Fans of French film might be interested to know that Jean-Pierre Melville's 1970 classic Le Cercle Rouge (starring Alain Delon, Andre Bourvil, Gian Maria Volonte and Yves Montand) is being remade in Hollywood by none other than Hong Kong action auteur Johnnie To.

What's even more weird is that Chow Yun-fat and Orlando Bloom are attached to the project.

Malaysia's The Star reports that in Chen Shi-Zheng's Dark Matter the film about the Chinese physics grad student in the US that gets homicidal. The production lost their first actor, which is when Meryl Streep suggested to the director that they get Quinn instead — but the catch was that he was almost too good-looking and charismatic for a physics professor. We guess they were looking for someone more shriveled, perhaps paraplegic?

The Taiwanese film What on Earth Have I Done Wrong?(情非得已之生存之道) (dir. by Doze Niu) originally had a cameo role by Chinese actress and all-around hottie Zhou Xun (周迅). She even donated some of the money she won from the Golden Horse acting prize to the production, but her part was, in the end, deleted from the film. We have not seen the film on DVD here yet, but it seems it was just released in Taiwan on April 11, so might not make it here you know, for another three hours or so.

Ang Lee is coming out with an autobiography this October, and some reports claim that in this book, Lee states that although many women seem to like his films and admire the depictions of women in the films, that he doesn't really understand or have much interest in women. We'd probably have to read more of the book to know what context this statement occurs in (there's more in the report itself, but you'd still want to read the entire book), but we're sure that this will provide more proof for those into the Chinese rumor mill who believe that Lee is a closeted homosexual.

Cross-posted at China Film Journal