The return of Lynch, Soderbergh and Li.

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By Alison Willmore on 10/31/2006

"Tell me if you recognize me from somewhere." Was it really only a month ago that we came crawling out of a rainy Sunday 9am screening of "Inland Empire" and stood, blinking, outside of Lincoln Center with other frazzled writers, trying to sort out whatever the fuck it was we'd just seen? And now David Lynch's DV opus returns to New York, where, according to Anthony Kaufman, it will premiere at the (hey!) IFC Center on December 6, and presumably make its way around the country from there.

According to the Guardian, Steven Soderbergh, who announced his plan to make a Che Guevara biopic ages ago, will now be making two: "In addition to Guerrilla, which had been announced earlier this year, Soderbergh is to make another film called The Argentine." Benicio Del Toro will play Guevara in both films.

Via Empire, not long after announcing his retirement from martial arts epics, Jet Li has signed on for a martial arts comedy co-starring Jackie Chan:

The pair is teaming up for an untitled family adventure that will be directed by Stuart Littleâ€™s Rob Minkoff and will feature action sequences from choreographer du jour Yuen Woo-Ping. Thereâ€™s not much information on the plot for John Fuscoâ€™s script, but we do know that itâ€™s loosely based on the legend of the monkey king and his attempts to gain immorality.

Anyone familiar with Li's occasional attempts at lighter fare (see "The Master") can attest to why he doesn't generally do comedy...then again, there's no better time to learn. And how many people have a monkey king script in development now? Whatever happened to Spielberg's?

Sandy George at the Australian looks in on another film soon to be in the works, "Children of Huang Shi," the first co-production between China and Australia and also one of the first big films we can think of to portray the Japanese invasion and occupation of China. The film will follow "60 war orphans who are led nearly 1600km to safety by a young English writer, an Australian nurse and a Chinese communist sympathiser." Already cast are Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Radha Mitchell, Chow Yun-Fat and Michelle Yeoh.

+ Lynch's "Inland Empire" Launches in NYC (Anthony Kaufman's blog)
+ Soderbergh plans Guevara double bill (Guardian)
+ Li And Chan Officially Teaming Up (Empire)
+ China movie role after audition that was just practice (The Australian)