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Jackie Chan's son doesn't want to be an action star like his father. While the Hollywood comedy "Rush Hour 3" was another hit for Chan at the box office this summer, his 24-year-old son, Jaycee Chan, was mixing with the arty crowd at the Venice Film Festival.
With a major role in "The Sun Also Rises," a Chinese-language movie that competed for the top Golden Lion prize in Venice, Jaycee Chan was considered for acting honors alongside the likes of Adrien Brody and Michael Caine.
Neither Jaycee Chan nor the film won any prizes, but his appearance highlighted his desire to chart a course distinct from his father's.
"I'm starting to carve my own path," Jaycee Chan told The Associated Press after promoting "The Sun Also Rises" at a Hong Kong theater. "I've made an art-house movie. ... My range is greater. I'm not just making action movies. I'm trying many different things."
The elder Chan, through a spokesman, turned down an interview request.
Jaycee Chan has played the son of a crazed mother in rural China in "The Sun Also Rises," a teenager dealing with his girlfriend's unexpected pregnancy in "2 Young" and a rebellious young man on the run from gangsters in the upcoming movie "The Drummer."
Jaycee Chan's also been in one film that resembles the work of his father: "Invisible Target," a frantic flurry of fight scenes and daredevil stunts in which he played a rookie police officer.
Jaycee Chan was born in Los Angeles and raised in Hong Kong. He attended high school in the U.S. and studied for two years at the College of William & Mary in Virginia.
Casually dressed in white T-shirt, pants and a Beijing Olympics cap, the lanky young man, who's inherited his father's big nose, bent over to shake a reporter's hand with both hands and kept answering questions even as an assistant tried to wrap up the interview.
Jaycee Chan's performance in "The Sun Also Rises," a colorful, epic story set against China's brutal Cultural Revolution, got mixed reviews.
"Chan is OK, reprising his bemused persona familiar from several Hong Kong movies," said Hollywood trade publication Variety.
Jaycee Chan tried hard, but his performance lacked emotional depth, said respected Hong Kong director Stanley Kwan. "In portraying very deep feelings through the look in his eyes, he's still a bit lacking," he said.
Chinese director Jia Zhangke, a past winner at Venice, said that Jaycee Chan's acting exceeded his expectations. "I think the direction he's going in is very good," Jia said in an interview with the Chinese news Web site Sina.com.
Veteran Chinese actress Joan Chen, who costarred with Jaycee Chan in the movie, raved about his performance, saying he was "very, very good."
She enjoyed the innocence Jaycee Chan brings to his role, she told the AP, a quality she finds lacking in mainland Chinese actors jaded by the country's political upheaval and economic struggles.
Jaycee Chan's first love was music, he said, but his advisers told him to juggle both singing and acting careers to boost his profile, a standard approach in the Chinese-language entertainment industry.
After releasing a self-titled folk album in 2004, which featured carefree musings about life sung in a soft, high-pitched voice, he focused on acting.
In a recent blog entry on his Web site, Jackie Chan described his joy when Jaycee surprised him with a birthday cake on his private jet.
The 53-year-old actor said he doesn't see Jaycee very often, and the two didn't talk much on the plane after the birthday surprise.
"I know we care about each other," he wrote. "It just isn't always necessary to be expressed with words. So Jaycee and I just sat side by side reading newspapers and it was very comfortable."
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