As much as I liked Pulp Fiction I didn’t understand why Quentin Tarantino did had to speak for ten minutes on the video before the feature film. OK, I get that he wanted to introduce the picture that his company distributes in the US. But that doesn’t entitle him to annoy me. He didn?t really add any value there, although I suspect that on the end of the tape he might have. He promised that he ‘would be back’ with more production details after the movie.
However his words couldn’t ruin the experience. It was a fun movie. I enjoyed that it didn?t have closures or anything definite in it. That in itself allowed me to play with the stories’ threads, and invent my own answers for the open-ended questions. Plus it was romantic in a non-Hollywood style. In one story-line a mysterious-looking blond woman, who in reality is a drug smuggler), spends an innocent night in the bad of a cop. The cop himself is lovesick and collects pineapple cans with the expiration date of his own birthday. He philosophizes, but not too deeply, about everything having expiration dates. Even memories. In another storyline a kooky girl plays with another cop and his empty apartment. She is sweet and funny and crazy. The cop is just the first of these, but by the end of the movie he also loosens up to her. There were a few other threads, all of them just loosely connected. The visuals style was impressive in this movie. On one hand we get a glimpse of Hong Kong’s busy and crowded life. On the other hand it was not as intense as the Hong Kong fighting movies. And the two cops’ lives were depicted in their own style. For the first one whenever he was working (always undercover) the images were blurred, so we couldn’t follow exactly what was going on or who do we see. Just as he did probably, because his main interests laid about his lost love and finding the next one. And for the other cop when melancholy attacked him, life for him slowed down. This was shown by the figures around him moving faster. Both of these were nicely done. I would also like to ink in two memorable quotes. ‘We’re all unlucky in love sometimes. When I am, I go jogging. The body loses water when you jog, so you have none left for tears.’ And the other one that had some relevance to my situation: ‘(633 after his date fails to meet him at the California restaurant in Hong Kong.) Actually she did go to California that evening. But it was the other one.’