Dude! Michelle Yeoh and Chow Yun-Fat are going to be starring in "Hua Mulan"! I liked the Disney version very much, and am pretty excited about the possibility of a live action version.

I regard with apprehension, however, the upcoming straight to video "Mulan II" from Disney. Why do they keep making crappy sequels to their perfectly good movies? Admittedly, I've only ever seen Pocahontas 2, and Pocahontas 1 wasn't that spectacular to begin with, but just the idea of even making a sequel to the legend of Pocahontas, like some kind of folklore fan-fiction, just seems blasphemous. Especially of Mulan.

Well, the Yeoh/Yun-Fat version should prove worth looking into, especially because, and I don't hink I'm making too much of an assumption here, it'll be a kung-fu movie. I don't know what it is about Chinese folk lore heroes, but they seem to translate well into Kung-Fu movies. Mulan has the potential for some good fight scenes, anything about Wong Fei-Hung or Fong Sai Yuk. Come to think of it most folk heroes translate well into action movies, Robin Hood, Zorro, Wyatt Earp, they're all action heroes. Even Romeo and Juliet has enough fight scenes to keep a guy interested.

Of course there are others who don't so quickly come to mind, but the ones that kicked ass figure most prominently in our cultural consciousness. I think that in the future we will find that the best-remembered stories of our time will end up being James Bond, Spider-Man or Rocky. Just as spoken-word tradition passed along the stories of our ancestors in some sort of literary survival of the fittest, so shall the consumer-tradition of today dictate that only those titles strong enough to survive are released in new formats, from film to VHS, from VHS to DVD. The films that prove unprofitable in one format will not so easily pass on to the next.

Which is why I'm waiting until the holocubes are released until I make my movie collection.