Could it be true? Can one of my favorite books of all-time really be translated into film? I’d think not, and while I like Ang Lee as a director, I just don’t think he has the chops to pull this tricky story off. Sure, he’s adept at pushing actors around, but as we saw with THE HULK, he has really no clue when it comes to CGI, which is pretty much the only way to get a 1600 lb tiger to interact with a little boy. I guess we’ll see…
Ang Lee hasn’t had much mainstream success since he won an Oscar for directing “Brokeback Mountain” a few years back. His follow-up was the hard-to-distribute NC-17-rated Chinese period romance “Lust, Caution.” Then, this past summer he released the much broader “Taking Woodstock,” a comic look at a singular true story behind the scenes of the legendary music festival, and it failed to find an audience (I recommend seeing it when it hits DVD on December 15, specifically for Imelda Staunton, who deserves an Oscar already).
Yea… I really don’t know anything about CGI and Ang Lee, but I’d think this would be a difficult story to translate into film well.