The memory of Ang Lee, sensitive humanist auteur from Taiwan's New Wave has become a distant memory over the past decade or so. All hail Ang Lee, constructor of boundary-pushing technical spectacle! He earned his second Best Director Academy Award for besting the hazard-trifecta of children, animals, and water with Life of Pi and then introduced public audiences to high-framerate hyperreal photography with Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk last year. (Though opinions on the extent to which he succeeded on that second one vary wildly.) And now, the news is out that he’ll rejoin us in 2019 for another huge undertaking.
Hot off Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Academy Award-winning director Ang Lee is ready for his next project — which might end up being a script that’s been in the pipe for about 20 years, penned by none other than Game of Thrones showrunner David Benioff. Lee is currently in negotiations to direct Benioff’s sci-fi thriller Gemini Man for Skydance.
Imagine landing your first role in an Oscar-winning director’s film. Now imagine that film is being shot with a technology that’s never before been attempted. Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, the latest visual experiment from Ang Lee, stars newcomer Joe Alywn, a 25-year-old who left his London drama school early to make a boundary-pushing film.
Given how much space physical media takes up, it’s hard for movie buffs to say no to the great promise of “cloud storage,” and the idea that we could summon anything we want to watch with just a couple of clicks. But so far, reality hasn’t matched the hype. Streaming services have been focused on exclusives and original programming, to the extent that the only way to have access to everything available is to spend hundreds of dollars a month on subscription fees. Meanwhile, older films keep disappearing from the digital archives; and even items that cinephiles “own” sometimes become inaccessible whenever software updates or a site shutters.