- Taiwanese music charts time! This week, 7 new albums entered the top 20, pushing out quite a few albums. Amazingly, Aska Yang’s new album debuts on top with nearly 23% of total sales, followed by Wang Yue Xin taking up 6.79% of sales, and Rene Liu’s latest follows him closely at third place with 5.22%. Meanwhile, last week’s leaders Fahrenheit and Ayumi Hamasaki see huge drops to 11th place (with 1.21% of sales) and 8th place (with 1.37% of sales), respectively.

- How many movies can Kenichi Matsuyama fit in in a year? He has a supporting role in Tsubaki Sanjuro, he has the titular role in the upcoming Death Note spinoff movie L - Change the World, and Japan Times’ Mark Schilling reviews yet another film he’s in this week - Don’t Laugh at My Romance (or Hito No Sex o Warau Na), where he plays a college student in love with a woman double his age.

- Kaiju Shakedown has a link to the Zhang Yuan arrest video. To those who haven’t kept up: Chinese 6th generation director Zhang Yuan was not only arrested in his home for using drugs, his arrest was also captured on camera by a CCTV crew, and used as a story to warn people that China is taking a zero tolerance policy towards drugs ahead of the Olympics. Of course, only with a camera crew would cops start moralizing to people they arrest about using drugs.

- Courtesy of the great EastSouthWestNorth is a blog post that translates and adds to another post about the way Americans and Chinese look at Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution.

- The fall 2007 Edition Nikkan Sports Drama Grand Prix has announced its results, with Yukan Club winning 4 out of 5 awards, despite a less-than-stellar 12.6 average rating. The seasonal awards will culminate into the yearly awards, which will be in a few months. Yes, it’s award-winning, but is a drama about rich spoiled 20-somethings really worth watching?

- The blackout of foreign films in China is just about ready to end (If you don’t count the limited release of The Pursuit of Happyness), with the British film Atonement to open on February 22nd. However, the film has reportedly been edited to make it suitable for all audiences in China. What did they take out, the war?

- Twitch has a review of Feng Xiaogang’s hit film The Assembly.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 19th, 2008 at 10:48 pm and is filed under China, TV, taiwan, awards, blogs, music, review, Japan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.