My Blueberry Nights
Crit
A mixed bag--the usually Kar Wai Wong gauzy beautiful look; a fine score from Ry Cooder and a soundtrack including, of course, the star, Norah Jones, as well as Cassandra Wilson singling Neil Young and channeling Nina Simone; and uniformly excellent acting, including the newbie Jones.
The story, though, is laboriously literate, like one of those New Yorker stories that's elegantly written but that you can't remember anything about 24 hours later (except that some of this writing is embarrassingly inelegant). It's sort of an offhand picaresque, as if Wong decided (sensibly) that a story so thin couldn't stay in the Bronx but needed some Memphis and Nevada casino locations to make us think something is happening.
Worth seeing, if only for the scene in which Natalie Portman's poker player on a losing streak makes Jones's waitress Elizabeth an offer she can't refuse, and Elizabeth chews on the offer and her sandwich simultaneously. It's the closest the film ever comes to making us believe that these are real people, not just characters.
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