I know it’s late by two days, but here it is anyway. It’s a little funky, and it was a drama theme. From Crazy Ken Band’s latest album Soul Dempa, it’s “Tenyawaya Desu Yo” (It’s So Topsy-Turvy).

- Grady Hendrix has picked up on the Jackie Chan blog posts controversy. It kind of started when he wrote in his own blog telling audiences to not have much expectation for his latest Hollywood film The Forbidden Kingdom. Then the press picked up an “old post” where he even admit that he doesn’t care much for the Rush Hour films (I don’t blame him for that at all). However, Jackie also admitted that he only did them for money, which begs the question: Why is he just settling for lots of money instead of trying to make better movies?

A blog post I found at EastSouthWestNorth pretty much takes the argument back to Chan as well: Why blame Hollywood when he’s the one that took all those jobs? And why blame audiences when no one really liked The Tuxedo?

Speaking of Jackie Chan still being in shitty movies, he has reportedly signed up to play Mr. Miyagi in the Will Smith-directed remake of The Karate Kid. Who will play the titular Karate kid? Smith’s own son. Say it ain’t so, Jackie! (thanks to Steven for the link)

- In Japan, the daily NHK drama Dondo Bare ended with a solid rating of 23.2% rating for its finale (that’s actually the highest-rated finale of the season) after scoring the lowest-rated premiere in the history of NHK’s morning dramas.

Following it is Chiritotechin, which did not premiere to the worst ratings in NHK morning drama history. Instead, it scored an average of 16.5% rating, which is only the third worst morning drama rating in history.

- Under “the death of Hong Kong cinemas” news today, The Queens Theater had its last show this past Sunday, which means Hong Kong has lost yet another single-screen theater from the old golden days.

Of course, when a theater goes away, there’s always a multiplex to replace it. Get ready for The Grand Theater and its 12 screens with 1600 seats (that’s a sad 133 seats per theater on average).

- I’m actually a big fan of the film Rendan, actor Naoto Takenaka’s directorial effort from a few years ago, which is why I’m somewhat excited that he’s making a new film, this time a zombie comedy. However, I’m not as excited as I should be because it’s a zombie comedy.

- Variety Asia has a small story on emerging Hong Kong studio Sundream, which would be a lot more likable if it wasn’t for that damn logo (not to mention that blue background).

You can say I took a break because it was a public holiday yesterday. You can say I was lazy. Or you can even say I was waiting to the Hong Kong weekend box office numbers to come out. Either way, we’re back for now.

- The Hong Kong Sunday box office was very strong because of the holiday weekend. Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution is dying down slightly after the hype has passed, but it still made an impressive HK$2.47 million from 64 screens. After 5 days, the sometime-erotic espionage thriller has made HK$11.29 million, and will probably not make the HK$15-18 million target distributor Edko had hoped for by the end of the weekend. Please note that the film did have ticket price inflation of HK$10, so the gross is about 10-20% higher than your usual film that runs shorter than 135 minutes.

In other Hong Kong movies, Oxide Pang’s entertaining mystery thriller The Detective made just HK$570,000 from 28 screens, and will wrap the weekend with around HK$3 million (it’ll be lucky if it gets to HK$6 million when it’s all over). Beauty and the 7 Beasts gets bumped down all the way to 5th place with just HK$290,000 from 25 screens on Sunday. After 5 days, the tedious dumbfest has made only HK$1.49 million.

Foreign releases saw a pretty big bump over the weekend, as Matthew “I quit X3 to work with Robert DeNiro and Michelle Pfeiffer” Vaughn’s Stardust made HK$520,000 from 21 screens for a HK$2.09 million 4-day total, and The Nanny Diaries starring Scarlett Johannson also made a not-too-bad HK$420,000 from 21 screens for a 4-day total of HK$1.67 million.

- Meanwhile, Lust, Caution also had a very good debut in limited release in the United States. In just one theater in New York City, the film made US$63,918, which makes it the best per-screen average for a foreign film ever. No idea how it’ll do when it goes wider, though.

- In South Korean box office, Love tops the box office for the second weekend in a row after an extended holiday. Otherwise, nothing seemed to have opened wide, and everything on the top 10 are holdovers.

- In Japan, since not all the numbers are out yet, I’ll let the admissions ranking tell the story so far - the Halle Berry-Bruce Willis-starrer Perfect Stranger is the highest debut at 2nd place, Isao Yukisada’s latest (that was fast) Closed Note, starring the not-very-friendly Erika Sawajiri, opens at 3rd place. The French biopic La Vie En Rose opens at 7th (on an unknown number of screens). Oh, and Hero’s at number one again. Who’s surprised at that, really?