As I reported in December, Danny and Oxide Pang (Bangkok Dangerous, The Messengers) were hired to direct the sequel to action fantasy The Storm Riders. More details have surfaced at the Hong Kong Filmart, according to Variety. Filming begins next month with original stars Aaron Kwok and Ekin Cheng set to return; Simon Yam, Nicholas Tse, and Charlene Choi will also star. The picture will be the first Hong Kong movie filmed exclusively on blue screen, a la 300, though the budget is just $12 million, compared to 300's estimated cost of $65 million. The Storm Riders II is due for release at the end of 2009.

Variety is also reporting that the wonderfully versatile Gary Oldman is in "advanced negotiations" to star in Rain Fall, the "story of a hit man who is forced to protect the daughter of one of his victims against assassination by the C.I.A." If the deal goes through, Oldman would join Shiina Kippei (Shinobi) and actress Akiho Hasegawa. Max Mannix will direct the Japan-set thriller; veteran producer Satoru Iseki is employing "sophisticated Western financing techniques" to get the picture made.

We've been tracking World War II action epic Shanghai since last summer. Production was expected to start this spring in Shanghai, but the Chinese authorities denied the shooting permit after the Weinstein Co. had spent nearly three million dollars building sets. Variety says that production has now been shifted to Thailand and England, though there's no word on a new start date. The film will be directed by Mikael Håfström and stars John Cusack, Chow Yun-Fat, Gong Li and Ken Watanabe.

Writers' strike got you down? Wondering how to fill those late-night hours now that all the talk shows are on hiatus? I've got just the answer for you: Asian films on DVD! All three of these newly-released films are sure to provoke, though I'm not sure they'll prepare you for sleep as well as Jon Stewart or Craig Ferguson.

Johnny To's Election brilliantly details a clash of triad titans in Hong Kong. Every two years an election is held to determine a crime gang's new boss; both Simon Yam, a suave yet savage family man, and Tony Leung Kar-Fai, a brutal and much feared lieutenant, want the job. Director To generates tension with great subtlety, and the story has several surprises up its sleeve. The DVD includes a "making of" feature and interviews with the director and stars.

Cinematical's Jeffrey M. Anderson wrote a beautiful review of Tsai Ming-liang's latest film, I Don't Want to Sleep Alone, explaining how it fits into the director's ouevre and concluding: "The pleasure here belongs to Tsai's images, which can be both familiar and baffling, or beautiful and humorously deadpan, or realistic and supernatural. It's best to give up ideas of plot, story and characters and just explore these amazing images, one by one." The DVD includes the original theatrical trailer, which can be viewed at Moviefone.

Our friends at Moviefone also have the trailer for Kim Ki-Duk's Time, which in no way prepares you for how infuriating the film proves to be. I agree with Martha Fischer, who wrote: "The problem with Time is that every character in the film is so fundamentally repulsive it's impossible to care about any of them." Still, as I've written before, Kim's films are visually beautiful and told in an indelible narrative style, and that might be enough to justify a rental if you're curious. The DVD includes a "making of" feature and the trailer.

I grew up and lived in Los Angeles for many years, but it was only after I moved away that I began to fully appreciate the tremendous variety of films presented by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. Early this year the Archive launched its first season of programming at the brand new Billy Wilder Theater in the Hammer Museum in Westwood, near the UCLA campus. I haven't been there yet, but it certainly sounds like a fabulous screening facility, and this weekend sounds like a great time to go see a movie (or two or four).

The Archive's New Chinese Cinema series, presented in collaboration with the California Institute of the Arts, gets underway tonight (October 5) with a double bill of Still Life and Dong, two works by Jia Zhangke that tackle a similar subject from both a fictional and documentary perspective. Jia was invited by the artist Liu Xiaodong to document his working process as he created one of his "monumental, fractured paintings." The location was the Three Georges area in China, where a huge dam is being constructed. Jia was inspired by the location to make the feature Still Life and also slightly "fictionalized" the documentary Dong.

The series continues with the US Premiere of Eye in the Sky on Saturday night. Eye in the Sky is the debut film by Yau Nai-hoi, who has written several films for director Johnny To (PTU, Running on Karma, Election). Tony Leung Ka-Fai is a criminal in this one and Simon Yam is a cop in the Surveillance Unit assigned to catch him.

