STUDIO: Criterion
RELEASE DATE: November 25, 2008
STARRING: Brigitte Lin, Faye Wang, Tony Leung, and Takeshi Kaneshiro
WRITTEN BY: Wong Kar-Wai
DIRECTED BY: Wong Kar-Wai
FEATURES: Remastered Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack supervised by director Wong Kar-wai
Audio commentary by noted Asian cinema critic Tony Rayns
Episode excerpt from the British television series Moving Pictures featuring Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle
U.S. theatrical trailer
New and improved English subtitle translation
PLUS: A booklet featuring a new essay by critic Amy Taubin and excerpts from a 1996 Sight and Sound interview with Wong by Rayns

With no exaggeration, I have seen thousands of movies. There are very few cinematic experiences that I can vividly remember the when and the where surrounding when I saw it. With a couple hundred movies a year, the details start to blur. And yet, I can remember in vivid detail where I was when I saw Chungking Express. It was London in the Fall of 1995. I can remember the weather that day. I don't remember the name of the theater but I'd recognize in a heartbeat it if I saw it and believe that if you dropped me in London now that I could probably find it. And I remember going to the lobby after and getting a postcard for the film to put on my wall. I still have that postcard over a decade later. That's how much I love Chungking Express. Wong Kar-Wai's best films - Chungking, In the Mood For Love, 2046 - feel like memories and so it seems appropriate that the seeing of Chungking has stuck with me for years. It's one of my favorite movies and it has been lavishly and wonderfully remastered in one of Criterion's best releases of the year.

Chungking Express is about two heartsick cops (Tony Leung and Takeshi Kaneshiro) who spend late nights together at a take-out restaurant called the Midnight Express. Both of them are heartsick and the film spins off into their two stories. Wong Kar-Wai made Chungking Express while he was taking a break from Ashes of Time with nearly the same cast and the film reflects a director working with themes of romance, loss, emotion, and fate. The film only has four characters and two stories - "Part 1 - Chung King House" and "Part 2 - Midnight Express". Badge 223 (Kaneshiro) has just broken up with a never-seen ex before he meets Brigitte Lin's drug dealer and Badge 663 (Leung) finds himself falling for a quirky girl (the wonderful Faye Wong) who completely shakes up his life. The two men are similar and yet contrasting, dealing with love and change in different ways.

Chungking is a wonderful movie made even better with a flawless, beautiful, restored high-definition digital transfer with Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtrack supervised by director Wong Kar-Wai. The film is one of the first that Criterion is releasing on Blu-Ray next month (although just the standard version was available for review) and it's easy to see why it was one of the first choices for HD from the studio with one of the best video transfer track records in the history of the medium. Chungking Express hints at the visual mastery that Wong Kar-Wai would display in In the Mood For Love and 2046 and is arguably this excellent writer/director's best screenplay. Special features include an excellent commentary by an Asian cinema critic named Tony Rayns (WKW himself is pretty reclusive, so the lack of an audio track by him is not surprising), an episode of the 1996 show Moving Pictures that features Wong and the amazing cinematographer Christopher Doyle, the U.S. theatrical trailer, and a great booklet by critic Amy Taubin. The subtitles have also been slightly adjusted in a new and improved translation.

The special features collected for Chungking Express are a little disappointing only because Criterion usually provides such a perfect collection of background material and I would have like more than just the Moving Pictures episode to represent the actual making of the film, but the transfer and the film itself make the DVD a must-own. Sometimes movies that live so vividly in your memory don't stand up to the test of time. We have a habit of romanticizing them and they can often pale in comparison to our trumped-up vision of what they were 13 years ago. Not Chungking Express. It was great then, it's great now, and it will be great many, many years in the future. You won't forget it.