Posterized: Ang Lee

By Nathaniel R

Ang Lee with one of his Billy Lynn stars, Vin DieselOne of our favorite directors has a new film going wide today. Unfortunately number 13 proves unlucky for the great Ang Lee as Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk, a military drama about the way we use soldiers as propaganda pawns or blank slates to project upon, is hard to watch. Let us pray for a swift death to Hollywood's current unfathomable interest in the high frame rate technique. (The technique is ugly, expensive but looks cheap, and doesn't look like cinema -- that's lose lose lose or three strikes you're out. So what's the appeal Hollywood?)

Nevertheless Ang Lee has given us so many riches over his 24 year feature film career that we ought to appreciate his filmography this weekend.

How many of his pictures have you seen?
All the posters are after the jump... 

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Doc Corner: From the Chiffon Jungle to the Great Outdoors at DOC NYC

Last week we looked at a group of films among the mammoth collection of titles playing Doc NYC. The festival continues and so we're looking at a few more films, taking a sort of cinematic road trip from the big city, down the highway to the Rocky Mountains and then back again.

The “chiffon jungle” is what the subject of Otis Mass’ debut film, The Incomparable Rose Hartman, a fashion and pop culture photographer whose images are as iconic as they are striking, labels her home of New York City. A place where fashion is as integral to daily life as breath is to life. Feel to free disagree, but as the first person to understand the appeal of the decadent backstage of celebrity life and master it into something truly artful, Hartman soon built a reputation that put her subjects at ease and made her none synonymous with New York’s cultural scene in a more extravagant way than the likes of Bill Cunningham. Whether she was photographing the models backstage and on the runways of  Donna Karen, Caroline Herrera or Halston, or capturing the more candid, celebratory side of celebrities like Jerry Hall, Andy Warhol, Grace Jones, Liza Minnelli and Cher at Studio 54, her work is justifiably as iconic as it is extraordinary...

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Review: South Korea's Oscar Submission "The Age of Shadows"

Tim here. Age of Shadows is currently making its way around the U.S. art house circuit, giving Americans our change to catch up with one of the biggest hits at the Korean box office this year. It's a historical spy thriller, set during a period of time that I suspect most of us English-speakers haven't thought about much, or at all: the stretch of time from 1910 to the end of World War II when Korea was occupied by Japan.

The film, set in the 1920s, takes as its subject the Korean resistance to Japanese rule, and follows the career of a double agent named Lee Jung-chool (Korean superstar Song Kang-ho), a Korean-born police captain operating under strict Japanese control...

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Oscar Horrors: Japan's Ghost Story "Kwaidan"

Boo! It's "Oscar Horrors". Each evening we'll look back on a horror-connected nomination until Halloween. Here's Dancin' Dan on a spooky Japanese beauty...

Have any of you ever seen Masaki Kobayashi's Kwaidan? I wouldn't be surprised if you hadn't. Even among Japanese films, it's not much talked about today, though it deserves to be. Kwaidan is a rarity in so many ways - an omnibus film made by one director, a truly artful horror film, a groundbreaking work of art. It was nominated for the Best Foreign Language Film in 1965 (losing to the heartrending The Shop on Main Street from Czechoslovakia), and it's a bit hard to imagine it getting that far today, even with its arthouse bona fides like a Special Jury Prize at Cannes...

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APSA Nominations: Lion, Cold of Kalandar, and More

The Asia Pacific Screen Awards has announced its nominations for the film year. The organization is in its 10th year -- and we should note that our own Glenn Dunks works for them behind the scenes. They basically cover the whole continent so that includes Asian countries, Australia, Russia, you name it. Their definition is loose enough that it even covers films with creative teams that qualify even if the film is a co-production made elsewhere. Their nomination procedure is elaborate -- 303 films from 43 countries were in the mix this year -- and whittled down throughout the year. The results are certainly a unique barometer of the region.

Cold of Kalandar, Turkey's Oscar submission, has 3 nominations

The nominations with commentary are after the jump...

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