Spy movie begets spyware

Oscar-winning director Ang Lee’s latest offering, “Lust, Caution,” is racking up international film awards and steaming up silver screens around the world. His spy thriller, set in WWII-era Shanghai, features a young woman who has been recruited to seduce and assassinate a Japanese collaborator. It also features sex scenes so explicit that it received an NC-17 rating in the United States. And in China, government censors threatened to yank the movie from theaters unless Lee trimmed some of the more graphic sex scenes. He complied, and now the movie has become one of China’s top box office draws, bringing in 90 million yuan in only two weeks. It’s tapped to become one of country’s biggest hits this year.

The seven missing minutes from the Chinese version of the film has caused some moviegoers to cross the border into Hong Kong to see the uncensored version. It’s also prompted many movie fans to flock, unsurprisingly, to the Internet, where they try to download uncensored versions. But pirate wannabes may instead find themselves downloading a virtual STD instead. Chinese anti-virus company Rising International Software is warning Web surfers that several hundred sites that are offering free downloads of “Lust, Caution” are embedded with viruses that can steal personal passwords of users. 

The possibility of contracting computer viruses isn’t the only warning officials are issuing about the movie. Doctors in Guangdong province are advising viewers to be careful when copying some of the more adventurous sexual positions depicted in the film. Xinhuanet, the portal for the official news agency Xinhua, quoted a doctor saying,

Most of the sexual maneuvers in ‘Lust, Caution’ are in 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.”

Perhaps when editing the movie, Lee should have renamed it “Lust, Caution, but especially Caution.”