s odd that right now “The Cool School” is only playing at New York’s Cinema Village, right in the heartland of old-line Abstract Expressionism.

Neville packs a lot of fascinating characters and enthralling history into his imaginative, jazz-inflected film, but the subject is too large and too complicated for 90 minutes. Several of the macho, hard-drinking artists who drew ideas (and colors and materials) from car culture and put the City of Angels on the modern art map went on to greater fame, like Ed Ruscha, Ed Kienholz and their architect pal Frank Gehry. The ones who were sucked under and died or disappeared, like Billy Al Bengston and Wallace Berman, might be even more interesting. Each almost seems to merit his own film. Speaking broadly, the L.A. artists were a group of hypermasculine, hypercompetitive, anti-intellectual assholes (a sign over the bar at Barney’s Beanery, seen several times in the film: “FAGOTS STAY OUT”), which does not diminish their accomplishments but may explain, in part, why their movement imploded in the late ’60s.

Neville’s movie is mainly about Walter Hopps and Irving Blum, the mismatched pair of entrepreneurs behind West L.A.’s legendary Ferus Gallery. Unbelievable as this may seem to some New Yorkers, Ferus hosted Andy Warhol’s first solo show, and for several years was far ahead of the New York art world (which resisted Pop and clung to Abstract Expressionism). Even Blum and Hopps’ story of ambition, betrayal, daring and venality — not to mention the beautiful ice blonde who married them both — gets a bit compressed here. Still, for art buffs this is a wild ride, and packed with stuff you probably won’t know about. Jeff Bridges narrates, and Dennis Hopper and Dean Stockwell (who both followed the L.A. art scene closely in their salad days) pop up here and there to offer stoned, laconic commentary.

Continue Reading Close

More Andrew O'Hehir.

• Comments
• Permalink
• Print
• Short URL

Thursday, May 17, 2007 3:45 PM UTC

Beyond the Multiplex

Norah Jones and Jude Law seduce viewers with slow, lonely smooches and bites of blueberry pie as Cannes kicks off.

By Andrew O'Hehir

• more

  • All Share Services

You have to suspend all varieties of disbelief and float along with “My Blueberry Nights,” which opened the 60th Festival de Cannes with a splashy red-carpet premiere on Wednesday night. That’s rather like the attitude required by this festival, both so inconvenient and so delightful, and by the storybook landscape of the Côte d’Azur. Reactions to the opening film have been muted here so far, more polite than enthusiastic. Costar Jude Law was the principal focus of paparazzi attention, climbing the steps of the Palais des Festivals in Ray-Bans and a classic tuxedo; with all the gentlemanly grace you’d expect, he tried to deflect the focus toward a winsome, awkward, clearly overwhelmed Norah Jones, the film’s unlikely lead. (I’m underqualified as a fashion critic, but did she choose the slightly dorky gown, with the high waist and poofy sleeves, on purpose?)

“My Blueberry Nights” may not quite be what fans of either Jones or Wong Kar-wai — directing his first film in English — are expecting. It’s a late-night, lovelorn mood piece in a minor key, not complicated or convoluted, finally more confection than substance. I’m not the first person to observe that it bears a startling, if presumably accidental, resemblance to Alan Rudolph’s 1984 indie hit “Choose Me.” Still, the longer this slice of fanciful blueberry-pie Americana sits with me, the better I like it.

This wistful, unobtrusive film has almost no connection to realism or plausibility. (The director’s recent Chinese films, like “2046″ and “In the Mood for Love,” certainly aren’t interested in those things either, and one could debate the naturalism of his early work as well.) It was shot by Wong and cinematographer Darius Khondji in a series of iconic American locations: Manhattan, Memphis, Tenn., the Nevada desert, Venice Beach, Calif. Except for a handful of exteriors, most of it could have been made on a soundstage; you learn no more about what Memphis looks like in 2007 from this movie than you do from listening to Elvis sing “Mystery Train.”

Even by Wong’s standards, the film has a dreamy midnight aesthetic, along with a supersaturated color palette that throbs with purple, gold, indigo and every other Crayola shade you can imagine. I’m not sure what burnt sienna and raw sienna actually are, but I guarantee you they’re in here. The shadows in this movie have shadows; the grains of film shed and subdivide into dark snowflakes of black and crimson and green.

What’s the point of all this gorgeousness? That may pose a difficult question for some viewers. I guess it’s just meant to put you in the mood for love, as it were. Or at least in the mood to watch a couple of beautiful and lovelorn loners, Elizabeth (Jones) and Jeremy (Law), moon around in an empty New York diner, eating blueberry pie and pining for their lost whoevers. We’re not merely supposed to buy Law as a diner proprietor but also supposed to imagine that these two people have been unceremoniously dumped by their true loves, and that Elizabeth wanders off on a no-destination road trip after Jeremy has kissed her. (Pop quiz for female readers: Jude Law has just smooched the pie-à-la-mode stains off your upper lip. Is your very first reaction to buy a bus ticket for parts unknown?)

