Norah Jones, Our Neighbor & A Natural Actor?

Singer (and fellow East Village resident) Norah Jones has been on the talk show circuit lately because her third album, Not Too Late hits stores this week. Mostly Jones' music isn't our cup of tea (to put not such a fine point on it, it's total vagina music and we grew out of that stuff after attending the Lilith Fair in '97), plus her level of crazy run away success and her crankiness about bloggers mocking her secret glam band, sorta bugs. However, her return to the media glare reminded Cinecultist of one intriguing bit of No Jo trivia: she's starring in Wong Kar-Wai's English language debut, My Blueberry Nights. Co-starring Rachel Weisz, David Strathairn, Jude Law, and Nathalie Portman, at least we can tell that Wong based casting on good looks punctuated by intense eye gaze skills. Actually in a recent EW article about Jones, it sounds like Wong had more of a plan than that.

"He cast Jones at their first meeting, but insisted the novice thespian not take lessons to prepare for the part of Elizabeth, "a woman who," Jones says, "is a little bit lost in life and takes a cross-country trip to find her way." Wong was beyond pleased with the results. "Crying in front of the camera is one of the hardest things for a first-time actor to do. She nailed it on the second take. After, she turned to me, her eyes still red, and asked, 'Do you want more?'" recalls Wong. ''At that moment, I knew this lady could act."

Intriguing, right? Of course we'll have to wait until June* to offer up our full assessment of Jones' emoting abilities in front of the camera, and obviously we'll be holding her to that high benchmark set by former Wong actresses like Maggie Cheung, Faye Wong, Brigitte Lin, Gong Li and Ziyi Zhang. Sorry for the tough company Norah, but you really kinda brought it on yourself.

*This is the date currently on IMDb but bear in mind that it's being released by Weinstein Co. who are notoriously bad about firmly setting their release schedule.