November 30th, 2007
The Golden Rock - November 30th, 2007 Edition
- Because it’s only one place’s box office, we’ll put the box office entry in here too. Thursday opening day numbers are out for Hong Kong, and Johnnie To/Wai Ka Fai’s latest Mad Detective came storming out of the gate. Despite the category III restrictive rating (only for one scene that’s pretty borderline II-B anyway), the mystery drama made nearly HK$650,000 from 35 screens. With its targeted adult audience, it should make about HK$3 million by the end of the weekend, which means it’ll end up doing much better than recent Milkyway movies such as Exiled and Eye In the Sky. It’ll probably even do better than Triangle.
In Love With the Dead, the latest from Danny Pang (of the Pang Brothers) made only HK$330,000 from 32 screens after making HK$450,000 in sneaks last weekend. Perhaps the young will come out and see Stephy tear out her hair this weekend and bump up the figures. Hollywood horror film 30 Days of Night opened on 24 screen for a take of HK$200,000. Andrew Lau’s Hollywood debut The Flock did much worse, making only HK$62,000 from 18 screens, and the Korean-Japanese co-production romance Virgin Snow made only HK$55,000 from 12 screens.
- Despite protests from major Thai filmmakers, The Thai Parliament has passed the Thai film law, which gives way too much power for the government to ban films. At least they can always make movies in China. Oh, wait…….
-It’s trailers time! Twitch again provides all three trailers today: one for the Korean body-switching thriller The Devil’s Game, one for the fairy tale-gone-nightmarish Korean horror film Hansel and Gretel, and one for Tak Sakaguchi’s directorial debut Be a Man! Samurai School.
- It’s Awards time too! Tang Wei will pick up the Asian Female Star of the year award at the Cineasia convention in macau.
Meanwhile, the Japan newspaper Sports Hochi also gave out their yearly film awards, with Masayuki Suo’s I just Didn’t Do It picking up best film and best actor. Meanwhile, Shiro Ito picked up a surprisingly best supporting actor award for Shaberedomo Shaberedomo and Maiko Haaaan!!!!, and I mean surprising as in his performances in those weren’t particularly award-worthy. Another small surprise is Nobuhiro Yamashita picking up best director for his two films this year: The Matsugane Potshot Affair and Tennen Kokekko.
Lastly, the Japan Record Award winners were announced. The sad part I only know three of those songs, and only two of those are worthy winners in my mind.
- Johnnie To’s Linger stars Mandarin-speaking actors Vic Zhou and Li Bing-Bing, which means that the movie will obviously be in Mandarin. However, according to Grady Hendrix, the movie will be shown in Hong Kong in Mandarin instead of Cantonese, despite the fact that it’s already been dubbed in Cantonese. By the way, Grady, Heidi is the operator in the studio.