Film industry movers and shakers criticize Taiwan's premier movie competition for marginalizing local productions and failing to foster homegrown talent
By Ho Yi
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[INTERVIEW] Ang Lee's heart of darkness never skips a beat

The director was determined to make his new film about Chinese espionage as frank as he could - but he did have to look away during the sex scenes
By Geoffrey MacNab
I meet Lee in the ballroom of an old Venetian hotel. In late afternoon, the room is dark and shadowy. It makes a suitable backdrop for a discussion of a film as ambiguous and unsettling as Lust, Caution (色,戒). The director is unapologetic about his film.

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Whitney Crothers Dilley talks about growing up in New York, Ang Lee's work and why she wrote the first English-language book on the award-winning filmmaker
By Ron Brownlow
In 1993, Whitney Crothers Dilley took her future husband to see The Wedding Banquet (喜宴), a film by an as yet unknown Taiwanese director named Ang Lee (李安). Dilley, then a doctoral student at the University of Washington, chose the movie because she was feeling nostalgic about the three years she had spent learning Mandarin in Taiwan. A dozen years later she would write the first book on Lee's films in English, the first academic treatment of his work, a book Chinese film specialist Chris Berry has called "essential reading for any scholar of either contemporary Chinese or American film."

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By Christopher Maag
Like most mobs, the one that pursued Megan Meier was cruel and unrelenting. Its members gathered on the social networking site MySpace and called Megan a liar, a fat whore and worse, said Tina Meier, Megan's mother.

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FICTION [ FULL STORY ]

Rising temperatures aren't confined to Earth, claim Christopher Booker and Richard North, who attribute the problem to changes in the sun's radiation
By Robin McKie
As claims go, the suggestion that the entire solar system is warming intensely is a corker. Mars and Pluto are heating up like Earth, it is alleged - disturbing news that appears in Christopher Booker and Richard North's examination of scare stories and "the new age of superstition" in which, it is alleged, we live.

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The director is on the verge of becoming, or may already be, one of the great film directors, argues the Taiwan-based author of 'The Cinema of Ang Lee'
By Bradley Winterton
At a press-conference in Taipei last week, Ang Lee (李安) appeared the most self-effacing and generous-natured of celebrities, but also one of the most intelligent. He guessed he was "not a macho kind of guy," he said, but was instead interested in outsiders, those who suffered from the conflicts of others, and especially women. He was also devoted to diversity, he said, to making each new movie as unlike the one that went before it as possible.

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