Chinese docs warn against replicating Ang Lee's movie's sexual positions

London, Nov 20 : Racy sexual sequences in director Ang Lee's latest movie Lust, Caution has led doctors warning film buffs against copying the grand sexual actions depicted in the film.

Though the film has been declared a blockbuster in China, it is also attracting tens of millions of viewers who are downloading pirated versions of the film, containing at least seven minutes of sexual endeavour slashed by China's censors.

Owing to the mass interest, medical officials have taken the responsibility to warn those with access to the uncensored version - 'do not try this at home.'

A reporter for the Information Times surveyed 20 people who had seen the uncensored film, which is set in Shanghai during the Second World War. He also spoke to medical experts about the several minutes of sexual gymnastics, often violent and almost always erotic, that help to describe the attraction between a naive young student and a disloyal and nasty Chinese police chief.

After the survey, the reporter wrote: "Highly difficult sexual positions can cause unnecessary harm to both the male and female body and, hence, people should not be imitating what they see on the big screen."

Yu Zaoze, a gynaecologist with the Guangzhou Modern Hospital told The Information Times: "Most of the sexual manoeuvres in Lust, Caution are abnormal body positions. Only women with comparatively flexible bodies that have gymnastics or yoga experience are able to perform them. For average people to blindly copy them could lead to unnecessary physical harm."

The damage by the film is not only limited to physical harm. A Chinese company focusing on software to combat computer viruses has given warning that pirate downloads of the film could be embedded with viruses and 15 per cent of links were contaminated.

According to local news media, hackers are planting viruses on Websites that provide online video or download services of the film and could infect personal computers if users attempt to download the movie or even click the link.

The film, which is tipped to become the year's biggest box-office success, has been a huge hit in China, reaping 90 million yuan (6 million pounds) in its first two weeks.

Set in Shanghai during the World War II-era, the film tells the story of a Chinese woman who is recruited to seduce and kill a married enemy collaborator.

***

Wes Anderson: Isn't it time the writer and director showed a little heart?

If you see Wes Anderson's new film The Darjeeling Limited for no other reason, see it for a single extraordinary shot, one that's instantly recognisable as pure Wes Anderson. The camera tracks along a series of compartments in the Indian train of the title, but they don't all seem to belong on a train: one resembles a cramped corner of an aeroplane, another an elegant Paris hotel room (for reasons that don't make sense unless you see Anderson's short Hotel Chevalier, which will accompany The Darjeeling Limited in British cinemas). The 38-year-old Houston-born director has a habit of arranging his films into highly designed, densely filled compartments: watching The Darjeeling Limited, with its sleeper carriages segmented into rectangles within intersecting rectangles, you feel you're seeing an image of Anderson's own obsessively organised imagination.

Admirers and detractors alike often characterise Anderson as an overgrown child prodigy, who has turned the film set into a luxury version of a spoilt kid's playroom. His 2001 film The Royal Tenenbaums was largely set in a New York mansion that Anderson customised into a cartoonish giant dolls' house. For its follow-up, the $60m maritime fantasy The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Anderson built a huge set in the form of a ship, its interiors fully exposed in cross-section. Now he's built a working train that's also a film set and taken it to India. The Darjeeling Limited is about three American brothers – played by Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman – and their misadventures on the train of that name. Some might question whether the film is really set in India at all, or simply in that part of Wes Anderson's brain that resembles India. But then a tenuous and playful relation to reality is the pleasure (and for many, the irritation) of Anderson's wry, elaborately artificed comedies.

Lanky in a beige corduroy suit, Anderson looks less gauchely preppy than he once did, having ditched his old boffinish clear-rimmed spectacles. Distractedly swinging his knees from side to side, he enthusiastically explains his work in a quiet, reedy voice. He bears little relation to the brash Hollywood monster he lampooned himself as in his recent American Express ad, in which a safari-suited Anderson barks his way ("I've blown up buildings, hunted sharks, crashed planes... Where's my snack?") through a preposterous spy movie shoot. "It's all pretty exaggerated," he grins.

