SUBMITTED BY LClem

April 15, 2003 — In a dusty abandoned warehouse on Toronto's railway lands, Chow Yun-Fat is looking suitably cool and menacing, bamboo fighting stick in hand. I'm not sure what take it is, but it's got to be double digits by now. The movie is Bulletproof Monk. And, in the scene, the Monk With No Name (Chow) is schooling a street kid named Kar (Seann William Scott) in the art of self-defence. Movie magic being what it is, Scott is not actually required to be present. At "Action!," Chow stands in position with a look of intense concentration and begins rotating his weapon. It makes a few good helicopter spirals and then flies out of his hand, clacking to the floor like a baton dropped by a rookie cheerleader. Raucous laughter erupts among the fight choreography team, led by Wei Tung (who has schooled Chow Yun-Fat in fight fakery all the way back to the 1992 Hong Kong classic Hard Boiled). Some jokes just don't get old. "I'm just lucky Seann is not here," Chow says later during a break in filming. "This is my first time working with sticks. We've been working for two months on this, and I'm still dropping them."