Michelle Kwan Video:

		List Price: $29.95		Label: Kino Video Salesrank: 49059 Released: October 19, 2004
		Our Price: $18.57
		Used Price: $14.97
		MPAA Rating: Unrated Media: DVD

Fallen Angels Reviews:
Stunning images, enigmatic stories -- an exceptional and exciting film about love and longing in Hong Kong
2008-04-12 - Three individuals whose lives intersect and parallel form the core of this stunningly photographed, moody and intense cinematic masterpiece. A hitman who is getting tired of the messiness of his job; his partner, who plans everything out for him in meticulous detail but would really like to cross the line with him between business and pleasure; a mute, who breaks into other people's businesses at night and forces unwitting passersby to purchase his wares. They rarely ever meet, but they share the same spaces, and sleep the same hours. The film alternates between: the intensely cool portrayal of a hitman with all the style of a Hollywood badboy, and all of the mellow of a Spaghetti Western antihero -- the femme fatale lonely longing that simmers with an undercurrent of anger of his partner -- and the slapstick comic silliness of the mute. The faded neon lights, the eclectic and moody music, the kinetic and flowing camera -- this is unlike anything you've seen unless you've seen a Wong Kar-Wai film and if you have you know that he doesn't ever quite repeat himself. This film shares a good deal with the atmosphere of Chungking Express, but is darker and more moody, and in many ways more intense and exciting -- I love both films but this one has an edginess that you don't find in the other -- you might say that Chungking is the day film and this is the night. One connection between the films is that the mute in this film is played by the same actor as the pineapple-eating policeman in Chungking Express. Their characters share the same name, He Xiwu, and this one lost his voice as a result of eating bad pineapple from an expired can -- but they are not exactly the same as this one never was a policeman and allegedly lost his voice at age 5. A beautiful and exciting film -- definitely one to see for lovers of the art of film.

Fallen Standards
2007-11-26 - One more pretentious exercise in pointlessness. Don't bother, unless your cinematic sensibilities never exceeded the nihilism of an adolescent.

One of the Best Wong Kar Wai Films!
2007-07-15 - This has to be my very favorite Wong Kar Wai Film. It's beautifully shot like all his films. He's a genius.

Must have for Wong Kar Wai fans!
2007-04-02 - As a sort of 'sequel' to Chungking Express, it definitely holds it's own quirkiness & action-packed fun! Viewers also get to enjoy watching Takeshi Kaneshiro once again. Definitely a Must-Have!

The Daddy of the Kar Wai Canon
2006-10-18 - Fallen Angels could have been so named due to its dropped origin as part of director Wong Kar Wai's previous film Chunking Express, emerging afterwards as a follow up. To hear the critics tell it, `Express' is his masterpiece, regularly making the `best movies ever made' lists along side such exalted company as your Citizens Kane's and Casablanca's. But for me Fallen Angels is, to date, the daddy of the Wong Kar Wai canon.

Fallen Angel tells of a not quite burnt-out hit man, Leon, who begins to tire of the whole `gun for hire' malarkey and decides to quit on account of his burgeoning feelings for the female operative who he has never met, but who plans his jobs for him. The female operative, Michelle, also emotes for our existential assassin but somehow they both realise that if they ever did come face to face the fantasy would evaporate. The unrequited love thing is Kar Wai's forte but here it is more a case of "As long as you don't look at it, it won't disappear." So their love continues on the basis of ensuring that it never really exists. Anxious to avoid an inevitable unprofessional encounter, our navel gazing killer goes off on an adventure into the Kowloon night where he crosses paths with a series of likable reprobates before embarking on that fatal "one last job."

This takes us not so neatly into a `mad as a hatter' subplot about a petty criminal who was rendered mute as a boy by a can of `out of date' pineapples. He goes out at night and gets up to a range of activities such as massaging a dead pig and kidnapping a family and forcing them to eat ice cream. He too falls in love, with a girl who believes she has been beaten to the altar by someone called Blondie. He helps her go in search of the usurper of her affections resulting in a hilarious beating up of a blow up doll!

Cinematographer and Kar Wai regular Christopher Doyle engages a warped and gaudy neon look throughout; something of a trade mark in Kar Wai films. This is the world from inside a Wurlitzer juke box - or, at least, through the eyes of a tranquilised goldfish and this, incidentally, is not a complaint. The other thing I like about this film is that it walks the line between the art house `heart warmers' of the best of European cinema and the `Glock Opera' pyrotechnics of John Woo and Ringo Lam.
Genre clash - it's the future.