The Hip Opinion

About Lust, Caution (2007):

Mr. Yee (Tony Leung), frankly, is a man who deserves to die.

Along with being a traitor to his country in the Japanese-occupied Shanghai of the 1940s, he murders and tortures resistant Chinese countrymen.  Patriotic activists want to kill him; specifically, six university students do.  One of them, the inexperienced and romantic Wong (Tang Wei), agrees to infiltrate Mr. Yee’s circle by befriending his wife and then becoming his mistress.  By and by she will lure the evildoer to her fellow students’ gunfire.  But Yee is hard to assassinate.  For one thing, the sex between him and Wong, though it resembles agony, means something to Wong.  She is moved by Mr. Yee’s emotion, by what appears to be love.  At the same time, she does not doubt that he must die.

This is not all that’s going on.  ”Would you believe me,” Wong says to Mr. Yee, “if I told you I hate you?”  Yee answers that, yes, he does believe her.  These words are spoken because instinctively Yee knows that Wong is a member of the resistance, that she is his enemy.  Maybe he suspects he is a doomed man.  But he never admits this and probably hopes he can win Wong over.  Critic James Bowman, in his website review, is right that Lust, Caution “transcends ideology . . . by making us see its irrelevance to the real well-springs of human action and feeling.”

This is one of Ang Lee’s best films.  The man who made Eat Drink Man Woman (1994) hasn’t lost his touch, for LC is adeptly directed and acted.  Its necessary eroticism earned it an NC-17 rating. . . Wong is a woman who barely conceals her passion.  Her breasts are small but, when she sleeps with Mr. Yee, her nipples are powerfully erect.  Copulation here proceeds in such a way that it belongs to a sphere of its own, a separate world.  Fascinating and honest–this is what Lee’s superlative film, based on a story by Eileen Chang, is.

(In Mandarin Chinese with English subtitles.)

Cover of Lust, Caution (Widescreen Edition)

Respect for women.  The detestation of cruelty, whether that of the Indian or of the white man.  Manly struggle for the good of others.

These are the values upheld in the short 1957 novel, West to the Sun, by Noel Loomis. Loomis wrote Westerns, and this is essentially what Sun is despite its being set in the 1700s on the cusp of the Revolutionary War.  Yes, the characters–Englishmen, Frenchmen and Spaniards in North America–are paper-thin, but the story is a sturdy grabber and the details are engaging.  Disturbing too:  boy, could the Indians be shockingly brutal!

Steve Taylor’s Blue Like Jazz (2012) is based on a memoir by Donald Miller. In it, an evangelical kid–Miller–is so stunned by his Christian mother’s having an affair with a youth pastor that he flees to the Portland, Oregon liberal-arts college his pagan father has enrolled him in.  The student body there is eaten up with leftism and frequently glorifies sex and drinking, with the result that young Don happily dismisses evangelical belief.  What we end up with is a basically Christian film, but one which expects Joe Christian (in this case, Don) to apologize to the world for the conduct of the devout.  This includes everything from the Crusades to “U.S. foreign policy.”

Nice try, Steve Taylor, but no cigar.

True, the film is reasonably intelligent, but not without many flaws.  It seems to consider the Southern Baptist denomination a “strange church” (i.e. not liberal).  The action of the story is rather forced, the characters are scantily drawn and, to me, Marshall Allman (Don) is not a very likeable actor.

Blue Like Jazz: The Movie (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Anyone who likes musicals should experience the very charming The Drowsy Chaperone if he or she gets a chance to see it.  The book by Bob Martin and Don McKellar salutes American musicals of the Jazz Age and, although it starts to sag after a while, is effectively mirthful and casually smart.  The music–by Lisa Lambert and Greg Morrison–seldom disappoints.  True, “Cold Feets” doesn’t cut it, but such songs as “Show Off” and “Love is Always Lovely in the End” are pleasant and exciting items.  As long as the singing and dancing are acceptable (they usually were in the local production I saw), it’s a heck of a show. 

The Drowsy Chaperone (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) is a Hollywood remake of a 1999 Japanese film, and I could hardly figure out what was happening in it.  A horror concoction, it is strikingly creepy (aren’t they all?), but for me creepy isn’t scary.

Even so, congrats to Verbinski for his directing and to Charles Gibson for his supervision of visual effects.  They make it palpable that evil exists.  The sequence with the freaked-out horse is wildly, weirdly effectual, and the image of Naomi Watts holding a small, clothed skeleton while standing waist-deep in well water is sobering.  I wish The Ring had been better.  It has its virtues, but confusingly complex writing in a freakfest is not for me.  More simplicity, please.

The Ring (2002 film) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)