RonnyYu 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).

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.