The movie version of the best-selling Tokyopop manhwa title, Hyung Min-Woo’s Priest, possibly the darkest, bloodiest story ever pencilled by a Korean comic book artist, will finally see the light of day... very shortly. Sony’s Screen Gems will take care of the distribution, while production will be placed in the adept hands of ex-horror master Sam Raimi (director of the three Spiderman), and his company, Ghost House Pictures (he produced Shimizu Takashi’ remakes of his own Grudges movies). The movie is set to start shooting on October 1st under the direction of Andrew Douglas (Amytiville Horror, the 2004 version of the classic horror film).

The series follows the tragic steps of Ivan Isaacs, a priest who traded half his soul to the devil Belial, in exchange for the power to come back from the dead and wreak his vengeance on the mad angel that caused the death of his beloved. The fallen scholar-ecclesiastic becomes an enraged killing machine and starts waging an unholy war on a legion of demons and other damned flesh-eating creatures in an imaginary Wild West that looks literally like hell, or perhaps, like one of the six Buddhist worlds: the realm of the ashura, where permanent war is the natural state of things. An elaborate epic, full of sound and fury, with abundant and complex theological twists and turns, this manhwa is certainly not the story of the genre that lends itself the best to an adaptation for the silver screen, but visually, it was practically begging for Hollywood to exploit (butcher?) it, and it is the first South Korean series to be licensed for a major feature film.

The script, penned by a newcomer, Cory Goodman, describes the adaptation as a “vampire western” that tells the story of “a warrior priest who disobeys church law by teaming with a young sheriff and a priestess to track down a band of renegade vampires who have kidnapped his niece.” Which already sounds a little worrying (and quite far from the original material), but why not? Wait and see…

Rumor has it that Gerald Butler (King Leonidas in Spaaaarta!, oops... 300) could be cast as the main character.

The manhwa is worth the read, but is not for the squeamish:

Jeon Do-Yeon, getting the baise-main from Alain Delon

May 27th 2007: Jeon Do-Yeon, wearing a silver lamé evening gown, walks to the stage to receive Europe’s top acting prize from the hands of legendary French actor Alain Delon; she  is walking in the footsteps of Kang Soo-Yeon, who won the Best Actress Prize at the Venice Film Festival twenty years ago (for her role in Im Kwon-Taek’s Sibaji/The Surrogate Womb) and Moon So-Ri, who won Best New Performer at the same festival last year (for her part in Oasis, directed by Chang-Dong, who also worked with Jeon on Secret Sunshine, which is hardly a coincidence). 

As Pusan International Film Festival director Kim Dong-Ho put it, after the award ceremony: “It’s a monumental achievement for an Asian actress to win the Best Actress award at Cannes.”
Jeon is indeed the first Korean and second Asian actress to win this title at the Cannes Film Festival. Hong Kong actress Maggie Cheung, who was on the jury this year, won in 2004 with Clean, under the direction of Olivier Assayas.

Predictably, Jeon’s distinction hit the headlines of the national Korean press and drew congratulations from President Roh Moo-Hyun. One of the most prominent figures of South-Korean cinema, the actress has nevertheless known very little international exposure until this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

Jeon’s achievement shows that Korean cinema still fares very well in the international film festival circuit, while it does not necessarily translate into massive sales in the global movie industry.  Since 2000, Korean directors Im Kwon-Taek (with Chihwaseon in 2002), Lee Chang-dong (with Oasis in 2002), Park Chan-Wook (with Old Boy in 2004) and Kim Ki-Duk (with Samaria and 3-Iron in 2004) have won best director and the Grand Jury Prize at the Cannes, Venice and Berlin film festivals. But the Korean actress is the first one from the peninsula to be honored for her exceptional skills on screen – a well-timed ray of sunshine in the recent media industry doom and gloom. As Jeon herself commented, there were many outstanding actresses in competition this year in Cannes, including Romanian Anamaria Marinca in Cristian Mungiu’s 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (which won the supreme distinction: la Palme d’Or) and Russia’s Galina Vishnevskaya with Alexandra.
Now seems a timely moment to evoke a few important stages of Jeon’s career.

On the paper, the story could hardly be more minimal: Jin, a 5 year-old little girl lives in Pusan, in a small apartment, with her mother and her little sister Bin. While their mother decides to go look for the father of her children, from whom she is estranged, Jin and Bin are put in the care of an unsympathetic, matronly, alcoholic aunt, in the province, before moving on to live at their grandparents’.

As many people know, Korean actress Jeon Ji-Hyun will be credited as Gianna Jun (why not?), perhaps an unheimlich alliterative echo of her much talked-about stint for Giordano.

More importantly perhaps, the direction of the movie has changed hands. Initially piloted by Ronny Yu (Yu Yan-Tai), the $35 million live adaptation of Kitakubo Hiroyuki’s japanimation work based on a script by Chris Chow, is now helmed by French director Chris Nahon, for whom this will be the second action movie.  Nahon is working with the martial arts choreographer/director Corey Yuen, who is overseeing action sequences, as he did on the somewhat mediocre Kiss Of The Dragon. In defense of this uninspired Jet Li movie, this was a first collaboration that did have a couple of original concepts (a Chinese cop lost in a postcard-lookalike city of lights, who becomes friendly with an American prostitute… what are the odds) but suffered from a number of problems of execution. For one thing, Corey Yuen has none of the pyrotechnical grace of some his peers like Yuen Woo-Ping, so that his fights, full of blood and violence, in Kiss Of The Dragon in particular, are often closer to pure and simple brawling. This could suit the visual style of Blood though. Wait and see… (I, for one, am a little worried, I must admit, considering Nahon’s pale record as a director)

Ronny Yu will remain involved in the project, but as a producer and screenwriter. The shoot has already started and some paparazzi pictures (from China, I think) leaked and are, like all things Korean these days, or so it seems, just about everywhere on the internet.