More of a news day today, but some additions to yesterday’s news:

- Hoga News found the final result for the opening weekend of that Genghis Khan movie, and it’s actually a flop! It may’ve opened at number 1, but it only brought in 197 million yen (and at some 480 screens, that’s only a 410,000 yen per-screen, which rounds down to about $3500). That can’t be good for everything else under it.

- Remember I reported that My Sassy Girl director Kwak Jae Yong is making a Japanese movie named “My Girlfriend is a Cyborg?” Apparently before that, Variety Asia reports that he did end up making a Korean movie starring Shin Mina and On Ju Wan named “My Might Princess” (How many of those “My _______” movies are we gonna get from Korea?) and it’s coming out in the summer. Who knew when those parodies of movies showed up in My Sassy Girl, the director was actually really pitching movie ideas?

- Hong Kong music review blog 3C Music has a damning report on the possibility that a new song on new Gold Label princess Stephy Tang’s album may be copied from famed composer Joe Hisashi. The site has quite a few posts mentioning these possible frauds in Hong Kong music, and as many many people know, hit producer Mark Lui is the biggest perpetrator. Examples include (just play the little play button under the main entry in Chinese to listen to a comparison)

Jill’s “Funny Jealousy” vs. Vitamin C’s “Graduation”

Jill’s sister Janice’s “I Love when I Want To” vs. The Coors’ Breathless

Alex Fong Lik-Sun’s “Large Small Heart” (Obviously an over-literal translation and by no means reflect the actual meaning of the name) vs. Ekin Cheng’s “The Era of Love”

Of course, Mark Lui is not the only one - Mark Lui’s protege Justin Lo’s “Headline News” (sang by a less talented guy in the crapfest Love@First Note) has been known to combine TWO sources (only one is in this post though): The Stylistics’ “You Make me Feel Brand New” and Bondy Chiu’s “Joy-seeking” (I knew that chorus sounds familar!), and Even Eason Chan’s “Bad Habits” seem to resemble Rufus Wainwright’s “Cigarettes and Chocolate Milk.”

It even happened to Joey Yung, and according to this report, this is the response by manager Mani Fok:

“《奇》所屬版權的這間公司已關閉多年，根本不存在問題。”

“Regarding the issue of copyright, the copyright holder of the song has already been defunct for years, so there’s no problem.”

Someone on a forum that broke the news said there’s no music in Hong Kong, just an entertainment industry, I’m inclined to agree.

Then again, it’s not like America’s music industry isn’t similarly derivative:

Usher’s Yeah vs. Chris Brown’s Run It.

The Frays’ Over My Head vs. How to Save a Life (holy shit, it’s the same chorus!)

I do have an example for Japan, but I can’t find the necessary clips on Youtube, so let’s just say that they do it too.

- Another Hong Kong, littleoslo, has a line-up of bad album covers from Mainland Chinese CDs. Don’t worry about the captions, some of them are funny anyway.

- Twitch has a long interview with Bong Joon Ho, one of my favorite Korean filmmakers working today in light of the upcoming release of The Host. Again, be sure to go watch The Host, it’s great monster fun.

- Daily Dumpling has a small round-up of some of the celebrity blogs out there. It’s not comprehensive, but it’s a good start.

- Twitch also provides a trailer for the Singaporean film “One Last Dance” starring Francis Ng and Harvey Keitel (who thought of that combination?).

- A very new blog called Hong Kong and Kung Fu DVD News and Review has popped up, and it offers a look at the availability of Hong Kong Kung Fu films’ bootleg being sold in large chain stores around the states.

Lastly, I’m sure everyone that cares have heard by now that Utada Hikaru is getting divorced, but I don’t do celebrity gossips here, so you can look it up yourself.

Updates might not come the next two days because I’ll be at my alma mater again for two days for a mix of personal and professional reasons. So make this one last, ok?

