Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor won nine Oscars out of nine nominations, sweeping every category except acting (stars John Lone, Peter O'Toole and Joan Chen weren't nominated). It was chosen as one of the year's ten best films by Cahiers du Cinema, Jonathan Rosenbaum, Roger Ebert, Richard Corliss, and even the National Board of Review. Gene Siskel voted it the year's best film, as did Judy Stone of the San Francisco Chronicle. Filmmaker Samuel Fuller chose it as one of his ten favorite films of all time. In 1998, it received a major theatrical re-release, supervised by cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, with nearly an hour's worth of footage edited back into the film, bringing the total from 160 to 219 minutes. Yet, it has somehow fallen into the list of hard-to-find films. For years, it has only been available on VHS or import DVDs. Now the Criterion Collection has come along and corrected this oversight by delivering perhaps 2008's most spectacular DVD release so far. (Blu-Ray be damned!)

Criterion's four-disc release includes both cuts, as well as two more discs full of extras. (Many are from 1987 and some were created more recently; the bonus is a series of "video postcards" shot by Bertolucci in China while preparing for the film.) Personally, I like getting to decide which version to watch, rather than having someone else choose the definitive version for me. The 160-minute version is the one that garnered all that praise, but the longer version -- here called the "television version" -- is great, too. The extra scenes don't particularly work to "drive" the movie forward, but they give a richer understanding of Pu Yi and the emptiness of his life.

The Australian Film Institute Awards -- the Aussie Oscars -- have been announced, and it looks like a majority of the the big winners came from the same two films. I guess it's a pretty open race over there in a year without a new Crocodile Dundee film. But seriously folks, I kid the Australian people! I kid because I love. The big acting winners were Eric Bana (Hulk, Troy, Munich) and Joan Chen (Twin Peaks, Lust, Caution). Bana won for his role in Richard Roxburgh's Romulus, My Father -- which was also named Best Picture of the Year. Romulus co-stars Run Lola Run's Franka Potente and tells the story of "a post World War Two migrant family dealing with isolation in Australia and a mother struggling with mental illness." Oooo, sounds like a fun one! You can read Monika's not-too-impressed review of Romulus here.

Chen won Best Actress for The Home Song Stories, in which she plays "a glamorous Shanghai nightclub singer who struggles to survive in 1970s Australia with her two young children." Sheesh! I guess the depressing films get the same praise Down Under that they do here in the states. Get the family together, pop some popcorn, and have a little double feature with these two good timey Saturday night flicks! The Home Song Stories also won awards for: Best Direction (Tony Ayres), Best Screenplay (Ayres again), Best Cinematography, Best Editing, Best Costume Design, Best Original Music Score, and Best Production Design. How exactly did it miss Best Picture?

In the first minutes of Lust, Caution, we get one of those shots where the camera swish-pans quickly to the side to reveal a guy looking through binoculars; the effect, used in countless Chuck Norris and Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, is as if we were also looking through binoculars, spying. Then we get a shot of four women playing Mahjong and talking, talking, talking. The clacking of the tiles mixes with their chattering, and the subtitles flash across the screen on top of images of tiles. Are we supposed to be looking at the pictures on the tiles, and if so, did we miss anything important in the dialogue? Following that, a car rolls down the street. We cut to another shot of the car rolling down the street, this time entering a gate. Then the car parks. A man gets out and walks into a large house. That's roughly the first ten minutes of the film. It begs the question: what do these shots have to do with one another? What does any of this have to do with anything? What does it have to do with the art of cinema?

I got the impression, here and throughout Lust, Caution, that director Ang Lee just arbitrarily set up his shots without much consideration for what they meant. His only concern is the story, not the art behind it. In a crucial, early exchange between our two lead characters, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung) and Mrs. Mak (Tang Wei), Lee very simply cuts back and forth between them on the beats of dialogue. When one finishes speaking, he cuts to the other, who starts speaking. There's no mystery or rhythm, and no concern for reactions or pauses. I bring all this up only because Lee is widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers in the world, and he ought to be a good deal better than this. I suspect that, like many others throughout history, he mistrusts cinema as an art form in itself, and sees it only as an extension of literature and theater. He adds external elements to make his films seem important. In this case, the movie's length (nearly 160 minutes) and his story about the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in the late 1930s and early 1940s, carry a historical weight.

After his last two English-language films garnered completely different reactions from audiences (Hulk was a bomb, whereas Brokeback Mountain was last year's Oscar darling), Ang Lee is leaving his Wyoming-based gay cowboys for a WWII-era espionage thriller set in Shanghai.

Based on the 26-page short story by Chinese writer Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution "follows a group of patriotic students who plot to assassinate the intelligence chief in the Japanese-backed Chinese government." Having already signed Tony Leung Chiu Wai to play the intelligence chief in question, Mr. Yi, popular actress (and formerly known as the "Elizabeth Taylor of China") Joan Chen has now come onboard to act as his wife. Newcomer Tang Wei also stars as the student who seduces Yi in an effort to set up the assassination.

When Shawn Wong first penned his novel American Knees way back in 1995, he may or may not have realized that he was writing what would become a classic of Asian American literature. As an undergrad, Wong looked for works by other Asian American authors, and was astounded to realize how few there were. Ultimately Wong, along with some fellow Asian American scholars, edited a compilation called The Big Aiiieeeee! An Anthology of Asian American Writers, which became as noted for an essay by editor Frank Chin about what was and was not true Asian American literature as for the astonishing collection of writings compiled therein.

This background is important to know because American Knees was far more than a steamy tale of relationships between people who happened to be Asian American; beneath that sexy surface, the book is about conflicts and misunderstandings between Asian Americans of different backgrounds, the subjugation of Asian Americans, and the subtleties of racism. Writer-director Eric Byler's film adaptation of the book, titled Americanese, because Byler felt that more people would "get" the intended meaning of the film with the title spelled that way, loses much of the steaminess of the novel, while focusing more strongly on the underlying themes.