Pages tagged “ang lee”

If we were to say that some Hollywood director and writer were teaming up to make yet another movie about the Summer of Love’s most adapted festival, Woodstock, would you turn on your favorite Grateful Dead album in anticipation or shrug with utter indifference?

Okay, well, what if we were to say that Ang Lee and James Schamus —the same team responsible for Brokeback Mountain and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon—would be the ones behind the film? And that while retaining the word "Woodstock" in its title, it would not be about the festival proper, but how it came to be? That’s a dancing bear of a different color, no!?

Lee and Schamus, most recently together on Lust, Caution, will reunite for Taking Woodstock. According to Variety, “the film is assuredly not going to be about the famed concert itself.”

The comedy will be based on a memoir co-written by Elliot Tiber and Tom Monte entitled Taking Woodstock: A True Story of a Riot, Concert, and a Life. It will follow our Everyman, Tiber, who works at his parents’ hotel in the Catskills during the week and spends weekends in Greenwich Village with the likes of Truman Capote and Andy Warhol.

Upon hearing that the original permit for the festival, set in Walkill, N.Y., had been cancelled, Tiber contacts festival organizers to let him know about his neighbor, Max Yasgur’s dairy farm. Since he is the official permit issuer in town, he secures a permit to have Woodstock there instead. Little does he know, he is setting into motion a chain of musical and cultural events of unprecedented impact.

The film will also be another foray into homosexuality for Lee and Schamus, since Tiber was a closeted gay man until his experience at Woodstock allowed him to come out in his parents’ small town. That aspect of the memoir has apparently just as much pull on the plot as the festival itself.

The filmmakers are collaborating with Focus Features, where Schamus is CEO, and will hopefully be in production before the end of the year. Although soundtrack choices are seemingly obvious, no original or period music has yet been confirmed.

Related links:
Feature: Art House Powerhouse - Directors
Taking Woodstock book synopsis
Feature: Rockfest Retrospective

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Director: Ang Lee
Writers: Kelly Sane
Cinematographer: Rodrigo Prieto
Starring: Tony Leung, Wei Tang, Joan Chen
Studio/Run Time: Focus Features, 148 mins.

Most notable directors have a distinct style that will immediately peg their work; a way of moving the camera or focusing on a facial feature, the use of music or color. Ang Lee, even in his high-flying moments (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), often prefers the invisible style of old Hollywood. But with this WWII epic he has taken that mode to extremes. The editor's work is invisible, yes, but so too is almost every trace of emotion, as well as the sensations of danger and lust.

It's difficult to estimate why Lee allows the James Schamus/Hui-Ling Wang script to play so large. Perhaps his grand backdrop is distracting - the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong and Shanghai during the 1940's. But the story, of a Chinese girl (Wei Tang) seducing a Japanese collaborator (Tony Leung) in order to assassinate him for the resistance, should be intimate. If the plot sounds familiar, you’re probably a Paul Verhoeven fan; last year, his Black Book presented a nearly identical narrative.

But where Black Book is a sort of grand guignol, this is a delicate chamber piece. Stately in pace and dry as porcelain, Lee dotes over the mahjongg games of wartime housewives and lets his camera roam wide to capture impeccably detailed recreations of streets and parlors, though he lingers longer on the well-maintained shopping avenues of society than the ravages of war.

Newcomer Wei Tang is simply glorious as Lee's heroine, able to be girlish and worldly, composed and shattered with equal fidelity. Watching her melt the immovable expressions of Tony Leung should be a delirious pleasure. But despite the much-vaunted NC17-worthy sexual content, during which Lee captures a range of human entanglement that is beyond most cinema, their courtship holds as much flavor as the dry bread we see lines of citizens queuing up for on Hong Kong streets. When, after one scene of rather rough sexuality, Wei Tang breaks into a small smile, the screen could positively shatter at the rare display of honest feeling.

Lee's interests have always leaned towards the feminine, specifically with respect to tales of repressed women. That might explain why he dallies so frequently with a trio of bored wives (including Joan Chen) and avoids engaging the passions of his nominal leads, not to mention the simmering desire and resentment between Wei Tang and her primary resistance contact. In doing so, Lee has bound Lust, Caution as tightly as any woman in his oeuvre, but absolutely nothing in this movie's 157-minute running time allows this work of art to truly break free.