The Weinstein Co. recently announced plans to invest heavily in Asian and Asian-themed projects, including a remake of the 1954 Kurosawa film The Seven Samurai (which has already been remade as The Magnificent Seven, but that was actually more of an adaptation so ignore this parenthetical). They're also putting money into in a martial arts film called The Forbidden Kingdom, the first movie to star both Jet Li and Jackie Chan, currently filming in China. It's all part of an Asian film fund of around $285 million that will shift between producing and buying the rights to both film and straight-to-video productions.

By my thinking this is a smart move. Harvey Weinstein and his brother Bob came into power in the '90s through their acquisition and distribution of foreign films. It was during this time that Harvey got the nickname "Harvey Scissorhands" because of his penchant for having directors (and sometimes his own editors) recut films to appeal more to an American audience. This pissed off some filmmakers and some film purists who believed that the director's vision is pure and untouchable, no matter how sprawling the finished product is, but the truth is he was widely successful in his endeavors and helped to popularize foreign films.

Ah, but Harvey got tired of recutting other people's movies and moved into producing his own. The cost of running Miramax went up, and he discovered that it's not as easy to produce hit after hit from the ground up. When Mirimax got into the Gweneth Paltrow business (Shakespeare in Love being the most successful collaboration), they started taking fewer risks and their output became more boring. Maybe part of that was the influence of Disney, who they sold their company to in order to help them keep up with the capital investments needed for film production, but whatever.

Since leaving Miramax and starting up The Weinstein Co., Harvey and Bob needed to rediscover their roots. My feeling is they're doing that with this new initiative. From my point of view, Harvey's strength was always in watching movies, much more than in making them. Back when he was acquiring movies he had a good sense of what worked and what didn't, but in my opinion he lost that objectivity when he was making them.

Which is why I think this move is a good one. He'll get back into that acquisitions groove. The Weinstein Co. wants to add a "Western sensibility" to Asian films so that they'll appeal to both markets, while taking advantage of the lower costs of Asian film production. It seems like a recipe for success. Apparently, these films will be released through a new "Dragon Dynasty" label, which Quentin Tarantino will help manage. I just hope Tarantino puts even a little more energy into it than he did into his Miramax-based vanity label Rolling Thunder, which put out Wong Kar-Wai's Chungking Express and then all but orphaned it. Maybe if he would have publicized the films he was releasing through the label it would have lasted longer than two years. No matter, because this new endeavor looks promising.

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Andy Spletzer loved Chungking Express when it first came out, and wondered why Tarantino didn't further promote the movie or his "Rolling Thunder" label way back when.

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