Ang Lee

There was a whole lot of fringe at Woodstock, the pivotal fringe festival that took place 40 years ago not in the artsy Upstate New York town but in the distant hamlet of Bethel. In the summer of '69 there were 500,000 stories in that naked village. Taking Woodstock is one of them, a microcosm of the fabled occasion that brought rock-and-roll to Rip Van Winkle country. Ang Lee's deadpan-comic account of the event sees the shaggy and fringe-vested horde through the bemused eyes of Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin)

HONG KONG - Oscar-winning director Ang Lee played an important role in "The Hangover Part II" - at least offscreen. He is the father of one of the actors. The filmmaker's younger son, Mason Lee, plays Teddy, the teenager the lead characters try to rescue as they struggle to piece together what happened during a crazy night in Bangkok. Ang Lee was clearly a proud dad speaking to reporters after catching a showing with his younger brother and mother earlier this week in Taiwan, his home country.

"Eat Drink Man Woman," director Ang Lee's celebration of family life and good food in contemporary Taiwan, received six nominations Tuesday to pace the field for the 1995 Spirit Awards honoring independent films. Alan Rudolph's "Mrs. Parker and the Vicious Circle" and Quentin Tarantino's "Pulp Fiction" followed with five nominations apiece from the Independent Feature Project/West's 11-member Spirit Awards nominating committee, which chose from among 112 films submitted by the independent filmmaking community.

Oscar may not speak English this year. Taiwanese-born director Ang Lee has received the Directors Guild award for "outstanding directorial achievement in feature film" for his Chinese-language kung fu epic Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Lee, who has been nominated for an Oscar for best director, received the guild award Saturday night. The award is one of the most prestigious stops on the road to the Academy Awards, which will be presented March 25. Since it was first given in 1949, only four of its recipients have failed to win Oscars for best director.

In 1973, the end of the Vietnam War and the third-rate burglary of a hotel known as Watergate had set off another powerful quake in an America still experiencing the political and cultural aftershocks of the '60s. But half a world away, 18-year-old Ang Lee had his own problems. To the consternation of his conservative father, the rebellious Taiwanese high school student, who could speak no English, had flunked his college entrance exams and was leaving home. It was time to begin the long odyssey that, a quarter-century later, would bring him back to 1973 and The Ice Storm.

During the sumptuous four-minute opening-credits sequence of Eat Drink Man Woman, viewers get to see a deft display of culinary wizardry: the brisk chopping of exotic vegetables, the surgical preparation of sea bass, the bubbling pot of lotus flower soup. To shoot these scenes, Ang Lee, who co- wrote and directed this follow-up to his Oscar-nominated art-house hit The Wedding Banquet, employed a trio of top Taiwanese cooks. More than 100 recipes were used in the film, which traces the relationship between three grown daughters and their widower father - a father who happens to be Taipei's most celebrated chef.

Say what you will about the sex scenes in the NC-17 "Lust, Caution" - they're anything but gratuitous. Ang Lee's World War II espionage movie is about a Chinese resistance fighter (Tang Wei) who, during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, seduces a high-ranking collaborator (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) in order to set him up for assassination. Just about everything that's important about their psychologically tortured relationship plays out while sexual congress is in session - sessions that involve bondage, submission and what appears to border on rape.

An act of courage, like an act of love, requires a leap of faith. It is with gravity and levity and incomparable grace that Ang Lee's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon - by light years the best movie of 2000 - makes those leaps literally, with heroes and villains springing onto rooftops and treetops variously in pursuit of amour, adventure, revenge, righteousness, and a mystical broadsword called the Green Destiny. Set in a China of the indefinite past, Crouching Tiger melds the legend of Mulan with the tales of King Arthur and Robin Hood.

Ang Lee wasn't sure how the veteran actor Nick Nolte would feel about joining the cast of a movie based on a comic book. So the director did his homework before heading to Nolte's Malibu estate to offer him the role of Bruce Banner's mad-scientist father in his big-screen adaptation of "The Hulk. " "I knew he didn't do big Hollywood movies anymore. He only wanted to do small, personal movies," Lee said. "So I didn't pitch it as a comic book. I pitched it as a Greek tragedy. " Lee knew Nolte was sold when the actor invited him up to his secret laboratory and showed him a sample of his own blood on the monitor.

