Even though it's not a public holiday I ended up having a long weekend as my evening students cancelled on me and my daytime student has obligations today and tomorrow so it'll be sleeping in for the next two days. Hooray! Although, one of the staff just called and I've been roped in to teach a half day for the next couple of Saturdays because one of my bosses is going on holidays.
I decided to go and watch the much-hyped Lust, Caution, the new Ang Lee film. Rotten Tomatoes gave it 67% and I would say the critics there were overly generous. It's rated III because of the the erotic sex scenes between Tony Leung and Tang Wei. I wonder if I got my bag checked because of the potential to make a soft porn film from the footage or because of the heightened security relating to DVD pirating. One usher actually had a pair of night vision binoculars to survey the cinema's audience from a ladder to catch anyone with a hidden video camera! How very commando of him.
Anyway, back to the movie. It was long (close to three hours) and drawn out because of the plot with little substance. If it's classed as a thriller, then I couldn't find anything thrilling about it. Any pluses you ask? Joan Chen and Tony Leung's "pat pat" and bits, which the Hong Kong entertainment media have aptly called "Gai Darn Tsays" (aka daipaidong little egg balls).
Two lonely cowboys on top of a mountain was a lot more interesting than a spy who falls in love with the man she is suppose to betray. It's beyond me how this film won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.
4 comments:
Wow, if two gay cowboys makes this look bad then I'm giving it a serious miss.
To think I was all interested in this because they've decided to release a censored version here. It's funny how censorship of films generally tends to work in the reverse - it makes people actually want to see the film!
I remember the film released a couple of years ago that had an actual *gasp* blowjob in it. It was a foreign film. Very few people would have been remotely interested and then they went and banned it - ensuring that people would track it down just to see the infamous blowjob scene. Sigh... this is what happens when you let conservatives be the only members of censorship boards...
A censored version! I wonder if they photoshop to omit the "offensive" material with a black rectangular box or actually delete scenes out. Either way,
there won't be much left of the interesting parts of the movie that is integral for the development of the already very thin storyline, so probably not worth your while to go and see it.
Also, I want to conduct an experiment. Can you go to Wikipedia and type into wiki search "sex positions" to see if you can view that page? Or has a certain government censored it because of "offensive" illustrations? Wikipedia has also been known to self-censor to be on friendly terms with particular governments from time to time.
at least Zhang Zi Yi isn't in it!
I like her, but western audiences treat their chinese actors and actresses like chinese food. You give them a little, and that's all they order.
Yup that page comes up alright.
Lust, Caution is not pixelated etc, it's about 15 minutes shorter instead.
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