Anderson shot The Darjeeling Limited on a train shuttling to and fro on a Rajasthan railway line beginning at Jodhpur for up to 14 hours a day. "It really was an adventure every day, even though we were always on the same track." Inspired by his love for the films of the Indian master Satyajit Ray, Anderson had spent a month travelling in India with his co-writers, Jason Schwartzman and the actor's cousin Roman Coppola. Then again, since the trio's purpose in going there, he says, was specifically to write a script based on their travels, the process seems characteristically self-enclosed. "The movie," Anderson notes, "is from the point of view of tourists. We were tourists and the brothers [in the film] are tourists, but nevertheless I certainly went there wanting to learn about India."

Inevitably, The Darjeeling Limited feels like a reworking of other Anderson dramas, with their themes of sibling rivalry: the film's quarrelsome Whitman brothers could easily be kin to the neurotic Tenenbaums. "When we started the script, I thought we shouldn't have any parents for these brothers, we shouldn't refer to them, it should have nothing to do with the story. By the time we'd finished it, the whole thing's about the death of the father and they go to see the mother at the end. I almost feel with some of these things, one doesn't entirely have a choice – it just reveals itself and it's gonna be what it wants to be."

Like the Tenenbaums, the Whitmans also have a wayward, domineering father (in this case, dead before the film starts) and an imposing mother, again played by Anjelica Huston. Anderson himself was the middle of three brothers; the youngest, Eric, contributes his distinctive drawings and paintings to Wes's films. Their father ran an advertising company, their mother was an archaeologist – like Mrs Tenenbaum – and they divorced when Anderson was eight. Both parents are alive, but here and in The Royal Tenenbaums, Anderson displays an odd penchant for symbolically killing off fathers: "Well, yeah..." he sighs, grinning. His real father, Anderson stresses, is nothing like the rascally Tenenbaum patriarch played by Gene Hackman, nor the absent Croesus of Darjeeling. "He's more like the father Seymour Cassel plays in Rushmore, who's a barber, and he's a very gentle father. But for some reason I have these fathers in the films who are a lot more aggressive and domineering."

Anderson's directorial idiosyncrasies seem inexhaustible: they're visible not just in the way he shoots and narrates, but in every corner of his crammed screens, whether it's in his favoured sans-serif title lettering, a certain hot yellow, or the imaginary jukebox that makes Anderson soundtracks some of the most distinctive in cinema. In Rushmore, it was 1960s British Invasion pop, in Tenenbaums, Nico and the theme from It's a Charlie Brown Christmas. For Darjeeling, Anderson borrows the soundtracks composed by Satyajit Ray for his own and James Ivory's films, plus some Kinks rarities and bouncy French variétés. "My tastes and predilections are very visible," Anderson admits. Yet, while Anderson is certainly the most extravagantly visual, and sonic, of film-makers, he regards his sensibility as literary at heart. "Starting from when I was 15 till I was 20, all I wanted to be was a writer, I wasn't even thinking about movies at that point. And I feel like the movies that I've done, I relate more to what I wanted to do as a writer."

Nevertheless, the first fiction he has actually tried to adapt is a children's book – Roald Dahl's The Fantastic Mr Fox, which he has just embarked on as a stop-motion animation. George Clooney is speaking the role of the dashing vulpine hero, and the film will have an Eastern European feel, Anderson says.

It sometimes seems that, encumbered or protected by his own cultural luggage, Anderson may not always see the world beyond his imagination. In The Darjeeling Limited, India rather takes a supporting role to the brothers and their bickering. True, the film ridicules the trio's self-fixation, but in the US, it has been rebuked for insensitivity and racial stereotyping. The most uncomfortable moment is the death of a young Indian boy, a tragedy that seems placed purely to trigger a turning point for the brothers – or rather, to allow them to stride across the screen in that dreamy slow motion which is another Anderson trademark. The director shrugs in response. "I just knew that that was going to be the defining moment of the story. You can without question say that about any dramatic event in any story – it's there for the drama. In the case of this story, it's the centre of the movie for me."

If you appreciate the organic or happenstance in cinema, Anderson's films are not for you. This director abhors a void, and every space must be filled: in The Royal Tenenbaums, he would build entire sets just to illustrate a jokey aside. It can be fatiguing for the viewer, but it can also make for exhilarating fun: at his best, Anderson simply gives your eyes and brain more to play with.

"For me," Anderson says, "creating a world for a movie is about just trying to put as much of my imagination into it as possible. I look at each scene, each character, and I feel like, 'Well, here's a challenge – what information can we give about this character, not just in the dialogue and the story but visually too and musically.' And some people think, 'This is too much, who are you trying to impress?'

