July 16th, 2007
The Golden Rock Podcast - 7/16/2007
It’s a little late, but it’s here. Except I forgot to continue the Winners and Losers of the Week. Oh well, at least it’s shorter.
The Third Golden Rock Podcast - 7/16/2007. (right click—>save as. 96 kbps MP3. 10.3 mb. 14:20)
This week’s theme song - Edison Chen - TP Won!!!!!!
On the Podcast this week:
Verbal review: Transformers
Hong Kong Summer films, part 2 - This summer sucks
Future goals of Asian films - remake and foreign distribution?
Does the sales of advance tickets in Japan affect studio guesstimates?
Thanks again to everyone’s comments, and enjoy.
July 17th, 2007 at 10:05 am
Fantastic podcast again, great choice of themes there. Especially interesting to me since I’m currently writing an article for a print magazine examining the development of HK cinema between the handover and now.
If HK audiences don’t even want to see their own productions anymore, does that suggest that they’re fed up with the amount of Wong Jing productions / pop star vehicles? Maybe Hollywood films do the same thing, but far better. Still, that would mean films like Flashpoint and Invisible Target, which pretty much represent the now fading unique identity of HK cinema, are going to fare better. I’ve got no idea how SPL did 2 years ago, but I assume it had its fair share of success.
I think that panasian production and making films with international audiences in mind are going to be important aspects in the future. I’ve read that the To/Hark/Lam collaboration Triangle had originally been supposed to begin filming much later, but production was started earlier because of the interest from international distributors.
Can’t wait for next week’s podcast - keep it up!
July 21st, 2007 at 9:40 pm
munin,
Thanks for your comment. SPL did only very moderate because of its category III rating, but its word-of-mouth was good enough for people to request a reunion between Yip and Yen.
As for what HK audiences are tired of, I suspect they’ve noticed the trend of big HK movies gearing towards a wider mainland audience, which is possibly why Twins Mission flopped so badly in Hong Kong.
In fact, I think Invisible Target and Flashpoint seem to be attempts to resurrect the old days of spectacle HK action cinema before the short post-97 period where films started coming with actors speaking 10000 different languages. They are still mainland-HK co-productions, but they certainly look more like HK cinema than say, Ming Ming.
What i would really like to see is HK dealing with co-productions nations other than China so they don’t have to worry about censorship standards, but I’m sure that’s just wishful thinking on my part.