China Film Journal

Fans of French film might be interested to know that Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1970 classic Le Cercle Rouge (starring Alain Delon, Andre Bourvil, Gian Maria Volonte and Yves Montand) is being remade in Hollywood by none other than Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To.

What’s even more weird is that Chow Yun-fat and Orlando Bloom are attached to the project.

Malaysia’s The Star reports that in Chen Shi-Zheng’s Dark Matter the film about the Chinese physics grad student in the US that gets homicidal. The production lost their first actor, which is when Meryl Streep suggested to the director that they get Quinn instead — but the catch was that he was almost too good-looking and charismatic for a physics professor. We guess they were looking for someone more shriveled, perhaps paraplegic?

The Taiwanese film What on Earth Have I Done Wrong?(情非得已之生存之道) (dir. by Doze Niu) originally had a cameo role by Chinese actress and all-around hottie Zhou Xun (周迅). She even donated some of the money she won from the Golden Horse acting prize to the production, but her part was, in the end, deleted from the film. We have not seen the film on DVD here yet, but it seems it was just released in Taiwan on April 11, so might not make it here you know, for another three hours or so.

Ang Lee is coming out with an autobiography this October, and some reports claim that in this book, Lee states that although many women seem to like his films and admire the depictions of women in the films, that he doesn’t really understand or have much interest in women. We’d probably have to read more of the book to know what context this statement occurs in (there’s more in the report itself, but you’d still want to read the entire book), but we’re sure that this will provide more proof for those into the Chinese rumor mill who believe that Lee is a closeted homosexual.

Do films with titles like “Feathers of Dongtan” and “Sounds. Breaths” give you a tingle in your special area? If not, fret not, there’s still some time to develop that acquired taste which is promotional films for really-big-Chinese-events. “Vision Shanghai”, like “Vision Beijing,” is going to feature documentary films by famous directors, thought the names of those directors have yet to be released. However, Shanghai Film Group has announced its next Expo film, a full-length doc by Jia Zhangke. We’ve been hearing about this intermittently for awhile, and whatever our reservations about promo films, we’re still curious to see what Jia’s up to with this film.The article says that trailers are being shown on TV soon, but we haven’t seen anything new on the video-sharing sites.

From Blogcritics.org we find a post about Orlando Bloom taking the lead role in the upcoming Hong Kong Phooey live-action movie. Toonzone links to a Variety article reports that Bretter Ratner’s Rat Entertainment is going to produce this film. Kirsten Dunst is reportedly playing the lead female character, telephone operator Rosemary. The movie is based on a short-lived Hanna-Barbara Saturday morning cartoon. Blogcritics says that Johnny To is going to direct – and then proceeds to call To the “Jerry Bruckheimer of Hong Kong,” which we would find insulting if we were To. But who knows, maybe he’d take it as a compliment.

Supporters of Tang Wei, the Lust, Caution that was recently banned by SARFT, has become a bit of a cause celebre – Danwei translates an open letter to Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao asking that she be allowed to work again.

Lastly, again from Variety, is news that some French films are going to screen in Shanghai as part of the fifth French Film Panorama： “Pics include “Asterix at the Olympic Games,” “Towards Zero,” “Hunting and Gathering,” “Dragon Hunters” and “Go West! A Lucky Luke Adventure.” We were just in Paris and some of these movies are still being advertised and still showing in the theaters. So they’re newish movies, yes, but tend to fall on the schlocky side of the spectrum. Not really the most representative slice of French film perhaps, but in case you’re interested, this is happening from April 15-19, though we don’t know which four Shanghai cinemas they are screening at.Technorati Tags: tang wei, lust, caution, ban, censorship, China, SARFT, hong kong phooey, orlando bloom, johnnie to, cartoons, comics, jia zhangke, documentary, Expo, worldexpo, 2010