"I'm trying to reach out to the audience,but it's also my personal preference," he says. "I don't think I'm particularly a minimalist."

'The Darjeeling Limited' is released on 23 Nov

Wes's world: Into the artful mind of Mr Anderson

Bottle Rocket (1996)

Anderson expanded his 1994 short of the same name into a Dallas story of three would-be crooks tangling with James Caan's crime kingpin

Rushmore (1998)

Jason Schwartzman makes his debut as nerdy private-school prodigy Max Fischer in Anderson's comic tribute to his own schooldays

The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)

Gene Hackman, Anjelica Huston, Gwyneth Paltrow and the Wilson brothers make up a dysfunctional family de luxe in a story set in Anderson's own private Manhattan

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (2004)

Elaborate ocean-going tribute to Jacques Cousteau, starring a bearded Bill Murray as a melancholic TV seadog

American Express TV advert (2006)

Spies, cars, pigeons, cranes... The essential Wes Anderson in a brisk, brilliant self-spoofing two minutes

***

Ridley Scott is hot

As befits a gruff, nononsense Teessider, Ridley Scott has always been far more in touch with his audience - the bums on seats - than with critics or cineastes. The latter have a tendency to turn up their effete noses whenever Scott’s name comes up in polite conversation. Even as audiences flocked to his latest film, American Gangster, which tore up the box office when it opened in the States last weekend, earning a huge $46.3m in three days, the critics couldn’t bring themselves to praise Scott unreservedly. Of course, they admired American Gangster, which stars Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe, for its “consummate professionalism on every level”, as the critic for the film trade paper Variety put it, but, he added: “It just doesn’t quite feel like the real deal; it delivers, but doesn’t soar.”

While no cineaste likes to acknowledge it, what has become increasingly obvious is that Scott, who remains astonishingly prolific even as he nears his 70th birthday, is among the two or three most influential film-makers of his generation. In fact, via films such as Blade Runner, Alien, The Duellists, Black Rain, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Black Hawk Down and now American Gangster, Scott’s striking and emphatic style may have had more impact on how we interpret the world visually than the work of any film-maker alive. There is even an argument to be made for him as the most influential feminist director, having created Sigourney Weaver’s iconic heroine, Ellen Ripley, in Alien - subject of reams of adulatory feminist theses - and brought Thelma & Louise to the screen.

Despite this, a grudging carping has followed Scott throughout his career, especially from those who distrust his grounding in advertising and commercials. Sight & Sound complained of his “facile eye”, and “disastrous ‘stylishness’ ”, adding that “ ‘beautifully photographed’ is a term that merges characterless proficiency with the kind of buying eye that so undermines Ridley Scott as an artist”.

Yet as Blade Runner: The Final Cut, Scott’s definitive reauthoring of what may be his masterpiece, and American Gangster are released almost simultaneously, you have to appreciate not just the astonishing range of his work, but how he has matured as a film-maker. As he has grown older and more successful, he has tempered the exaggerated visual style that Blade Runner exemplifies, although Scott says that what he now most likes about that film is “its cadence, its very deliberate pacing”. The Sir Ridley Scott of today is far more respectful of story and character, both of which American Gangster - which is as close as anyone has come recently to evoking crime sagas such as The Godfather, Ser-pico and Prince of the City - has in spades. As a director who no longer feels he has anything to prove, he has been quietly reacting against the often overstylised visual world he was so instrumental in creating.

“Yes, it’s everywhere now,” he says when I ask about the effect he has had on the visual side of film-making, “to a degree that is almost damaging. There’s less emphasis on good material, a good script. My job is about reading. You have to sit down and read everything. You can’t read a reader’s report; you have to read it yourself. Now I tend to be less visual, because sometimes the visuals and the beauty get in the way of the story.”

Reading is what brought Scott American Gangster, which has had a long, turbulent and expensive journey to the screen. Scott read a script by Steven Zaillian about four years ago, liked it a lot, but was too busy to take it on. It had been inspired by an article published in New York magazine in 2000. The Return of Superfly told the story of Frank Lucas, a once notorious but forgotten 1970s Harlem drug lord. The article, by Mark Jacobson, was bought by the producer Brian Grazer (A Beautiful Mind, Apollo 13). And thus began Lucas’s transformation into an outlaw in the grand American tradition of Billy the Kid, Al Capone and Bonnie and Clyde. Lucas has since come to have a particular appeal to black gangsta rappers, and it’s no coincidence that the release of the film coincides with the release of Jay-Z’s new album, American Gangster.

