A trailblazer
RANDOR GUY
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With Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee attempts to infuse freshness into mainstream cinema
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CROWNING GLORY Ang Lee with his Oscar for Brokeback Mountain
History of a different kind has been created recently at the Academy Oscar Awards Night when, for the first time, an Asian filmmaker Ang Lee won the Best Director Oscar. A memorable event for Asian Cinema, which has not received the kind of attention it should have from critics in the West. Taiwan-born filmmaker Ang Lee blazes a new trail with his breakthrough movie, Brokeback Mountain (2005).
For the first time in American Cinema the forbidden love between two men, two cowboys considered the epitomeof themacho image, has been explored in this film. Ang Lee has had interest in dealing with homosexual love as part of human love.The Wedding Banquet (1993) deals with a homosexual gay American Taiwanese businessman in New York, who has an arranged marriage with a Chinese woman to conceal his homosexual leanings.The movie has been nominated at the Oscars for Best Foreign Film.
Lee made a mark in Hollywood in 1995 when he filmed the Jane Austin novel Sense and Sensibility.The movie has been a major success, and has won the Oscar for Best Screenplay for the British actor Emma Thompson who also played a role in it. Lee's hour of crowning glory dawned in 2000 when he established himself with his classic martial art movie, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, which has been a major hit around the world and won seven Oscar nominations including and won four, Best Foreign Film, Best Musical Score, Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography.
Ang Lee was born in 1954 in Pingtung, Taiwan, and graduated from the National Taiwan College of Arts in 1975 and relocated in America and took a B.F.A. Degree in Theatre at the University of Illinois, and M.A. Degree in Film Production at New York University. Here he served as Assistant Director to Spike Lee and worked on his (Spike's) thesis film, Joe's Bed-Sty Barbershop: We Cut Heads (1983). After writing a couple of screenplays, Lee took his bow as filmmaker with Pushing Hands (1992), a comic drama highlighting the generation conflicts in his homeland.
His next movie, Eat Drink Man Woman (1994), is the story of an aging widower with three unmarried daughters who are not bothered about his passion for food, but are more concerned about finding husbands.His advice to his daughters is "Eat, drink, man, woman. Food and sex. Basic human desires. Can't avoid them! All. life, everyday...!"
Lee, an excellent cook, during the making of this movie, engaged a number of cooks to make different kinds of exotic native dishes! This movie has received Best Foreign Film Oscar nomination. His other movies include The Ice Storm (1997). Based on a best-selling novel, which deals with sin, sex, and the Vietnam War, in the sizzling suburbs of aristocratic New England!
Ride With The Devil (1999) is an American Civil War drama, which has seen Lee ride into a new turf. However, critics and crowds feel that the movie is too long with not much action.
In 2003, Lee comes out with Hulk. Much has been expected of it but it did not happen, unlike comic book heroes like Superman or Batman. Then comes Brokeback Mountain.
Lee's body of work, covers a wide range from American Civil War tocomic book figures. His underlying theme about men under stress and caught in crisis is essentially what life is.
On why he risked portraying homosexual love in mainstream Hollywood Cinema, he says in an interview, "Mainstream films have occupied Hollywood but you can get bored very easily. It can be very repetitive and I think now we want something fresh and something inspiring and different."
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