Celluloid Heroes

All your life you thought you were better than everyone else. Now you think you’re the worst of all!

Perhaps the saddest line in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Oscar-sweeping epic, comes early when the 9-year-old Emperor Pu Yi (Tijger Tsou) naively tells his brother that an emperor can do anything he wants. The bitter irony is that this is only true so long as the emperor does not want to do anything that matters to the people of China. He spends his childhood as a prisoner of his court’s need to have an emperor, in order to justify their own position.

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Whatever the merits of his various films, you have to admire Ang Lee’s ability not to be pigeonholed as a filmmaker. There aren’t many mainstream filmmakers with as varied a résumé, including comic book movies (Hulk), martial arts (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), gloomy family dramas (The Ice Storm) and genre-bending love stories (Brokeback Mountain). Thus it’s probably no surprise that he seems perfectly comfortable handling this Chinese-language character study masquerading as a spy thriller.

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First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him back safely to the earth. – John F. Kennedy

The Apollo missions to the moon were a big part of my childhood. One of my earliest memories involves the launch of Apollo 12 when I was four. Among my more prized possessions is a big hardcover book entitled “Apollo Expeditions to the Moon,” the official NASA history of the program. Naturally, I have movies like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, plus HBO’s From the Earth to the Moon, in my DVD collection. You wouldn’t think that there was much that this British documentary could tell me about the subject, but you would be wrong. By focusing on the human experience of the twelve men who actually walked on the surface of another world, In the Shadow of the Moon has something genuinely fresh to say about the greatest adventure of the twentieth century.

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