April 11th, 2008
The Golden Rock - April 11th, 2008 Edition
Yay, the Golden Rock is back at least for the weekend. Can’t guarantee that daily updates will continue, as this blogger is still fairly busy these days. But take what you can get, folks.
- On Hong Kong Thursday opening day, Daniel Lee’s overhyper and overdubbed Andy Lau period extravaganza Three Kingdoms will likely take the weekend again after taking in about HK$460,000 from 39 screens on its 8th day. Now it has already taken in HK$11.28 million, with HK$15 million possibly within reach. The weekend’s widest opener, Sylvia Chang’s Run Papa Run, made an OK HK$380,000 from 29 screens, and will probably have about HK$2 million when the weekend’s over. The weekend’s widest foreign language opener, John Rambo, made HK$317,000 on its opening day, possibly hurt by its category-III rating here. Lastly, the British comedy Run Fat Boy Run with Simon Pegg made about HK$35,000 from 9 screens on its opening day. I’ll be paying my 55 bucks to see this as soon as I can. Ouch.
- Hayao Miyazaki’s long-awaited latest work, Ponyo on a Cliff, now has a release date for Japan: July 19th. Damn, I was hoping it would be about 2 weeks earlier than that.
- Drama News Net updates the latest Japanese drama ratings everyday. In a preview of next Monday’s report, the much-hyped Last Friends, starring Juri “Nodame” Ueno and Masami “The Sick Girl in Crying Out For Love In the Center of the World” Nagasawa flopped with just a 13.9% rating for its premiere episode.
- As Jason Gray’s blog, I’m a little “Yasukuni‘d out” as well from reading all this news about the controversial documentary. However, this news is a little frustrating: a sword maker who is a major part of the documentary has asked director Li Ying to remove all of his footage from the film after a right-wing Japanese Diet member reportedly spoke to him about his appearance in the film. Now I’m really beginning to regret not catching this at the Hong Kong International Film Festival, it was one of the only chances to see it uncut.
- The China Fim Archive will begin restoring historic films that survived up to the last 102 years. I hope they don’t have to be communist-friendly to qualify restoration.
- The 2007 Spring drama Watashi Tachi no Kyokasho just picked up the best screenwriter award for its writer Yuji Sakamoto. Did that pique up my interest a little bit? Yes. Is that going to compel me to buy a copy right away? Not exactly.