Happy White Day!

With no new news coming for the weekend, we’ll do mostly number crunching today.

- As expected in Hong Kong box office, Patrick Kong’s bitter “romantic” drama L For Love, L For Lies shot straight to the top of the box office on opening day. From 37 screens, it made HK$668,000 and will probably see close to HK$1 million per day over the weekend as the kids get out of school for the weekend. The weekend’s other wide opener, the Hollywood remake of the Japanese horror film One Missed Call, opened with only HK$111,000 from 17 screens.  As for limited openers, Woody Allen’s Cassandra’s Dream opened on 9 screens with just HK$52,000. Expect this to get a small boost from the adult audience over the weekend.

- It’s Japanese music charts time! On the Oricon singles chart, Smap scores another number 1 single, making this their 42nd consecutive single to debut at the top ten, tying the record with Southern All Stars. Meanwhile, Asian Kung-Fu Generation’s latest album debut at the top on the album chart, while Every Little Thing and Hitoto Yo are down at second and third place. More details at Tokyograph.

As for the Billboard Japan Hot 100 charts, the rankings are a little different, as airplay managed to lift Ayaka’s single all the way to 2nd place. Radio play also helped the foreign single by Adele get on the top 100, as well as some songs that were not released as singles, such as Keisuke Kuwata’s latest.

- On the Taiwanese G-music chart, Aska Yang seems to never leave the top, especially when sales are this weak. He only had to take up 2.46% of total sales to get that spot, which also helped Joanna Wang’s album as well. However, Gary Chaw drops straight down 12th place, though another new edition of the CD will perk those sales right up. The weak sales also helped Yui Aragaki’s album, which actually took up a bigger share of the sales this week.

- Hong Kong director Pang Ho-Cheung, whom I consider one of my favorites, has directed a trailer for the latest installment of the Udine Far East Festival. Hollywood Reporter has the story, and Twitch has the link.

- It’s like repeating the same story again and again: Japanese total video sales was down by 3.7% in 2007. On the other hand, rental store sales have actually risen.

That’s it for today, y’all