Film Fetish: A Chinese movie roundup

This unhealthy obsession with movies is going to stop soon ... but first, we just have to tell you what we just heard.

• Jackie Chan and Jet Li, together, in a time-travel kung fu story? You best believe it:

  Based on a classic Chinese legend, the story follows a teenager who gets transported to ancient China after he steals a mystical staff from a New York pawnshop.

  The youngster enlists the help of a motley crew in order to overcome the tyrannical Jade Emperor and release the legendary Monkey King, the only person who can return him to modern times.

  We like the concept, if only because we feel that Chinese screenwriters dropping acid should be able to realize their visions on the big screen.
• Actress Vivian Wu of The Last Emperor fame is teaming up with director/hubby Oscar L. Costo for a trilogy of Shanghai base films. The first installment is Shanghai Red, which stars our favorite bald actor, Ge You, as well as Richard Burgi of 24 and Desperate Housewives. They've taken this film to Cannes, and are already working a second film called Shanghai Blue. All you film nerds out there are thinking the same thing: five kuai says that the last film in the trilogy is going to be called Shanghai White, because those are just the colors that great trilogies are made of. Red is a murder mystery set in Shanghai, while Blue, from what we've heard, is an adoption drama. Red's dialogue is in both Chinese and English, and is considered the first US independent production in China. We hope it gets to the local DVD stores soon!
• Unless you have no sex drive whatsoever, you're going to be excited to hear that Norah Jones, Rachel Weisz, Jude Law and Natalie Portman are going to be acting together in a Wong Kar-wai film set in the US. My Blueberry Nights is a road movie starring Jones as the lead. We think this has the potential of being a great movie, despite Natalie Portman's knack of fucking up every film she stars in. Part of the movie is shot in Las Vegas, and you know mayhem ensues whenever lost souls find themselves in the city of sin.
• We know that Chinese reporters at the Cannes film festival were ordered to keep silent, and we thought that some of them had been ordered to come back to China -- but what this report says is that they are leaving "in protest." Could that be true?
• We guess that despite the disappointment of a few hard-core fans, that plenty of Chinese people still went hog wild for The Da Vinci Code.
• There is justice in the world -- M:I:3 will be shown in Chinese theaters after a little snippety snip.

Photo from Supernovapop.com.