All that stuff bothered me at first, along with the fact that Jones can’t really act. When she’s required to display emotion about the former boyfriend, it’s more like watching somebody miss the bus or lose her cellphone than undergo a very early midlife crisis. Still, the camera loves her, as they say. (If there’s one thing Wong Kar-wai knows how to do better than any other filmmaker, it’s shoot beautiful women so they look their best.) She has a little of the young Julia Roberts, or a less extreme Angelina Jolie, about her. As the film progresses Wong seems to make more modest demands of her; on her road trip from one service-sector job to the next, Elizabeth is a likable wallflower, an observer of other people’s lives rather than the subject of her own.

Similarly, the chemistry between Law and Jones is nearly null at first — when Jeremy nuzzles in to give Elizabeth that sleepy smackeroo, I half-wondered if he was really after the dribbles of ice cream — but Wong and Khondji eventually create it out of images. There’s no nudity in “My Blueberry Nights,” and if anything it’s aggressively chaste. Except for a few cuss words it could probably be rated G. But the curves and swells and furrowed brows and twitching lashes of Law and Jones, captured in one lingering close-up after another, become their own kind of erotic landscape.

But because this is a movie about unfulfilled longing and delayed gratification, Elizabeth can’t just hang around Wong’s painterly New York night, watching the subway clatter overhead and inhaling pieces of blueberry pie with a really cute guy who happens to be single too. Jeremy’s diner doesn’t look like anyplace in the real New York, but I eventually quit worrying about that once I realized that no part of the movie happens in the real world. Wong’s America is the mythic, heartbroken America of Edward Hopper paintings and rhythm and blues records and Jim Thompson novels, and you can pretty much baste yourself in that flavor or move on.

In some ways, the nonromance between Elizabeth and Jeremy is the least substantial of the three roughly parallel segments of “My Blueberry Nights.” Once Elizabeth ends up in Memphis, where she becomes a waitress and bartender named Lizzie, who observes the not-so-gradual disintegration of a drunken cop (David Strathairn), the film’s prettiness and artifice finally yield some grit. Sitting in the moonlit shadows of Lizzie’s dive bar, Strathairn demonstrates why he’s among the finest of American character actors. With his bowed head, a few tired gestures and an almost masklike expression, he shows us a decent man drawing very near the end of a road paved with bad women (the worst of them played by Rachel Weisz) and bad liquor.

In the film’s Nevada section, Lizzie becomes Beth, a waitress at a backwater casino — I’m pretty sure it’s the Hotel Nevada, in Ely — who befriends a vivacious, tough-talkin’ Texas card shark named Leslie (broadly and enjoyably played by Natalie Portman, in a bad blond do and a succession of almost-trashy outfits). Wong and co-writer Lawrence Block (the well-known mystery novelist) flirt with cliché here, or maybe they embrace it whole-hog. After Leslie’s big showdown at the poker table (her weedy nemesis is Tim Roth, in an almost unrecognizable cameo), she and Beth hit the road in Leslie’s Jag for some lightweight “Thelma and Louise”-style adventures.

Neither that detour nor the film as a whole quite manages the emotional payoff it aims for, but by the end of this slight, charming, vaguely silly picture I was enchanted anyway. Art-house devotees of Wong’s work may have a tough time accepting the setting or the star (or the lightweight, sentimental tone) of “My Blueberry Nights.” And who knows whether Jones’ fans want to see her in a nearly plotless movie where she can’t make up her mind to snog with Jude Law. Still, this movie will seduce viewers one at a time with slow, lonely smooches and forkfuls of blueberry pie, even if it probably won’t be remembered as a major career event for its director and stars.

All in all, it wasn’t an uproariously successful opening for Cannes, but anybody left in a bad mood by “My Blueberry Nights” — not to mention the blue skies, blue sea and pink wine out in the French night — is just a sourpuss. Beginning Thursday, new films will roll onto the Riviera beaches like waves; among the most promising weekend premieres are Hou Hsiao-hsien’s “Flight of the Red Balloon” (inspired by the famous 1950s French short film), Michael Moore’s already-controversial “Sicko” and the Coen brothers’ violent western, “No Country for Old Men.” More soon.

* * * * For more coverage of the Cannes Film Festival, click here.

Continue Reading Close

More Andrew O'Hehir.

• Comments
• Permalink
• Print
• Short URL

Page 1 of 6 in Jude Law

Earlier Articles