Ang Lee and Mel Gibson are arguably the two moviemakers most responsible for the career of Heath Ledger. Aside from the fact that they're both double Oscar-winning directors who were born in the 1950s, could these men be any more different? Ang Lee is an enormously talented director of restrained style and superb taste. His films are quiet, nuanced, and moving. In them he looks on other types, races, and cultures with a compassionate eye and profound humanism. Mr. Gibson is an enormously well-rewarded director of showoff style and bizarre taste. His films are loud, obvious, and violent. In them he looks on other types, races, and cultures with a suspicous eye and harsh judgment.
Mel, part-time Aussie, snatched up Heath Ledger when he was just a hot young Australian actor to play his son in The Patriot (directed by Roland Emmerich) which led to multi-million dollar paychecks and billboard & magazine cover fame. Ang then rescued him from a dwindling career and guided the performance of a lifetime in Brokeback Mountain. We owe both Mel and Ang for lifting the career of this very promising actor into our sight line.
Thank you Mel. Now please go sell crazy somewhere else!
Thank you Ang. You can stay. Make lots more movies, please.
tags: Heath Ledger, Mel Gibson, Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain,celebrities, Australia
Posts
13 comments:
When it comes to Heath, either you're eehn, or you're ouht.
I'm sorry, Mel. That means you're ouht.
(Can't forget to give due props to Naomi Watts, though, who by most accounts encouraged Heath to take the role when he was hedging about it.)
Aw, Ang looks so...angelic. And pure. :-D
Mel Gibson only made one movie in my world (Braveheart). The Passion of the Christ was Caleb Deschanel's film. People will realize that eventually...
uhh...didn't Ang Lee only win one Oscar? IMDb says so.
he won two. for some reason IMDB never lists the foreign film under the director but from my understanding it goes to the director (unlike best picture which goes to the producer)
someone correct me if i'm wrong.
didn't roland emmerich (speaking of hack directors) direct 'the patriot'?
Oh The Patriot was also Deschanel's film. hehehe.
Ang Lee won one Oscar. The Oscar for "Crouching Tiger" symbolically goes to Taiwan as a film nation, though of course, it stays with Ang Lee (because you just can't toss it somewhere in Taiwan I think. Someone may get hurt).
Oh and then there's their blatant disregard for the auteur theory. Best Picture should always go to the director, anyway.
Yeah, from my understanding, Foreign Language Oscars technically belong to their country of origin, but the director gets to keep the actual statuette by default. Then again, they always are used in promotion to say Academy Award-winning director, so I'm not positive...
- Adam
It doesn't make much sense that the producers don't get the Foreign Film statue. Maybe it's because in other countries films need to get SO much funding from other places that there ends up being about 20 producers. But it's nice to be able to say Ang is a 2 time Academy Award winner. Same for Pedro Almodovar!
Heath's awesome.
Whoa, when you typed PotC, I thought you meant Pirates of the Caribbean, which was weird.
I think it's totally appropriate that the producers get the Best Pic award, since that one is clearly all about money and marketing anyway. Oscar knows who really earns those awards.
But even that is screwed up when they only allow two producers when there are obvious cases on three or four producers working extensively on a movie (see Crash last year).
Well, my comment was really a veiled dig at the Crash win again, but you know.
Post a Comment