The Weinstein brothers say their Asian Film Fund is good to go, presently filming a chop-socky blockbuster w/Jet Li AND Jackie Chan in China now, with plans to remake Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai and make a live version of Mulan. Yawn.

I listened to a great interview this morning with New York Asian Film Festival Director, Grady Hendrix about the move (his blog here), and he had several interesting things to say. My favorite quotes:

On the basic image Americans have of Asian cinema:

“It’s either a big, posh, glamorous martial arts epic where everyone dresses in six miles of billowing silk, or it’s a low-brow, grotty horror movie where pissed-off dead wet girls with long black hair crawl out of sewers and television sets.”

On wire-fu fatigue:

“When you’re sitting in a theater with a bunch of people and someone flies across the screen and chops someone’s head off, and everyone just yawns, you know a genre may be in trouble.”

His recommendation to distributors? Forget about twentysomethings and older – concentrate on the American teens who already read their manga right-to-left. Once they figure that out, he says, someone’s gonna make a lot of money.