to me, chungking express represents the ghost of netflix recommendations past. netflix recommendations have been responsible for causing me to watch a number of terrible movies, and i suppose it was foolish of me to think that i would be free of it just because i had cancelled my subscription. i should have remembered that the human brane is a mess of all the things you have ever heard or seen, which means i am warped for life.
anyway, netflix recommendations presumably pointed me at this one because of all the other terrible movies it tricked me into watching. i hated the story and all the characters, and was unable to tell which parts were dreaming and which were awake. they may all have been awake with characters merely saying that they felt they were dreaming. i also remain confused about why this was framed as two stories that were essentially disjoint. one story, i could have understood. three or more stories, i could also understand. but why two? two stories means both have to be long enough to be shortish movies in and of themselves. and if you go that far, why not just flesh them out and have two films? presumably, the writers had two disjoint stories and could not sell either, so they smashed them together to make something they could.
none of that really matters, but it is the kind of thing that i obsess over when trying to understand the overarching aspects of a film. all i really need is a guidebook. for life. even something as simple as annotations that say "there is something interesting here you should try to understand," or "this detail is not important," or "avoid the tuna salad, they left it out on the counter overnight." dysentery is no laughing matter, and neither was this movie.
see? that is how you connect two disjoint things together. with a circle.
