Word: caution
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Beneath its lacquered surfaces and tasteful period trappings, Lust, Caution is a movie about the ineffable mystery of sex - its power to debase, as well as to sanctify. In the film, the lovers' first encounter is violent, verging on rape; later, when they twist into a fleshy pretzel, their embrace becomes a shelter from the dangerous outside world. The censors who have branded Lee's film as art-house erotica have got it all wrong. Lust, Caution isn't an adult movie - just a grown...
...keep its decrepit economy limping a while longer. Kim has been more pliable of late: at six-party talks in Beijing late last month, North Korea agreed to dismantle its nuclear facilities and disclose the scope of its nuclear program by the end of the year. Yet history counsels caution. Kim Jong Il has proven a master manipulator of Seoul's optimists, raising hopes of eventual reunification just to extract economic concessions and buy more time for his hermetic Stalinist fiefdom. "You can imagine a scenario in which South Korea offers this big carrot and North Korea simply pockets...
...second hour of stately intrigue, as a young woman in Japanese-occupied China woos a Chinese collaborator, hoping to get close enough to kill him. Then the man (Hong Kong star Tony Leung Chiu-wai) takes the woman (newcomer Tang Wei) to bed, and Ang Lee's Lust, Caution becomes a different movie. In three startling sex scenes, the two actors mime first a brutal seduction, then a sadomasochistic pas de deux, then the flexing of the woman's wiles until she has achieved erotic control of her prey...
...Director Oscar for Brokeback Mountain, a less explicit but no less passionate story of two gay cowboys. He took that cachet and banked it on a Mandarin-language drama that has earned the Motion Picture Association's NC-17 rating (no children under 17). That rating will keep Lust, Caution out of many cinemas because lots of theater owners won't show films with a rating harder than R. Nor, if current standards hold, will the dvd be available at Wal-Mart or Blockbuster. But the $83 million theatrical take of Brokeback makes some in the film community hope that...
...those films aren't seen--worse, they aren't made--because for all the naughty words and bloody corpses in today's movies, Hollywood is a timid place, at once prurient and puritanical. It's afraid of films that show strong, subtle passions between men and women. If Lust, Caution becomes a hit--a long shot, given its 2 1/2 hr. running time and lack of marquee names--it would be bucking both the NC-17 stigma and the current aversion to serious, old-fashioned screen romance...