I went to see My Blueberry Nights with Jenia and the parental units.

It was basically a remake of Chungking Express, but in America with worse actors.

Quick Comparison Chart
Chungking Express	My Blueberry Nights
Ex-girlfriend leaves Tony Leung’s keys at a café	Norah Jones leaves ex-boyfriend’s keys at a café
Tony Leung eventually falls in love with the café worker	Norah Jones eventually falls in love with the café worker
Vampy blonde Brigitte Lin swindles drug dealers, Takeshi Kaneshiro	Vampy blonde Natalie Portman swindles gamblers, Norah Jones
Faye Wong (famous primarily for her singing career) plays a dreamy, childish, and impulsive character by plot necessity	Norah Jones (famous primarily for her singing career) plays a dreamy, childish, and impulsive character by plot necessity

Chungking Express was so good, though! And My Blueberry Nights was rotten! I think it is

my fault as an American viewer for assigning so much error and gloss to the subtitling of

Chungking Express. The same kind of embarrassing lines, spoken aloud in English rather than

read in translation from Cantonese, were much harder to forgive.

The opposite is usually true; transcribing what feels like a flawlessly articulate conversation

into written dialog always exposes the inconsistency, repetition, and verbals tics of the

speakers.

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