You know, I've seen a lot of 'behind the scenes' photographs over the years, but these latest from Crank 2: High Voltage win the "what the heck is going on here?" award, hands down. The LA Times is now hosting 19 new images from the set of the follow-up to the 2006 action film. In fact, I have to be honest with you: I can't for the life of me figure out why directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor would need a giant foam head of Jason Statham -- but now that it has my interest piqued, it had better be good.

This time around, our favorite hit man Chev Chelios (Statham) has to chase down a Chinese mobster who has stolen his nearly indestructible heart and replaced it with a bum ticker. But that's not all: on top of everything else, Chev has to keep his heart running on jolts of electricity (where's James Bond's dashboard defibrillator when you need it?). Joining in on the fun are Amy Smart (who we saw on set a few months ago in a 'questionable' costume), Dwight Yoakum, Bai Ling, and a cameo from '80s cautionary tale, Corey Haim (and for his sake I hope things went better on the set here than they did on Lost Boys 2).

Crank 2: High Voltage is expected arrive in theaters in 2009 -- maybe by then we'll know what all those big foam heads were about.

And more actors get gigs, according to Variety:

First up, there's a little Russian/American indie thriller called Magic Man which is cooking up. It's about a magician who might possibly be a serial killer, and it stars Alexander Nevsky, Billy Zane, Richard Tyson, Estelle Raskin, Jed Allan, and Andrew Divoff. And now, there are two more. Both the increasingly prolific Bai Ling (who has 8 other films on the way) and infamous tough guy Robert Davi (Die Hard) have signed on for roles in the indie, which I presume has a whole ton of sliced and disappearing volunteers. Is this another Wizard of Gore?

Meanwhile, more players have been added to the Brian Clough biopic called The Damned United. The talented off-the-radar actor Michael Sheen signed on in April, and now we've got three more Brits attached to the feature -- Stephen Graham (This is England), Martin Compston (Red Road), and Peter McDonald (Festival). Clough is being played by Sheen, while Graham takes on his nemesis, Leeds United captain Billy Bremner, McDonald takes on player Johnny Giles, and Compston takes on player John O'Hare. Meanwhile, there's a slew of other actors added to the cast as well, including Liz Carling as Clough's wife. We should see all the eccentric story on the big screen some time in 2009.

As Scott told us last October, there's a sequel to Crank on the way. This might seem surprising, considering the ending, but movies can make just about anything happen. This one will somehow take the seemingly finite ending and continue the story without the use of "dream sequences or long-lost twin brothers." Now, months after Jason Statham signed on for more Crank action, we've got the supporting cast for Crank 2: High Voltage. Variety reports that Chev's girlfriend, Amy Smart is back, plus Dwight Yoakam and Efren Ramirez. But that's not all -- Bai Ling has also signed on, along with Clifton Collins Jr., who will play Chev's nemesis.

This time around, "Chelios faces a mobster who has stolen his nearly indestructible heart and replaced it with a battery-powered ticker that requires regular jolts of electricity to keep working." If it's not low heart-rates and poison, it's mechanical hearts and electric jolts. He should ditch Eve and hook up with Gwen from Angel -- a girl with electric hands could come in handy for this action tale. I guess Clifton is the mobster, but there's no word on who Bai Ling will play -- perhaps a butt-kicking henchwoman.

The sequel kicks into production on April 28 in Los Angeles.

Ah, Dim Sum -- the Chinese smorgasbord of tasty dishes where tray upon tray of steamer baskets filled with food swims around you until you're stuffed and satiated. Unfortunately, I don't get to order to my heart's content (translation) weekly, since my friend's Dim Sum group is too lazy to coordinate my appearance outside of Facebook. (It's a cult, cult I tell you!) Nevertheless, we're all going to get a taste of the Chinese treat through a new Canadian film that has just gone into production in Vancouver.

Variety reports that Anna Chi is directing a new film called Dim Sum Funeral, and both Bai Ling (Southland Tales) and Talia Shire (I Heart Huckabees) have been added to a cast that already includes Russell Wong (The Mummy 3), Kelly Hu (The Air I Breathe), Steph Song (jPod), Lisa Lu (The Joy Luck Club), Julia Nickson (Half-Life), Francoise Yip (AVPR), and Chang Tseng (Everything's Gone Green). According to Imagination-LLC, the feature centers on four estranged siblings who are called together by their childhood nanny (Shire) when their mother (Lu) passes away.

