Ang Lee (
Lee and frequent producing and screenwriting partner James Schamus were honored with a freedom of expression award on Tuesday at ShoWest, an annual convention of US theater owners, for their collaborations, which include last year's sexually charged thriller Lust, Caution.
NC-17 RATING
Though the US$4.6 million domestic haul for Lust, Caution was small compared with the US$83 million box-office return for Brokeback Mountain, Lee and Schamus' latest production went a long way to legitimizing the NC-17 rating.
Set in the World War II era, Lust, Caution centers on a young Chinese woman (Tang Wei,
"You see the most private performances. The most brave and private," said Lee, who won the best-director Academy Award for Brokeback Mountain. "I think those scenes are pivotal. They anchor the movie, so it would be a shame if we don't see it."
Only a handful of movies have gone out with the NC-17 rating, which replaced the old X rating in the early 1990s to offer a category that did not carry the connotation of smut for explicit movies.
`UNUSED MUSCLE'
The rating had been viewed as a kiss of death, with distributors usually preferring to release movies unrated rather than with the NC-17 tag. The expectation had been that theaters and audiences would shun anything with an NC-17 rating, but Schamus said that was not the case with Lust, Caution.
"It was one of those strange situations where the NC-17 was kind of an unused muscle. It was lying fallow, and everybody simply assumed the stigma was still there," said Schamus, who heads Focus Features, which released both Lust, Caution and Brokeback Mountain.
John Fithian, who heads the National Association of Theatre Owners, said he hoped that with filmmakers of Lee and Schamus' stature opening the door, other directors would not shy away from material that could get them an NC-17 rating.
"Lust, Caution showed people that an NC-17 movie is not pornography, which is kind of the legend we have been living with, that NC-17 was the same thing as X-rated," said Dan Glickman, head of the Motion Picture Association of America.
The Taipei Department of Health yesterday said it has launched a probe into a restaurant at Far Eastern Sogo Xinyi A13 Department Store after a customer died of suspected food poisoning. A preliminary investigation on Sunday found missing employee health status reports and unsanitary kitchen utensils at Polam Kopitiam (寶林茶室) in the department store’s basement food court, the department said. No direct relationship between the food poisoning death and the restaurant was established, as no food from the day of the incident was available for testing and no other customers had reported health complaints, it said, adding that the investigation is ongoing. Later
REVENGE TRAVEL: A surge in ticket prices should ease this year, but inflation would likely keep tickets at a higher price than before the pandemic Scoot is to offer six additional flights between Singapore and Northeast Asia, with all routes transiting Taipei from April 1, as the budget airline continues to resume operations that were paused during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Scoot official said on Thursday. Vice president of sales Lee Yong Sin (李榮新) said at a gathering with reporters in Taipei that the number of flights from Singapore to Japan and South Korea with a stop in Taiwan would increase from 15 to 21 each week. That change means the number of the Singapore-Taiwan-Tokyo flights per week would increase from seven to 12, while Singapore-Taiwan-Seoul
BAD NEIGHBORS: China took fourth place among countries spreading disinformation, with Hong Kong being used as a hub to spread propaganda, a V-Dem study found Taiwan has been rated as the country most affected by disinformation for the 11th consecutive year in a study by the global research project Varieties of Democracy (V-Dem). The nation continues to be a target of disinformation originating from China, and Hong Kong is increasingly being used as a base from which to disseminate that disinformation, the report said. After Taiwan, Latvia and Palestine ranked second and third respectively, while Nicaragua, North Korea, Venezuela and China, in that order, were the countries that spread the most disinformation, the report said. Each country listed in the report was given a score,
POOR PREPARATION: Cultures can form on food that is out of refrigeration for too long and cooking does not reliably neutralize their toxins, an epidemiologist said Medical professionals yesterday said that suspected food poisoning deaths revolving around a restaurant at Far Eastern Department Store Xinyi A13 Store in Taipei could have been caused by one of several types of bacterium. Ho Mei-shang (何美鄉), an epidemiologist at Academia Sinica’s Institute of Biomedical Sciences, wrote on Facebook that the death of a 39-year-old customer of the restaurant suggests the toxin involved was either “highly potent or present in massive large quantities.” People who ate at the restaurant showed symptoms within hours of consuming the food, suggesting that the poisoning resulted from contamination by a toxin and not infection of the