Days of Being Wild (1990)

Pretty Good

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Sexy drama about a single bachelor living the free life - worry free - pleasuring himself to whatever and whomever he sees fit .. Secretly depressed about the abandonment of his birth mother , he decides to "fly" the rest of his life until he crashes downHis orphan mother (who runs a nightclub) takes care of him; two women fall in love with him - a homesick shopkeeper and a dancer from his mom's club; he has a peasant friend who tails him to ripe the reward of having a bachelor friend; and a naive cop watches him from a distance because he's secretly in love with the shopkeeperGood case study film on the inside life of random hook-ups8/10

I guess the main reason that this is my favorite WKW movie is that it's one of the least abstract of his movies and I feel like the viewer becomes more emotionally involved with the characters because of that. The music, as always with WKW, is wonderful and the cinematography is fine, I especially like all the shots of the lush tropical forests. It isn't as beautifully photographed as many of his later films like chungking express and in the mood for love. And it doesn't feature much of the fancy techniques that WKW likes to employ in movies like fallen angels or happy together. Still I think this is my favorite of Wong Kar Wai's movies, not necessarily the best, but the one I enjoy the most. Highly Recommended.

Days of Being Wild is the one of Wong Kar Wai's films in his portfolio which introduces and usually hypnotizes them under his genius. It also is the film that truly made Wong Kar Wai the filmmaker he is today with the respect he deserves. The film features many of his usual themes of alienation and separation though, unlike his other films, it marries Western and Eastern film-making to create a hybrid of cinematic perfection.Wong's story telling is usually a beautiful and emotion story broken into pieces and left for the viewer to figure out where they fit in the grand scheme of things. Days of Being Wild departs from that in a way where the story is presented linear though reminiscent of his usual style. While the story follows one character living out their life it will branch off to follow another character for a substantial amount of time and none of the stories lack emotional depth because of it. In fact, Wong's direction of his actors allows each departure to be a showcase of their acting talent as they live as there characters in their own little episodes. This presents a pragmatism which hints back to Wong's usual style.Many of the "episodes" intertwine which tells us something of what Wong is saying. Though the stories aren't very eventful, they are absolutely real and like in the real world, lives intertwine everyday, without even knowing their social relevance. Where Wong's idea of an overcrowded world filled with lonely people usually sends them searching for companionship, this film has them collide whether out of fate or coincidence. That even though the world is impossibly large and there are millions of people in it, it isn't a big as we think.The story builds and builds until a violent climax which leaves the film with a shadow of unease about it. The crushed montage of events leading to the final scene leave you breathless, wanting more. The film's lasting appeal will leave anyone thinking. No wonder this is one of the more popular Wong Kar Wai film, where his other films are beautiful and real, Days of Being Wild is entertaining like an American film with an underlying Wong Kar Wai feel.

This is the fourth Wong Kar-Wai film I've seen, but it might as well have been the first... which is to say that it's pretty much the same thing as the other three Wong Kar-Wai films I've seen, so it's like watching them again. This is not actually a bad thing, it's more of a style thing, like how Ozu's films are largely the same concepts, themes, imagery, characters, etc., repeatedly. Wong Kar-Wai remakes himself a lot, I've noticed.In this film, the idea is the tango, as opposed to the other musical structures of his other films. A womanizer in 60s Hong Kong obsessively destroys two women until he must leave, at which point he meets an ex-cop/first woman's confidant who actually seems to understand him a bit better than the women ever did, being as it were that all the women can do is try to get over him. The man is led, in theory, by his anxiety over his true mother and his need to control women based off of his lack of control over them: his true mother abandoned him, his adoptive mother entraps him, and he can't get over his frustration of either.The thing about Wong Kar-Wai's films I don't understand, though, is that though all of them have unique plots, great imagery, and good performance (the things that typically add up to "a good film"), for some reason I always get the sense that the overall value of anything in them is the same. Christopher Doyle's cinematography and Kar-Wai's directing loves blocking, framing, reframing, framing within frames, and especially vibrant color, but the overall effect is remarkably undramatic. His stoic characters and their bubbling aggression are sometimes pretty apathetic despite their emotion. He follows characters, and then leaves them, and then sometimes brings them back, and sometimes doesn't, and sometimes the story is done before the movie ends, and sometimes the movie ends before the story is done, and overall I notice that the effect is pretty much the same. The ultimate effect is a glossed over, smooth surface, which is pretty to look at but honestly not very tactile to touch.Basically, this is a good movie. It's just not very interesting. Which is exactly what can be said of everything of Kar-Wai's I've seen. The more of his work I watch, the less I understand its popularity.--PolarisDiB