Fight Club

I've been meaning to post about this for a while, but many things distracted me, one of which is Sharon Stone's idiotic comments about the China earthquake. But more on that in another post.

There are at this time two fight-film projects, one from Malaysia and one from Singapore. The Malaysian one has completed shooting and even has a trailer online now. It's called Kinta 1881, and it's touted as Malaysia's very first martial arts movie. It's directed by C.L. Hor, the guy who did The Third Generation, the gorgeously shot but ultimately senseless film with huge arthouse pretensions. We all know how that one went, but hopefully Kinta 1881 is much better. It does look very exciting in its trailer, and definitely hopes are high for our first kungfu movie.

The Singapore one is called Knife. It will start production "soon," although no dates have been announced. But this one sounds interesting on paper. It's about an ex-soldier who returns to a Southeast Asian city to rescue his daughter from the clutches of the biggest gang in the city. It promises a lot of east-meets-west martial arts styles - Muay Thai, streetfighting and Special Forces knife techniques. So far the best knife-fighting we've seen in recent times is between Donnie Yen and Wu Jing in SPL. And that was one hell of a fight.

Knife will be directed by Xie Dong, who was assistant director on many of Zhang Yimou's movies. Sunny Pang, last seen in the Singaporean film Lucky 7, plays the lead. Other confirmed cast include John Lone, Jade Leung and Yasuaki Kurata.

The film's official site is here.