Sunday takes a decided turn toward the independent with Huang Weikai's street musician doc Floating and Yang Heng's debut feature Betelnut, a "gently observational portrait of youthful aimlessness," as described in the program notes. The series continues through October 26 with screenings also taking place at the Roy and Edna Disney/Cal Arts Theater (REDCAT).

Manoel de Oliveira's Belle Toujours is back on the charts this week, playing on one lone screen, in Denver, according to my information. Among its other qualities and achievements, it marks the fourth collaboration of director Oliveira and actor Michel Piccoli (a fifth, a short segment in an anthology film, appeared earlier this year). At 81, Piccoli is practically a living legend, having worked with Alfred Hitchcock, Luis Buñuel, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Louis Malle, Mario Bava, and many other greats. He also appears in Jean-Pierre Melville's 1962 Le Doulos, currently re-released on 2 screens. It's a delicate relationship between director and actor; Piccoli and Oliveira seem to be developing a comfortable working relationship in which each brings out the best in the other. This has happened relatively few times over the past century. When it happens, it can be very exciting, but when a director and an actor don't click, everything can fall to pieces.

Milos Forman has coaxed and guided some great performances over the years, notably Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham in Amadeus and Jim Carrey in Man on the Moon. But he has rarely been praised for directing women, as evidenced by his awkward handling of Natalie Portman in the awful Goya's Ghosts (37 screens). The movie earned advance attention for its nude/sex scene, but will probably be remembered for fitting Portman with a set of humorously bad fake teeth and for her self-consciously dazed walk, newly released from prison, through a chaotic town square. Forman may be to blame, but Portman is out there, on the screen, all alone and in front of everyone.

My pick of the week is the underseen Cautiva, a drama from Argentina. Cristina's biological parents were "disappeared" during the 1970s, but she knew nothing about it and is none too happy when she is torn away from her comfortable upper class existence to live with them. Cautiva (AKA Captive) does not dig very deeply into the political issues that it raises -- and I kept wishing that Cristina would react to her situation instead of simply slumping her shoulders -- but it is fascinating for its new twists on the old coming of age story.

More fully realized on every level, Away From Her marked the assured directorial debut of actress Sarah Polley. She paints a delicate portrait of a long-time marriage that reaches a breaking point from which it may never recover. In his Sundance review, our own James Rocchi wrote: "Away from Her is a truly romantic film, and it moves us because it knows the cruel, beautiful fact that how much love and life give us is often matched by how much they can cost." Julie Christie and Gordon Pinsent star. The DVD includes an audio commentary with Christie, plus deleted scenes and commentary by Polley.

Triad Election is a riveting drama starring Simon Yam as a Hong Kong mob boss who desperately wants to stay in power. Johnny To masterfully directed. Cinematical's Jeffrey M. Anderson says that "the movie's real strength comes in the performances, the interplay, and the unknown levels of trust." Triad Election is actually the second part of a drama that begins with 2005's Election, which details Yam's rise to power. Unfortunately, Election won't be released on Region 1 DVD until November. Taken together, they are powerful, but even separated like this, Triad Election is well worth a look.

Other indie titles that may deserve a rental include Hungarian sports drama White Palms, character drama Snow Cake (featuring Alan Rickman and Sigourney Weaver), and nightlife comedy The Boys & Girls Guide to Getting Down.

In the early 1990s, the leaders of the Hong Kong action pack included John Woo, Ringo Lam, Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-tung with Johnny To running somewhere in the distance. His only major credit was co-directing the awesome The Heroic Trio (1993) with Ching. But as the 1997 handover approached, during which control of Hong Kong would revert from the British back to the Communist Chinese, most filmmakers panicked. Some came to the U.S. to make Jean-Claude Van Damme movies and others simply laid low, waiting for the worst to happen. However, To suddenly found himself at the forefront of things, and slowly worked his way into becoming Hong Kong's top new action director, consistently churning out reliable, if old-fashioned hits: Running Out of Time (1999), Help!!! (2000), Fulltime Killer (2001), Running on Karma (2003), Breaking News (2004), Election (2005), Exiled (2006) and now Triad Election.

