Posted on 09/08/2007 1:26:03 PM PDT by SkyPilot
VENICE (Reuters) - Taiwanese director Ang Lee's sexually explicit "Lust, Caution" was the surprise winner of the Golden Lion for best picture at the Venice film festival on Saturday, just two years after he won with "Brokeback Mountain."
The movie is a World War Two thriller set in Shanghai featuring long and sometimes violent sex scenes which Lee has hinted were real.
"It is overwhelming, because this movie has taken me to some very difficult places," Lee told the red carpet award ceremony on the Lido waterfront.
"I have invited you to come along with me and in the end to stay down there with me ... You are the seven samurais, I needed your help," he added, addressing the seven-member jury.
(Excerpt) Read more at today.reuters.com ...
I couldn’t care less as long as DePalma’s troop-sliming film didn’t win.
All right, the gay cowboy flick was repulsive but I put it down to a foreign director taking on any project labeled “impossible to do” - and I heard it actually got that 5% of the world to turn out enough to make it profitable. From what I caught of it (the first quarter before flipping channels) it looked like enemies learning to get along. Should we boycott the actors involved?
Both Bubble Boy and the Patriot’s son have done nothing but heterosexual roles otherwise. Ang Lee did a terrible job with the Hulk and seems to be out of his depth with the Western culture he’s enamored with. We have enough home-grown hacks pushing their visions of our culture on us without foreigners with a provenly bad track record given money to do more of the same.
“Brian De Palma, whose “Redacted” shocked audiences in Venice with its brutal reconstruction of the real-life rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers, won the Silver Lion award for best director.”
I can live with that. He’s not going to get a Best Director Oscar with stuff he’s pulled off the net.
Brian DePalma is a second rate filmmaker. He has devoted most of his alleged career to copying Alfred Hitchcock — but copying him in distinctly inferior films. When his imitation of Hitchcock failed (all of the time), he fell back on excessive violence and gore. He is a hack who has made a dubious reputation by imitating someone of real merit without ever achieving any genuine distinctions of his own. A virtual cinematic parasite.
I’m not really sure a Hong Kong director winning an Italian award says anything about our culture. If it even gets released in America it’ll be art house bait, I doubt it’ll make as much money as the average Kevin Smith movie.
I love comic book action hero movies. I couldn't get through 15 minutes of the Hulk and wondered why. Now I know. It was made by this jughead. That explains it all. Every "movie" I've tried to watch from this guy was pure garbage. No wonder the artsy-fartsy crowd loves him.
“the real-life rape and murder of a 14-year-old Iraqi girl by U.S. soldiers,”
Is this true? Is there any proof, or is it just more anti-American propaganda from the Hollywood crowd? It’s hard to believe an American soldier would do anything like this.
Even if it’s true, it’s probably just an isolated incident they’re trying to use to condemn the whole Iraq war.
That's most likely the case.
Another flop in the can for the director only Hollowood loves.
They are replacing all of the cast with new actors. Ed Norton will star as Bruce Banner; Liv Tyler will play Betsy Ross; Tim Roth will be Emil Blonsky, aka the Abomination; and William Hurt will play General 'Thunderbolt' Ross.
I hope they do a better job with this one than the first.
Sounds like a typical day at the Euro film festivals, with thumbs’ up for a movie about violent sex, an anti-American tale centered on the violent rape of a minor, and a film about the plight of Muslims in the West.
Ang Lee once had a little bit of talent. I like CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON. But his version of HULK was pathetic. Then we got the homo cowboys eating pudding, and now a film wallowing in violent sex.
I’m glad the beautiful and talented Ziyi Zhang hasn’t worked with him since CROUCHING TIGER. She’s way too fine to appear in his recent trash.
He who lives by the sword (i.e., violence) dies by the sword. From God's lips, let it be true.
Then again, a friend told me that the "Little Black Sambo" image of blacks is still widely prevalent in the Orient and some pieces bring high prices from avid collectors...the most stereotypical ones featuring watermelons command top dollar. I wonder how the limp-wristed arts crowd would take to that?
A British news service reporting how a Chinese director won top honors in Italy. What does this have to do with *our* culture?
Brian DePalma films I’ve seen.
The Untouchables: Unbearably somber, yet without any trace of having any depth. F
Wise Guys: Not a single funny moment, with unbearably awful characters. F
Mission Impossible: The center of this supposedly “too-intelligent” film was a scene done by everyone from “Tom and Jerry” to “Will and Grace”. But the directing wasn’t bad at all. C
Bonfire of the Vanities: One of the most notorious bad films of all time. Better than most DePalma movies.