In 2004, the film moved close to production, with Washington and Benicio del Toro set to star, and Antoine Fuqua (Training Day) to direct. Washington was to play Lucas; del Toro was cast as Richie Roberts, the cop who brought Lucas down. As the $85m film went into preproduction, with Washington to be paid $20m and del Toro $5m, the budget kept rising, in typical Hollywood fashion, to more than $100m. A couple of weeks before shooting was due to start, in November 2004, a nervous management at Universal decided to cut their losses and pull the plug. Because Washington and del Toro had negotiated “pay or play” deals, they got their full fees, even though they never did a day’s work on the film, and Universal had to swallow a $30m loss.

Grazer, smarting from his first high-profile failure after producing some 60 films, kept looking for a way to revive the project, and a year later Scott agreed to come on board. By then, Universal had new management, who were keen to show the studio was back in the business of making big, expensive, prestige films, and it agreed to back the film at $100m, with Scott and Grazer contracted to kick in every dollar the film cost over that. When the shoot finished in May, the pair ponied up $1.5m each, money they are likely to see back now American Gangster has opened so strongly. Scott admits the shoot for the 2hr 40min film was a logistical nightmare, with “360 scenes in 180 locations”.

Scott persuaded Crowe, with whom he’d worked on Gladiator and the comedy A Good Year, to play Roberts, even though the Lucas role was obviously the showier part, by beefing up his role. “I always thought the Richie character had to be almost as big as Lucas,” Scott says. “Little by little, we brought Russell’s part up to what it is now, bringing in a lot of the really interesting private-life stuff that had been in the original screenplay - how he was getting divorced, studying to become an attorney. The studio said, ‘But isn’t all that stuff incidental?’ And I said, ‘No, it makes him a great character.’ The same with Lucas: it’s as important to meet his mother as to see him peddling dope.” As for snaring Washington? “I knew he’d play it like a big tuna, but I also knew Denzel had nothing better in front of him.”

Scott admits he and the volatile Crowe “have had our hurricanes, but he loves the fact that I move really fast and know exactly what I’m going to do. Somebody has to make a decision, and that’s my job. Actors like Russell and Denzel don’t want endless discussions about motivation. That’s all bullshit. It’s more about keeping it simple”.

Although Scott was attracted by the chance to make a mythic American crime drama in the style of the great films of the late 1970s, he insists his main reference was his own experience of New York, which he first visited in 1962. After studying art and graphics at the Royal College of Art, in London, he went to New York to see if he could apprentice with any of the photographers he admired, such as Richard Avedon, Irving Penn or Bert Stern. “I had no money, and was living at the YMCA on 34th Street,” he recalls. “It was pretty tough. I used to walk through Harlem and take photographs. The real war zone was the Bowery – bodies lying in the streets, alcoholics and drug addicts dying, and nobody doing anything about it.”

While Scott is no doubt gratified that American Gangster has touched a nerve with audiences starved of smart, engaging entertainment, he has already nearly finished his next project, with Leonardo DiCaprio and Crowe (again), Body of Lies, a political thriller set in Washington, the Middle East and North Africa. Then he plans to work with Crowe yet again – he will play the Sheriff of Nottingham in a reimagining of the Robin Hood story. It will be the first big film that Scott, a shareholder in Pinewood and Shepperton studios, has made in the UK on a British subject, although he grumbles about the government’s attitude to the film industry and its “confusing and constantly shifting” tax and incentive structure. “We should be doing brilliantly with the capabilities we have in the UK,” he says.

All the while, Ridley Scott Associates, the commercials company Scott set up 40 years ago, remains one of the most prolific and influential in the world, with plans to open offices in Hong Kong and Shanghai. It was Scott, one should not forget, who has twice changed the visual language of commercials, with his famous 1974 Hovis ad, then, a decade later, with the Apple Computer ad based on the theme of George Orwell’s 1984.

I wonder, as he approaches 70, if he has any plans to retire. “No,” he responds quickly, “that’s out of the question. It’s a stressful job, but I feel alive doing it; the more pressure, the better.” And how does he manage to get so much done?

“My mother said, ‘Get up early.’ So I do.”

***