A late update today for personal reasons, but I’m here anyway. But given that it takes me around an hour or two to write a complete entry, I’m just gonna spread them out on this and the next entry. Let’s start with a bunch of numbers and rankings:

- Hong Kong Sunday numbers were, as predicted, fairly weak on the wide release side. The stronger numbers are all in the new limited release, with The Queen leading the way, earning a phenomenal HK$500,000 on 14 screens on Sunday (that’s an HK$35700 per-screen average, or roughly $4600, which is pretty good, considering the average ticket price in HK is give or take HK$55 and The Queen is playing in most, if not all, multiplexes). It’s already made HK$1.63 million, but given its talky nature, it’s hard to tell how far it’ll go with the average HK moviegoer, who was probably attracted by both the subject matter (being a former British colony) and the Oscar win by Helen Mirren. It ties with Protege, which took the same number, but on 33 screens. It’s already gone past that HK$25 million mark, and it’s even about to double Dragon Tiger Gate’s take at the box office, which signals some kind of hope in the HK film industry.

Next in line is Dreamgirls, which made HK$210,000 on 10 screens (total so far: HK$700,000 after 4 days), and then Letters From Iwo Jima with HK$150,000 on 5 screens (total so far: HK$480,000 after 4 days), which means it has a better per-screen average, which would make sense considering the inflated ticket price due to a longer running time. Anyway, I would expect Letters From Iwo Jima to have better word-of mouth and hang around the theatres longer than Dreamgirls anyway.

As expected, the Pang Bros.’ The Messengers did manage to take the 2nd place spot with HK$590,000 on 29 screens for a HK$1.89 million total so far, but with the fickle horror audience, it’ll probably fizzle out around the HK$5 million mark. Meanwhile, Night at the Museum remain unbeatable with HK$870,000 on 37 screens for a HK$35.64 million total so far. Looks like the HK$40 million mark won’t be very hard to reach.

- According to Korea Pop Wars, the South Korean box office seemed to have a much more interesting weekend, as three films are claiming the top spot.

- Japanese box office rankings for total attendance is out, and as expected, the over-titled Genghis Kahn movie takes the top spot. The One Piece movie takes second, Ghost Rider takes 4th, and Tom Tykwer’s Perfume takes 5th (Eiga Consultant analyzes its opening day and predicts that it will do way worse than Phantom of the Opera, which was a huge success in Japan, and do considerably better than A Very Long Engagement. The best news is that it will do better than it did in America. Of course, a 2 million-dollar gross isn’t hard to beat at all.). Sakuran went into wide release and stays at 7th place. It probably had a considerable increase in box office for it to stay at the same spot among the new releases. Takeshi Miike’s “Ryu Ga Gotoku” (based on the game Yakuza) also opened in a limited amount of screens and got the 10th spot (more on the premiere by Hoga News here). Hopefully, numbers will come out tomorrow for a more solid analysis (despite the change in the exchange rate in the last week).

- Japanese drama ratings are also out, and the Flower boys (don’t worry, it’s just my nickname for a show about a group of protagonists that actually have the galls to call themselves “Flower 4″) beat out Karei Naru Ichizoku again for the second week in a row, scoring 22.3 rating on its 9th episode (it’s also its third-to-last episode) while Karei Naru Ichizoku gains slightly with a 21.6 rating, but not enough to win the week. Yukie Nakama’s drama continue to find new lows with a 10.3 rating this week, and Haken No Hinkaku continues its higher-than-average rating run with a 19.9 rating this week. As these dramas begin to wrap up in the next few weeks, ratings should be slightly higher on the whole.

- David Fincher’s Zodiac also opened this weekend waaaaay behind John Travolta’s lowbrow road comedy Wild Hogs at second place with just $13.4 million. Then again, considering that David Fincher may be the film’s biggest attraction, it’s an OK number, but it won’t make back its reported $65 million budget in domestic box office.

- Lastly, it does count as numbers, but not really. Despite the recent health show scandals in Japan, 47% of Japanese people still believe in expert testimony on health shows, according to a survey on the Daily Mainichi news. In fact, only 67% of those people who believed the “natto=diet” correlation (which sparked the scandal) found out that it was false. Which means 1/3 of those people who watched that show is experiencing some heavy cognitive dissonance right about now.

I’ll fill in some of the links tomorrow, all the important news links are already there. And of course, more news will come too.