Mission to Mars: I like science fiction so much, I liked “The Postman” and “Waterworld.” This movie was terrible. What does that say? F
How can this be considered a surprise? Like Nabokov's Lolita, or Joyce's Molly Bloom, it just pushes the perversion ball one more space forward. Put it this way, they couldn't NOT vote for this movie and maintain their leftist artistic creds.
Speaking of pushing the perversion ball, it was reported that Ang Lee is implying that the violent sex scenes in his film were real. This could just be hype, of course, but it brings to mind a Japanese film from about thirty years ago called IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES. It was shot by Nagisa Oshima, a left-wing radical turned “artsy” filmmaker. Set in the 1930s, it was the apparently true story of a wealthy brothel owner who begins an affair with one of his girls. They become obsessed with one another and their sex becomes violent. Eventually, when the girl realizes that her lover will never leave his wife for her, she strangles him to death during sex.
The sex scenes in this film actually were real, and the film got banned in Japan and numerous other countries. It made the round of assorted film festivals where the elites debated whether it was art or pornography (”But is it art?”).
The actor in the film, Tatsuya Fuji, didn’t see his career harmed. He wasn’t a huge star, but was a known supporting player and still has that status today. He recently played a prime minister in a Japanese film (he’s around seventy now). But the young actress in the film, Eiko Matsuda, saw her career pretty much ended. She got a part in a low budget crime comedy, and then played hooker or stripper types in a couple of films, and faded away by 1980.
It’ll be interesting to see how the young actress in this new Lee film fares. She may have seen it as a golden opportunity to appear in a film by a prominent director, but I’m not sure if it was wise in the long run.
Nabokov may have thought of himself as a conservative (a conservative Russian of that era probably had more in common with Ted Kennedy than Ronald Reagan), but Lolita was and is glorified in the West because of its decadence. While Nabokov seemed intent on wordplay and sketching out America’s provincial foibles, this novel had nothing to do with “conservative” values.
I must be the only person in America that enjoyed The Hulk. I expect the new Hulk movie to be garbage, if the quality of the director’s previous efforts are any indicator.
Was his sister, Ug Lee, in the movie?
Careful: if you come at the movie with a bad grade, somebody's going to come at you with a fist. If you come at him with a fist, he'll come at you with a bat. ...
Sorry, but it’s not celebrated in the West because of its “breadth and lyricism.” It’s celebrated because it examines an obscene subject matter in great and – granted – literary, detail: the serial rape of a prepubescent girl and the aftereffects of that rape. Look, I was an English major myself and I read all the “texts,” but come on, let’s be real here.
Your points are well taken, but I believe there is an undercurrent in Western literature that celebrates the unwashed (and the un-washable) at extreme levels, and to deny that these forces embrace Lolita not for its insights regarding American culture but for its salacious reputation (even if that reputation goes unrequited) seems misguided. The term “Lolita” has permeated Western culture, not because it represents Americana, but because it appears to represent unconsciable defects and unspeakable sex. If all Nabokov wanted to do was provide an intimate portrait of America, why didn’t he write something like Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley”? I loved the parts about the storm and Charley finally being able to go to the bathroom, and the details of their life in what may have been America’s first pickup-based camper are great, too. Nabokov didn’t do that because, conservative that he was(?), he knew he needed a “hotter” topic. As a writer myself, don’t tell me such considerations do not come into play.
I guarantee that Wajda’s upcoming Katyn movie will blow away any of this trash.
By the way, it's a pleasure to be able to have this kind of discussion on Free Republic!
Sorry, Lolita does humanize pedophilia, and it has become an electric touch-point for the leftist agenda, even if the author did not intend this. And “Pale Fire” has had literally no impact on the broader culture. I think you need to get out of the library!
All Art humanizes its subject matter. Does Macbeth humanize regicide? Does Crime and Punishment humanize Ax murderers? Does The Godfather humanize gangsters?
I prefer “The Defense” over “Lolita” as a novel, although the film version (called “The Luzhin Defense”) was rather ho-hum.
I liked Hulk too, I thought it was a good film, but, perhaps, a lousy comic-book movie (save for some nice effects and “rampage” footage).
The Russian novels are a different world. It’s certainly the best piece of fiction about chess ever written.
Wow. Okay, art over all, then. He purposely chose a salacious and obscene subject matter, Period. It’s not like he HAD to write this book – he wanted to write this book, because he was a good student of Joyce (who he focused on) and other leading 20th Century literary lights. Believe it or not, there is a calculus authors go though when choosing subject matter. Why do you think he chose this topic? To humanize the pedophile’s predicament? I don’t think so. Sure, he was poking fun at America (i.e., Lolita) in general, but he wanted to be ranked with the literary big boys, and that meant pushing the obscenity ball forward. Case closed.
The only problem being that there is nothing remotely obscene in the text itself. It’s not remotely pronographic. It only sounds obscene when summed up afterwards.
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