"Chungking Express"
Directed by Wong Kar-Wai.
Starring Brigitte Lin, Tony Leung, Faye Wang.

Those for whom the statement "that was weird and meaningless" is high aesthetic praise will love "Chungking Express." Those who prefer their art to come equipped with such old-fashioned accessories as coherence and character development will be less happy. Iconoclastic Hong Kong director Wong Kar-Wai's 1994 film is a frenetic one-way ride through The Land of Vaporous Plot, with stops along the way at Irritatingly Cute Extended Metaphor City. There's madness aplenty in this tantalizing film, but not nearly enough method in it.

You have to give Kar-Wai, the much-parodied, arty bad boy of Hong Kong cinema, points for audacity. To his unorthodox two-stories-in-sequence structure Kar-Wai adds generous portions of Hong Kong noir, manic editing, urban angst a la Scorsese, Freudian analysis as told to Hello Kitty and possibly the worst overuse of a pop song in film history. This wild mixture sounds intriguing, but it ends up being about as nourishing as those "special milk shakes" that six-year-olds make out of beer, aspirin, peanut butter and cayenne pepper.

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