It's Monday, and we have a whole week of work ahead of us, as well as these casting bites, courtesy of Variety:

• Paz Vega, the brown-eyed Spanish beauty from Spanglish and Fade to Black, has found herself her next gig. Aside from The Spirit and The Six Wives of Henry Lefay, she will star opposite Simon Baker in the upcoming Not Forgotten -- replacing Jordana Brewster, who left the project. The film is about a couple (played by Baker and Vega) whose daughter is kidnapped, forcing them to face their troubled pasts and consult a Latina soothsayer.
• I have to say, any gig that isn't CSI: Miami, unless you have a weakness for all things seriously silly, is a step up, and Brooke Bloom is making one. Most recently, she popped up as a grocery shopper in The Brothers Solomon (along with other bites actor Johnson), and now she's joining He's Just Not That Into You. If you've followed Cinematical's coverage of the comedy, you'll remember that it's jam-packed with celebs from Jennifer Aniston to Scarlett Johansson, Justin Long to Ben Affleck. The best part for Bloom -- it's not some no-name part, but the role of Aniston's soon-to-be married sister.
  
• She played Myca in The Crow, was put on ice in Angel, got to be a Serpentine in Southland Tales, and now Chinese actress Bai Ling is going to delight in the joys of a Nevada brothel. She has signed on to co-star with Helen Mirren and Joe Pesci in Love Ranch. And it is, most definitely, a ranch of love, or at least, of sex. It sounds pretty goofy, like The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, but is actually a drama about a couple who opened the first legal brothel in Nevada.
  
• This last casting bite is my favorite, or at least, it will be as long as Variety has a picture of Growing Pains alum Ashley Johnson up. She's not the star of this gig -- sorry Ashley fans -- it's African-American actress Nicole Randall Johnson -- Mad TV comedian, Louise in License to Wed, and the birthing instructor in The Brothers Solomon. She's now joined the cast of Little Big Men -- the new Ken Marino/David Wain flick starring Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott. While they act as Big Brothers, Johnson will play some woman named Karen.

Cinematical takes great joy in bringing you the final poster for Richard Kelly's Southland Tales (click on the poster for a larger image) -- mainly because we've been anticipating this film's release for upwards of two years now. And so when the last poster goes public, it means we'll be sitting in a movie theater, watching Kelly's follow-up to the cult hit Donnie Darko, soon enough. And what a poster it is! You know they mean business when The Rock goes by his real name -- and only his real name -- Dwayne Johnson. Also starring in this eclectic cast are -- ready for this -- Seann William Scott, Mandy Moore, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Curtis Armstrong, Cheri Oteri, Justin Timberlake, Jon Lovitz, Bai Ling, Kevin Smith, Miranda Richardson and John Larroquette, among others. If that line-up isn't worthy of your lousy 10 bucks, you have issues I don't want to go near.

Essentially, Southland Tales is an ensemble piece (that mixes sci-fi, comedy, music and drama, if you can believe it) which takes place in a 2008 where Los Angeles is on the verge of political and environmental disaster. Boxer (Johnson), an action star with amnesia, soon finds his life intertwine with the dysfunctional worlds of an adult film star (Gellar) and a cop (Scott) mixed up in a conspiracy. But from what I gather (and knowing Kelly's work), there's a whole lot more going on as well. I mean, just look at that poster -- it definitely gives us a peak peek inside the complexity of the film. Southland Tales will finally make its new and improved debut in theaters on November 9.

It's hard to know, just from talking with Bai Ling, which of her roles have been leads and which have been walk-ons -- she seems to view all of her activities as equally relevant chapters in the Story of Bai. An eye-witness to the massacre in Tiananmen Square in 1989, she departed for NYU film school in 1991 and began to land roles. Fifteen years later, she's a fixture on party circuits, an unabashed lover of American pop culture -- the trashier the better -- and, at 35, an actress with serious credentials. She recently played the female lead in The Beautiful Country and Face, both dramas about Asian-American identity, and was praised by the New York Times for showing "tremendous range" in the latter. Next up is a starring role in Shanghai Baby, adapted from the controversial 2001 novel about sexuality in modern China.

