Ronny Yu Tagged Articles at Cinematical

With Buffy, we had a vampire slayer inextricably linked to humanity. With Blade, we had an angry half-man, half-vampire tough-guy who protected humans from the vampiric scourge. Together, they're a yin and yang, the small, bright girl and the large, dark man. If you merge the two, getting rid of the humanity while keeping the gender and darkness, you get Saya, a vampire/vampire slayer from the Japanese animated film, Blood: The Last Vampire. The premise: It is right before the Vietnam War, a base is dealing with blood-hungry vampires, and Saya is their defense against them.

In May and September, Mark Beall reported on the live action remake of the film. With Freddy vs. Jason and Bride of Chucky also under Fearless director, Ronny Yu's belt, a bloody, vampiric action movie is just up his alley. However, fresh to the genre is the newly-cast star, Korean actress Jun Ji-hyun. Her experience lies in much softer themes -- one of her most notable roles is in Il Mare, the Korean original of Sandra Bullock's The Lake House.

Ji-hyun will have a lot on her plate with this role, which is set to start filming in March. First, she must genre-jump from dramatic actress to ass-kicking antihero, which presumably means a good deal of martial arts training. Then, while working her muscles, she also has to learn English. I don't work out as much as I'd like, and re-learning French is on my eternal to-do list, so if she pulls this off in a few months, she'll be my new hero (pun intended).

How many horror movie series start with a good movie and then just get worse and worse? I'm talking mainly horror movies that move past the "trilogy" stage, like Halloween, The Exorcist, Hellraiser, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, A Nightmare on Elm Street, etc.

What sets the Friday the 13th series apart is that it started in mediocrity and continues in mediocrity. No one has ever been disappointed by a Friday the 13th movie; each and every one delivers exactly the same thing. A friend of mine, a beer connoisseur, once explained to me that even though Budweiser beer is bland and horrible, it's apparently a difficult task to continually brew beer with the same taste. There's something admirable, even comforting about that. When one comes to a Budweiser or a Friday the 13th movie, one attains the illusion of stability in an unstable world.

Rumors have been flying that Jet Li is retiring after Fearless, but loyal fans should not worry. He's only finished making wushu films (i.e. films about his own personal fighting style). He has revealed in interviews that he has said everything he's ever going to say on the topic in Fearless.

As a result, Fearless is a dual-edged sword, but both sides cut equally sharp. Li once again impresses viewers with his astonishing physical prowess, but the message here is that all the opponents in the world mean nothing; it's your own true self that is your greatest enemy. (Li has said that "wushu" literally translates into "stop war." People get the "war" or "fight" part, but don't quite understand the "stop" part.)

Along those same lines, Li -- as well as many of his martial arts contemporaries -- is usually misinterpreted as a tough guy, a superbad fighter that can kick any behind in the room. But in reality, he's a poet, a dancer with the grace and sophistication of a Fred Astaire. Moreover, Li shares the same critical reception as most dancers or comedians, or artists who accomplish their cinematic work through physical means; he is ignored. But I maintain that in Fearless he has given performances worthy of awards.

In my entire one year tenure with Cinematical, I've probably written a grand total of a dozen posts about anime related titles. This always struck me as odd, because comic book properties have been the hottest things on the movie market in the past few years, and anime represents a largely untapped comic book market (untapped in America, that is) just ripe for the movie pickings. However, all that has changed in the past week, as I've written an anime-related post nearly every day. Today's anime news is an update on a story we alerted you to way back in May of this year: Blood: The Last Vampire. In a recent interview with Ain't it Cool, Ronny Yu dropped a few details on his plans for the popular anime/manga title, and the details are as follows:

• Yu is still very interested in the title. In fact, he plans on making it his next major project.
• Shooting could start as early as late October/early November.
• He wants to "reinvent" the vampire genre (who doesn't?) To do this, he plans to move away from "greys and blues" to a full "multimedia" color approach.
• The setting will be moved from 1960 to 1948 Tokyo. You know, just after the bombing. A very interesting scheme, in my book.