HONG KONG - Oscar-winning director Ang Lee played an important role in "The Hangover Part II" - at least offscreen. He is the father of one of the actors. The filmmaker's younger son, Mason Lee, plays Teddy, the teenager the lead characters try to rescue as they struggle to piece together what happened during a crazy night in Bangkok. Ang Lee was clearly a proud dad speaking to reporters after catching a showing with his younger brother and mother earlier this week in Taiwan, his home country.

Although it circles back on itself, bracketed by dreamy scenes of snow-covered woods where momentous things occur, Alejandro González Iñárritu's Biutiful works differently than the Mexican director's previous films. No overlapping time-loop narratives, no sprawling, interconnected cast of characters. The story is linear, the point of view belongs to just one man. And yet, this immensely powerful and haunting work resonates in ways that Amores Perros , 21 Grams, and Babel - hardly lightweight affairs - did not. Much of that resonance has to do with Javier Bardem, who was rightly accorded a best-actor Oscar nomination last week and who draws from a deep, deep well of love, pain, and who-knows-what-else.

There was a whole lot of fringe at Woodstock, the pivotal fringe festival that took place 40 years ago not in the artsy Upstate New York town but in the distant hamlet of Bethel. In the summer of '69 there were 500,000 stories in that naked village. Taking Woodstock is one of them, a microcosm of the fabled occasion that brought rock-and-roll to Rip Van Winkle country. Ang Lee's deadpan-comic account of the event sees the shaggy and fringe-vested horde through the bemused eyes of Elliot Teichberg (Demetri Martin)

It's time to catch Demetri Martin before he becomes Steve Martin. The star of Comedy Central's Important Things With Demetri Martin, an inspired amalgam of stand-up, prop, and sketch comedy, has recently scored some meaty roles in such dramatic forthcoming films as Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock and Steven Soderbergh's Moneyball. The Steven Wright acolyte performs tonight at the Tower Theater in Upper Darby, delivering his surreal/cerebral humor. (Videos from his shows can be seen on the Comedy Central Web site.

'Golden Compass' topped weekend film openings The Golden Compass, a fantasy tale based on the novel by Philip Pullman, opened as the top film at U.S. and Canadian theaters over the weekend, taking in $26.1 million for Time Warner Inc. That's about $9 million less than industry insiders had expected, given that it was the only major film to open. Still, Compass, from New Line Cinema, dethroned Walt Disney Co.'s Enchanted, which dropped to second. Compass tells the story of a young girl who uses a unique ability to discern truth in a cosmic battle over free will.

Say what you will about the sex scenes in the NC-17 "Lust, Caution" - they're anything but gratuitous. Ang Lee's World War II espionage movie is about a Chinese resistance fighter (Tang Wei) who, during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai, seduces a high-ranking collaborator (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) in order to set him up for assassination. Just about everything that's important about their psychologically tortured relationship plays out while sexual congress is in session - sessions that involve bondage, submission and what appears to border on rape.

In some ways, Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain , adapted from a short story by Annie Proulx, and Ang Lee's Lust, Caution , adapted from a short story by Eileen Chang, aren't so very different. Both, at the core, are about secret passion: two cowpokes who can't reveal their love for fear of the shame it'll bring on, or worse, and two Chinese in World War II Shanghai who can't reveal their love, for more complicated but no less dangerous reasons. He - Yee (Hong Kong star Tony Leung)

THE BIG WIN for "Crash" on Oscar night is being ballyhooed as the triumph of the independents, but, in truth, "King Kong" won just as many Oscars (three), and so did the old-fashioned costume drama "Memoirs of a Geisha. " So, for that matter, did "Brokeback Mountain," whose director, Ang Lee, has to be wondering how his unequalled work didn't yield a best-picture statuette. So Lee is no doubt confused, but 2005 left a lot of people in Hollywood scratching their heads. The box-office take was down, and 12 months of panic and introspection have so far yielded little useful insight.

It says a lot about America - and movies, and the genius of the Taiwan-born director Ang Lee - that Brokeback Mountain, the first gay love story to be embraced by the public ($62 million and going strong) and the Oscars (eight nominations, including best picture) is an oater, a horse opera, a western. Like a stagecoach trundling over a rocky pass, the cowboy genre has been used to carry baggage - heavy themes, messages, metaphors - from the Silent Era to the iPod Age. In Brokeback, it's gay love.