In between the big roles, there's a portfolio of pop-ons. You probably remember the eyeball-collecting villainess in The Crow, and the interpreter who delivers Chairman Mao's icy retorts in Oliver Stone's Nixon: "You're as evil as I am ....". She was also the begoggled ninja in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and has a quick comedic turn as a peep-show stripper in David Mamet's Edmond, released Friday. And yet another one is forth-coming, this time as an abstruse oracle called Serpentine in Richard Kelly's sophomore sprawl, Southland Tales.

Appropriately, the film Bai is best-known for is one she wasn't even in: Ling's posing with a large, phallic lightsaber in the June 2005 Playboy may have caused George Lucas to snip her role as Senator Breemu out of the wholesome-as-a-Happy Meal Star Wars: Episode III. Her comments at the time indicated that belief; Lucas denied it. When Cinematical recently spoke with Bai, in Manhattan to do press for Edmond, she was feeling diplomatic.

"You know who I hate? Faggots. Because they hate women." When Glenna (Julia Stiles) says this, it's a casual admission; something tossed off in the down moments of a one-night stand. It's a confession to a near total stranger that presumably won't cause any ripples in her real life, or ever be mentioned again. But Edmond (William H. Macy) is way ahead of her. Before meeting Glenna tonight, he knocked the teeth of a black man all over an alley in Times Square, and considered it a victory not just for himself but for what he views as the long-suffering white race. What luck, that he's found a kindred spirit he can tell his story to, detail by detail! Edmond is David Mamet's contribution to that strange film genre that dates back to John Ford's The Searchers, in which a lonely anti-hero's expectations of how things should be racially-wise, sexual propriety-wise, and otherwise-wise, must be adhered to by the rest of the world, lest he go completely schizoid.

Despite the considerable violence Edmond eventually racks up, Mamet's motormouthed version of Travis Bickle ends up coming off more like the world's most annoying bar patron than someone truly menacing. His pathos is inherently comedic, even if the filmmakers don't want it to be. His bete noire, we find out, isn't really blacks or women or city life, but high prices! Repeatedly thwarted in his attempt to find a low-priced call girl, Edmond at one point becomes enraged when a peep-show stripper is unable to make change for ten dollars from behind her glass window. "Give me the ten dollars! Give me the ten dollars!" Edmond yells, exasperated at how he ended up at such a moment in his life. The arguing of these two characters is so absurd that it almost saves the rest of the film, which is plodding, labored, and ultimately too theatrically-grounded for its own good.

Not that we would have had time to go anyhow, considering the breakneck pace at which we are seeing and reviewing films at Sundance (yes, in between all those parties here, they do show a few films), but I wonder if we should be offended that Paris Hilton neglected to invite us to her bash. I guess our film geek factor was a little too high for a party that included the likes of Bai Ling (wearing a bikini top in Park City in January! What was she thinking), Joel Madden, Eve, and Darryl Hannah. Judging from the photos of Hilton at the party, it's a good thing we weren't invited. I don't think Karina and I brought the right clothes to fit in with that crowd. Guess we'll have to stick to reviewing films.

Some Sundance posts from around the blogosphere.

• Bai Ling gyrating in public with Lizzie Grubman--nuf said.
• Spin and Stir reviews Black Gold
• A photo essay of furry boots at Sundance--cute.
• I don't know what iMeem actually is, but they may have the first Paris Hilton sighting.
• Mark is a great blogger, but he needs to get Nick to shoot the lock off his wallet and spring for a decent camera!
• PSA, You're going to read this blog post 100x this week: "We waited for two hours inside of a cold tent. They didn't let us in.."

BTW: If you want to get in touch with me or Karina during Sundance you can email jason at calacanis dot com, or karina at cinematical dot com. Please send in any celeb photos from main street, your reviews of films, links to blog posts, and anything else you think we might be interested in.