First up, Zhang Yimou’s sorta-remake of Blood Simple, the amazing debut feature by Joel and Ethan Coen, has a new title. Once called Amazing Tales: Three Guns, the title now seems to be The First Gun. Except that in some places, as on the upload for the trailer featured below, the title Amazing Tales: Three Guns, or some variant on it, persists. But the new name was reported by Yahoo, and they’ve got to be correct, right? So for now we’ll run with it, but don’t be too surprised if you still see the Three Guns title used in the next few months.

Now, about that trailer: we’ve got it after the jump, and it is a little bit insane. We’ve already seen some images, and they were wild, but this is over the top. You won’t recognize much Coen Brothers in it, but there’s no small amount of weird, wacky style going on.

The film isn’t quite a remake, maybe half remake and half reimagining. As you’ll see immediately, it is a period piece, and the setting is a noodle shop on the edge of a frontier in feudal China. Not so different from a bar in Texas, I suppose, but different enough. More to the point, there’s a lot more comedy in this one, and probably more overt action. Oh, and some totally different characters.

“We have added a lot of things,” said Zhang, “and changed the whole feeling [of Blood Simple]… we brought in a lot of comedic elements and changed the relationship and personalities of the characters.”

Which is for the best, really. Zhang is a great director, and the notion of him doing a pure remake of Blood Simple, even transplanted to a different time and place, we weird. This looks REALLY weird, and kind of exciting. Sony Pictures Classics will release the film in North America in 2010, but since the picture opens in China next month, hopefully we’ll know a lot more soon.

[this is via The Playlist, which I didn't remember to credit at first. apologies for that!]