Ang Lee and Eileen Chang
American media have not given it a good publicity.
Good that I can read news from Taiwanese news sites.
I found Reuters gave it a nice report
I believe Ang Lee is not going to disappoint Eileen Chang if she's been alive.
Ang Lee did a great job on the originally short story of Brokeback Mountain. This time is an originally short story again, from my favorite writer. I am actually nervously looking forward to how he is going to make it on the big screen.
Sex scenes have been highly emphasized in all the media who cover his new work. But I've seen all his movies. Sex may be more important in this new film than others, but the subject matter should be beyond sex. The intriguing question may be: What does sex do to people who participate in it?
The answer is in the title: Lust, Caution.
I like it that he always names the English title literally equal to the original Chinese title if the film is Chinese-speaking.
(For example, "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon", "Eat Drink Man Woman", and "Pushing Hands")
Even though the US rates it NC-17, only Taiwan will play it without trimming it.
Sex is a weird subject in the States. I just learned that many Americans of my generation did not have formal sex education when they were in grade school.
Is it a rebound? I just saw Factory Girl. Americans in the 60's were very wild. Now they "believe" in abstinence-only sex education because sex is not "safe" if you do it before getting married. This belief is so not educational.
They are so afraid of not being safe and dying of sexually transmitted diseases.
Also previously people smoked like crazy. Now ads make smoking like the worse sin.Or if you smoke to death, you'll definitely go to hell. Or if you sell cigarettes, you are the enemy of the human kind.
If they want to live long and healthy, they should simply change their diet and lose a loooot of weight. Take a look at this chart on Heart Disease and Stroke.
Americans really should lose weight, and ... enjoy sex with informative disease-preventing education, and also watch good non-English-speaking movies.
4 comments:
I'm looking foward to this one too. It seems that they have a great team. Tony Leung is one of my favorite actors.
About your latest post on Helium, actually my advisor gave me the best answer to this question(at least I think - although he himself is never married :P). He said "you decide to marry someone because you don't want to miss this particular person in your future life". Apparently I didn't give him the 'ideal' reason :) - I told him something like you mentioned in your last paragraph... yeah...why not... but it's more of a passive attitude if you think about it. This also applies to many other aspects of our daily life.
Interesting views about Americans. Maybe I'm just being lucky. Most of the Americans I met are great people, knowledgable (not just the domestic issues), open-minded, caring, humorous, ... well, I know I have a small sample size :) so can't say it for all.
As for the sex topic, I don't think disease is the only thing people're concerned about. We all have different comfortable levels and we set our limits based on our inward needs. Physical pleasure is not always on people's top list as you can see from Maslow's hierachy of needs: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow's_hierarchy_of_needs)
So I'd assume that even if sex was safe at all times, some people might still not enjoy it as much as others and choose a more abstinent life style. Whichever decisions they make sound good/right to me as long as they know what they are doing and they can be themselves.
(You should update your blog more on this kind of discussion ;p )
Yeah, as long as people know what they are doing, they should be good and everyone should just mind their own business.
What bothers me is that people know little.
What bothers me more is that many people do not want to know more.
What bothers me even more is that some people reject to acknowledge things they did not know after they know it. They just want to stick to the old narrow universe of theirs.
Now I sound kinda snobbish.
Not just sex, many people do not enjoy the following for "safety" reasons too: yoga, tango, good movies, bath with a good book, and latte in a nice little coffee shop.
Why? Probably they think some God or some unbreakable peer-pressure want them to suffer in order to have a more meaningful life than others.
he he, I enjoyed reading your blog so much that I almost forgot I had one too :P Mine is more of a 'soap opera' blog with no big&deep thinking. I tend to use it for resting :)And I just noticed that my montana diary stayed unfinished for two months already - that's what happens when you pause during writing: you don't find the same feelings and motivation to continue again...
I agree there're people who're not willing to see, understand, and accept new ideas - I try to avoid those - maybe that's why I don't see them often ;)
However for your last comment, we may also want to look at it this way, the pressure and suffering only exist when you yourself feel them. Freedom is a relative term - depending on how much you truly need. And in this case, it's not always the more the better. Some people prefer to stay in a little box where they actually feel safe and 'free' - hehe, I've seen those, but they enjoy themselves in the huge wonderland inside. So it's good for them. I, on the other hand, need a bigger space to survive.
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