GAME 2: CHUNGKING EXPRESS vs. SHORT CUTS

And last week's winner revealed!

Last week our readers resoundingly chose The Limey over Jackie Brown. That film will go against the winner of this week’s 1990s film playoff for a semi-final in our Narrative Rebellion bracket.

Robert Altman was on a career comeback at the time with 1992’s The Player and 1993’s Short Cuts. Both are rambling narratives that make us remember how he invented the form in the 1970s with Nashville and The Long Goodbye. Short Cuts is maybe peak Altman, with a cast of 22 and a script that links nine different Raymond Carver short stories.

In 1994 Wong Kar-Wai was exhausted after making a Hong Kong swordsman movie in the Gobi Desert. He said of that time, “I had forgotten how to see.” In the middle of postproduction on that film Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle set up in the small apartments and food stalls of Chungking Mansions to make a hyper-kinetic, handheld movie built around two storylines of lovelorn almost-couples.

Which film will advance? If you’ve made up your mind already, vo…