Tartan Films is giving Triad Election an American theatrical release, even though its forerunner, Election, did not get the same treatment. No matter. I didn't see Election, and it was easy enough for me to parcel out what was what. This superb, graceful new film actually has quite a bit in common with Francis Coppola's Godfather trilogy, and so anyone even remotely familiar with that should be able to follow it pretty clearly. Here it is: Lok (Simon Yam) is the current Chairman of Wo Shing Triad Society in Hong Kong. Each Chairman is elected and serves for two years. Lok's time is running out and he wishes to serve another term.

We've reported a couple of times here about an intriguing-sounding, unnamed collaboration between Hong Kong superstars Johnnie To, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam. Referred to as a "puzzle film," the movie is expected to be a 90 minute crime feature, with 30 minutes directed by each man, based on what has occurred in the previous section (there is not a screenplay for the film; each bit is being made independently, according to the desires and ideas of its director).

A couple of weeks ago it was revealed to the surprised of no one that To's long-time collaborator Simon Yam would star in his segment, and now further details about the film are starting to leak out. Though no cast members apart from Yam have been confirmed, it's expected that Louis Koo, Kelly Lin and Sun Honglei will also star in one or more segment. In addition, the film -- currently called Triangle -- now has a vague plotline from which Hark, who is at the helm of the first segment, will work. According to people at Twitch who can read the Chinese media, the film will start with "a few guys with little money and a lot to worry about [who] gather together to chat about how to get rich. Then a mysterious man sitting in the same room approaches them with a treasure map. ... To get their hand on the treasure, the map is only the first of a series puzzles they have to solve."

Frustratingly, there's still no reliable info available about shooting or release dates. Rest assured, however, that whether you like it or not, we'll let you know when those details emerge.

Well, hell. I've been all excited (and, hopefully, the few of you interested in Hong Kong film have, as well) about the fact that Simon Yam is part of the ever-expanding cast for Olivier Assayas' multi-cultural Boarding Gate, and now it turns out that Yam isn't going to be able to do the film. Which, you know, sort of sucks. The good news, though, is that Yam pulled out of the project because he's committed to playing a part in Johnnie To, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam's "puzzle film." In case you've forgotten, the film will be directed in thirds, with each section being completed before the next is made. The three will reportedly tell a single story, but each director will have to write his segment based on what the director before him does with his own piece -- for example, if Hark, who is going first, kills off his main character at the end of his segment, To, who comes next, will have to come up with a way to deal with that event.

As a frequent collaborator with To, Yam apparently felt he had to make the puzzle film a priority (plus, it sounds like a hell of a lot of fun); because it was likely to shoot at the same time as Boarding Gate, he was forced to pull out of Assayas' project.

Just last week, I shared the exciting news that Hong Kong superstar (and a pretty good actor, to boot) Andy Lau was going to appear in Olivier Assayas' Boarding Gate, assuming the film fit into his schedule. It now appears, unfortunately, that despite the fact that Assayas reportedly flew all the way to Hong Kong (From Paris, I assume. It's less impressive if he was in Beijing before making the trip.) to make the request in person, Lau won't be able to take part in the project. Before you fans of HK film get too depressed, however, check this out: Both Kelly Lin and Simon Yam (aka one of the most wonderful supporting actors the world has ever known) will now be appearing in the film. Yay! As long as this sucker doesn't turn into an HK-stars-making-cameos mess (which, since we're talking about Assayas, seems very unlikely), it's sounding more exciting by the second.

In other news from Hong Kong, Johnnie To has announced that he recently signed a deal with Meridian Pictures. Under the terms of the deal, To will reportedly direct 3-4 "big budget" films for the studio over the next six years. What's interesting about this news is that the first project has already been revealed: It's called Butterfly Flies and will star Li Bing-bing and Vic Chow in a story about "a girl who has a fight with her boyfriend right before he dies in an accident. She gets depressed, and then she meets his ghost." (A far cry from To's output for Milky Way, huh?) There's no word on the timeframe for this one (the script is yet to be written), but things happens fast in Hong Kong, so it could easily be out sometime next year.