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Fallen Angels

Fallen Angels is a 1925 play by Noël Coward.


Fallen Angels is also a 1995 Hong Kong movie written and directed by Wong Kar-wai, starring Leon Lai and Michelle Reis.

Plot outline: Set in contemporary Hong Kong, a disillusioned killer embarks on his last hit but first he has to overcome his affections for his cool, detached partner he rarely sees. Thinking it is dangerous and improper to become involved with a colleague, he tries to find a surrogate for his affections. Against the sordid and surreal urban nightscape, he crosses path with a strange drifter looking for her ex-boyfriend and a mute trying to get the world's attention in his own ways.

Fallen Angels, being shot and conducted in a modern way - using fast cuts, hand-cameras, strange light visuals - reminding one of a hip, glossy photo-magazine, is regularly compared to the 1960s films of Jean-Luc Godard, where you will end up not with conclusions but with impressions.

See also: Cinema of China, Hong Kong in films


Fallen Angels is also a 1991 novel by science fiction authors Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn. The story features a future in which the environmentalist movement has gained control of the earth's governments, imposing draconian luddite laws which, in an ironic effort to end global warming, bring about an even greater environmental catastrophe in the form of an ice age. Against this backdrop, two marooned astronauts from the spacestations of Peace (the Russian Mir), and Freedom (which collectively form what amounts to a rogue state), flee the radically green American Government with the aid of science fiction fandom (the last remnants of a pro-technology underground in the U.S.), in an effort to return home.

The novel was written as a tribute to science fiction fandom, and includes many of its well-known figures, legends, and practices.