- Now.com.hk is a little late in their report of the Sunday numbers in Hong Kong, but Thursday numbers show that the Hollywood comedy The Heartbreak Kid and the Hollywood action flick The Kingdom will be duking it out for the top spot this weekend. Unless the Japanese tearjerker Tokyo Tower (which I saw today and liked) pulls off another rebound for the weekend, Beowulf will probably hold at third place, despite suffering a fairly big drop. One thing that’s for sure is that Aubrey Lam’s Anna & Anna is a bona-fide flop with only HK$12,000 from 5 screens on opening day.

- In Japanese attendance figures, Always 2 finally takes the top spot 4 weeks after its opening, exchanging spots with teen romance Koizora. Meanwhile, Resident Evil 3 stays at 3rd place. The big news is Midnight Eagle’s opening at only 5th place. Originally expected to be THE next Japanese blockbuster with day-and-date release in America, a 5th place place opening is damn near embarrassing for Shochiku and Universal. More when the actual numbers are released.

- In South Korea box office, Seven Days actually saw an increase in audience to climb up to the number 1 spot, and Lust, Caution becomes a 1 million admissions-plus hit thanks to female audiences. All that and more from Korea Pop Wars.

My interest in this week’s song was re-ignited when I found out the theme song for the animated film Byosoku 5 Centimeters per Second (also known as A Chain of Short Stories About Their Distance) happens to be this song. Since it came out 10 years ago, there was no way that it was chosen as some type of promotional tie-in. Then I found the MTV specifically created for the film by director Makoto Shinkai, and I fell in love with this song all over again. It can be found on the compilation album Blue Period, and it’s even on a single re-released specifically for the film. However, I cannot seem to find the Ronald Cheng cover anywhere on Youtube. It’s Masayoshi Yamazaki’s “One More Time One More Chance”.

Here’s the video created specifically for Byosoku 5 Centimeters Per Second. It made me bought the DVD without having seen the film.

Here’s the original MTV