Fallen Angels and Time and Tide

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art will screen Wong Kar-wai's 1995 film Fallen Angels and Tsui Hark's 2000 film Time and Tide as a part of their Hard Boiled Hong Kong Weekend Series.

Fallen Angels
Friday, November 19 | 7:30 pm
After finding his métier in a series of ethereal urban romances, Wong triumphantly returned to the criminal underbelly of his debut. A lone wolf contract killer is given his assignments through a female agent he never meets. Attired in black stockings and a vinyl dress, she also cleans up the flophouse room where he hides out between jobs. Two lovers entirely disconnected from one another, they drift through the endless, turbulent Hong Kong night in a haze of cigarette smoke and drowsy longing. Shot after hours while Wong was filming the bubblier, diurnal Chungking Express, Fallen Angels is a vibrant nocturne of canted angles, mixed film stocks, and neon-washed slow-motion that's just as rhapsodic as its day-time counterpart. "Half of Fallen Angels takes place in a monsoon; the rest is set in a pungent series of lovingly selected locations (deserted subway stations, an empty McDonald's, 24-hour noodle joints, impossibly narrow apartments, entropic dives where the jukebox plays Laurie Anderson). The director's throwaway style has its equivalent in the movie's world of fast-food parlors and one-night stands. The more disposable the experience, the more crucial the memory. Shot entirely at night and mainly in wide-angle—Christopher Doyle's camera racing down rain-slicked Nathan Road or positioning itself an inch from a performer's face—Fallen Angels is suffused with nostalgia for the present."—J. Hoberman.
1995/color/90 min. | Scr/dir: Wong Kar-wai; w/ Leon Lai, Takeshi Kaneshiro, Michelle Reis, Charlie Yeung, Karen Mok.
Bing Theater | $10 general admission. $7 museum members, seniors (62+), students with valid ID. | Please note: This newly-struck print of Fallen Angels features a Taiwanese soundtrack.

Time and Tide
Friday, November 19 | 9 pm
Born in French Indochina (now Vietnam) and educated in Texas, Tsui Hark burst onto cinema screens with a series of anarchic spectacles that blended genres with punk abandon and made him the progenitor of the Hong Kong New Wave. In subsequent years, Hark was inexhaustible, prolifically switching between directing and producing films of every type imaginable. Along the way he gave Woo, Fat and Jet Li their big breaks. Returning to Hong Kong after a spell in Hollywood, Hark helmed this frenetic thriller whose convoluted plot involves a pair of hired guns, drug cartels, Brazilian mobsters and surprise pregnancies. With nod to both Wong's lyrical stillness and Woo's torrents of hot lead, Time and Tide is a sensational rollercoaster ride with superlative stunt work. "[Hark's] best movies are made with such verve and craft that the viewer's head practically explodes with the concentration they require, the pleasure they bring… Just the first two minutes of Time and Tide are breathlessly virtuosic, using slo-mo and rapid cuts and neck-swiveling pans to impart enough visual information for half a dozen Hollywood features… [it's] the movie-est movie of the year."—Richard Corliss, Time.
2000/color/113 min./Scope | Scr: Koan Hui, Tsui Hark; dir: Tsui Hark; w/ Nicholas Tse, Wu Bai, Candy Lo, Cathy Tsui, Anthony Wong.
Bing Theater | $10 general admission. $7 museum members, seniors (62+), students with valid ID.