LucyLiu Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The whole time I was watching this movie I thought it was set in L.A., but someone told me that's not the case?

PS: Well, it was shot in New York City, but set to be kind of anywhere. I had originally conceived it to be more like a college town. There's an area where I grew up in Denver where there's a lot of mom and pop indie record stores, comic book stores, kind of places like that. Originally, the idea was that I was going to shoot it in Austin, Texas, and then for various reasons and then it turned out that we had to shoot it in New York. It turned out to be kind of a tricky thing, to come out here and find a way to shoot something in this city, that hopefully didn't look like the city. So we ended up shooting in Brooklyn, Queens, Bayonne, New Jersey, sort of all over the place -- everywhere, but the city. You say there was something in it that made you think of Los Angeles?

It may be just the whole film noir vibe that runs through it, that made me think of L.A.

PS: I'm glad to hear it, because I always hope that I pulled it off and it didn't just look like, around the city.

Did you talk to the actors about actually injecting a film noir vibe into the film, the acting, the dialogue, and so forth? Lucy Liu's character has a very femme fatale thing going on.

PS: Yeah, definitely. I tried to explain to them that a lot of the idea behind making the movie was that you take the dynamic between the male and female that exists in so many film noir movies and try and transplant that into a current film set, in the current day. So, you know, yeah, in terms of Lucy being a sexy, mysterious, possibly dangerous woman and Cillian being this guy who sort of thinks he knows the score, but everyone but he knows that he's being taken for a ride. Yeah, I wanted them to sort of be aware that that's what was going on while they were doing it.

"I can't shake the feeling that you're just blowing through town with a carnival." Dialogue from Watching the Detectives, a romantic comedy with shadings of L.A. noir that played at Tribeca this year. If the film were made sixty years ago, the male lead would first be seen in a downmarket private investigator's store front, leaning back in a chair with his feet up on a desk, as the dangeous female comes waltzing into his life. Today, it's a downmarket indie video store, where Neil (Cillian Murphy) lounges with his fellow employees, savoring their status as increasingly rare birds in a neighborhood being invaded by behemoth video store giants. Into the store one day waltzes Violet (Lucy Liu) a first-time customer who continually asks Neil questions about this and that and when he answers, points out that she's talking not to him, but to whoever is on the other end of her invisible Bluetooth handless. She eventually sidles up to the counter and announces that she has no membership and no driver's license, but she wants to check out anyway.

What follows is a gentle spoof on femme fatales and the men they inevitably drag along by the ear. The plot can't handle any seriously evil or crooked intentions on the part of Violet, so instead she's portrayed as having a screw loose -- a woman who enjoys walking her men into elaborate practical jokes and then doubling over with laughter every time they fall for it. She begins by showing up at the restaurant they choose for their first date falling-down drunk. When Neil refuses her aggressive, drunken come-ons, she reveals the put on and tosses it off as a half-joke, half-test to see if he would take advantage of her. In the real world, the man would run for the hills of course, but it somehow works here. For his part, Neil is a classic noir stooge who understands intellectually that he's being taken for a ride by this woman but can't help himself. "I've lived in Tasmania, Cape Town ..." Violet tells him. "That sounds incredibly ..." "Exciting?" "I was gonna say made up."

You've got to like a movie that gives us a nude Lucy Liu, shot high and from behind, and then moves her slowly over to a full-length mirror where all will be revealed ... but she's a vampire, so no reflection! Rise: Blood Hunter, from director Sebastian Gutierrez, is a cheap and dirty mash-up of the vampire and revenge genres, following L.A. reporter Sadie Blake (Liu) as her quest to find out who murdered a goth vampire wanna-be lands her on the menu of the real vampires behind the crime. Unfortunately for them, some potent blend of reporter moxie and girl power prevents her from staying dead like they planned -- she ends up kicking open and crawling out of the morgue drawer she was stuffed into, pissed off and shaking like a heroin addict for want of blood. Soon enough, she'll adjust to her new lifestyle and even acquire two must-have accessories: a girly little crossbow as a signature weapon and a vampire mentor who encourages her to "embrace your shadow side," whatever that means.

Sadie's shadow side is apparently the side that allows her to kill and dine on innocents, and not even particularly annoying innocents, as is sometimes the loophole. Picking up a reasonable young hitchhiker at one point, she quizzes him: "Do you have a wife? Have a girlfriend?" After giving all the wrong answers, he's lunch. Hey, she's a vampire -- vampires gotta eat. I have to say I wasn't expecting such a morally troublesome hero to emerge from those paragons of virtue at Sam Raimi's Ghosthouse Pictures, but I like it! Blood Hunter succeeds through edgy little moments like that one, along with an assortment of nude scenes, each one shot in such conspicuously low light that it smacks of actress protest, which somehow makes more enjoyable, in a perverted way. Sadly, there's no virtuoso special effects or cinematography -- there was more visual originality in a ten minute vampire short included in the anthology Paris Je T'Aime, released this weekend -- but there is enough here that works to make up a picture that's good for a Saturday night.

• We're only 4 months and 1 day away from the release of the next Die Hard movie, Live Free or Die Hard. While a poster isn't quite as exciting as flying cars and exploding helicopters, it's a pretty good representation of what we love about franchise -- Bruce Willis looking tough, dirty and resilient in the face of chaos. While a small version is on the right, you can click here for the larger version, which was posted on a Russian website.
• While Die Hard is wrapping up and waiting release, production is gearing up on The Mummy 3. Last week, I reported that the sequel will deal with Alex O'Connell as a young man, and that Jet Li and Michelle Yeoh might star. While no further casting news has been released, SneakPeek has stated that the sequel to the popular Brandon Fraser series will shoot in Montreal, at the Cité du Cinéma studio. (It is the same effects house that re-created ancient Sparta for 300.) According to the site, this news has been confirmed by the head of the Quebec Film and Television Council.
• Although Lucy Liu made a name for herself on Ally McBeal, her tough-girl stints in Charlie's Angels were enough to send her up and into cinematic circles. However, her latest films -- Domino, Lucky Number Slevin and Code Name: The Cleaner, aren't quite box-office smashes. So, it's no wonder that Film Ick has reported that she's going to head back to television and take on one of the starring roles in the upcoming pilot, Cashmere Mafia. Coming from Bring It On and The Break-Up director Peyton Reed, Liu will most likely play one of the lead executives.