XXX, the Ang Lee Film

As a student at Tisch, students may often hear people commenting saying “Oh, look at this sequence man, God, it’s so Scorsese! ”, or “Oh lord, this is such a Woody Allen film.” not only for Tisch students, moviegoers who have watched a decent amount of films will recognize something common in mostly every piece of work a filmmaker has done, and we call it the filmmaker’s fingerprint. Not only these well-known filmmakers contain their own fingerprints, Xavier Dolan, a young rising director/writer, has only done films about homosexuality like I Killed My Mother is about the relationship between the gay son and his mother, and Heartbeats is about a love triangle among three close gay friends; Steven Chow, a Chinese filmmaker, has ninety percent of his art works like The God of Cookery, Shaolin Soccer and Kung Fu Hustle to be classic Chinese comedy with tremendous amount of Chinese humor; Julie Taymor who is an independent filmmaker always brings experimental elements into her narratives and adjust the visual image with over-the-top color corrections. These artists have very strong personal tastes of their art works, and the fingerprint gradually becomes audiences’ expectations of their films: audiences hope and believe that the trend will continue throughout his career, and also because of that, the filmmaker’s fan base is settled - people who love Dolan and appreciate the homosexual focus will most likely continue loving him, people who get a good sense of Chinese humor and appreciate Chow’s narrative will always want to watch his latest work…
I asked a few students in Tisch, “Well, what do you think Ang Lee’s fingerprint is?” Hardly a student can give a confident answer. Then I asked them, “so what do you think Ang lee’s next fi...

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...ng Lee’s films have a great and pretty establishments of the natural surroundings. In Brokeback Mountain, the camera transforms the melancholiness of the Brokeback Mountain in Wyoming into a vivid image with its midtone of its color shifts to purplish-blue; in Life of Pi, the sea reflects the exact skyline and blends the sky and the ocean together because it is extremely hard or impossible to recognize the end line of the ocean; in Lust, Caution, even though the overall setting of the film is in the post-war Shanghai, but one can realize that the production designer tries to bring in as much nature as he can to symbolize the growth of the city and the growth of the character’s arc. By using nature, Ang Lee is able to let audiences feel more authentic watching his film because a person can act to be another person, but the nature forever and always presents itself.