First, more news from the wrapping Hong Kong Filmart:

- The American economy is on its way down, but the Asian film industry says it ain’t got nothing to do with them.

- After 11 years, Filmart is now a viable launching pad for Chinese blockbusters, though the Chinese censoring body has spoiled the party for everyone. Sylvia Chang revealed herself to Oriental Daily that the film that was told to re-apply as an import rather than a co-production.

- Professor David Bordwell writes about the films he’s seen and the people he’s met at this year’s events.

- One of the events at Filmart is the Hong Kong Asia Film Financing Forum, and Pang Ho-Cheung has won top Hong Kong Project award again this year for his proposed project The Bus (However, his other two awarded projects appear yet to be made).

- Bey Logan says Japanese movies should open themselves up to the world so that they can survive when the bubble bursts. I have my own doubts about the need for that.

- Twitch’s Todd Brown roams and share the promos he’s seen at the film market.

- Variety’s Grady Hendrix also shares info about the promos he’s seen at the film market.

- In fact, I waited so long to post this entry that Hollywood Reporter has already posted their wrap-up of the market.

And now, some number crunching:

- Japanese box office numbers have come out, showing that Enchanted scored a fairly huge opening (more on that later). Also, the other three family films on the top 10 (not counting The Golden Compass) dropped fairly little between 24.7% to 32% or so.

Oscar winner No Country For Old Men made 43.46 million yen from 41 screens on its opening weekend, which is damn good. It’s so good that it’s actually 152% of the opening for An Inconvenient Truth (which I’m sure is an inconvenient truth for that film’s distributor. Yes, I know it’s a bad pun).

Actually, Enchanted’s reported opening also includes last weekend’s preview screenings, so the 583 million yen gross isn’t exactly a three-day gross. However, Eiga Consultant did compare it with Ratatouille, which had the same release pattern. Turns out Enchanted still comes out on top, opening at 107% of the Pixar film’s gross.

- It’s Japanese music charts time! The Oricon and the Billboard Hot 100 charts are fairly similar, except Tetsuro Yamashita’s single got a bit of a bump on the Billboard because of its high position on the Radio Airplay chart. On the singles chart, Johnny’s Kanjani takes the top spot, as Namie Amuro’s latest stays fairly behind at 2nd, though it sold quite well. On the album chart, Kou Shibasaki’s compilation wins the day, while Ken Hirai scores a second place debut with his latest.

More over at Tokyograph.

- Doraemon has been picked as Japan’s animation ambassador, which I think it’s pretty damn cool as a lifelong Doraemon fan.

- Music show is a major part of many major Japanese TV networks: Fuji TV has Hey Hey Hey, and TBS has Music Station. However, NTV has apparently been without one with its primetime lineup for 18 years, though now that’s about to change. It even answers a question that I forgot to ask for years: What happened to Noriko Sakai?

By the way, keep checking the spin-off for those HKIFF reports.

- The 17th Japan Movie Critic Awards were announced, and the comic adaptation Yunagi No Machi Sakura No Kuni won Best Picture, though Kichitaro Negishi picked up best director for Sidecar Ni Inu. Why can’t Art Port co-produce something that classy with Hong Kong (instead of Dog Bite Dog and Shamo).

Full list over at Tokyograph

- The multi-nation production (Japanese and American financed with a Hong Kong director) remake of Japanese horror film Don’t Look Up has found its cast. Just reading who’s involved in it made me slightly dizzy.

- This weekend on Daily Yomiuri’s Teleview column, Wm. Penn looks at the upcoming quiz shows on Spring Japanese TV. Now the blogger will lament that Trivia No Izumi (Fountain of Trivia) is no longer on.

- The latest version of the Gegege No Kitaro anime has set the record for the highest-rated episode of the Thursday night 12:45-1:15 am animation block on Fuji TV.

- The potential disaster also known as the new Street Fighter movie (now named The Legend of Chun Li?!) has just dragged another actor into its mess. This time it’s Hong Kong Film Award-nominated actress Josie Ho.

- It’s reviews time! This weekend, Japan Times’ Mark Schilling looks at the sci-fi/horror/just plain weird double feature Ghost vs. Aliens by Takashi Shimizu and Keisuke Toyoshima. Menawhile, Twitch’s Mike McStay looks at the hit Korean thriller The Chaser. I’m glad to hear that Golden Scene in Hong Kong has picked up the rights for this.

- With the Korean wave slowly dying, new Korean president Lee Myung-bak still hopes Korean cultural exports will increase by over 400% in the next 3 years?

- Under “not very significant, but major awards” news today, Japanese group Bump of Chicken picked up three awards at the Space Shower Awards. In return, they have to explain clearly what the hell Bump of Chicken means.

- Wanna have Yuen Wo Ping teach you how to kick ass? Find out how.

- Under “not significant nor major awards” news today, Yui Aragaki, who starred in the Japanese breakout hit Koizora, was named the Best Girl of 2007 by Tokyo Girl Collection.

-  I left the best for last: a trailer for the new drama Cell Phone Detectives, directed by Takashi Miike. I sure as hell hope Miike got paid a ton of money to do this, or I’d think he’s kinda a crappy director.

- There’s a very interesting feature on Japan Times this weekend, which transcribes a panel discussing the Japanese war trial film Ashita He No Yuigon (Best Wishes For Tomorrow)  featuring Japan Times critic Mark Schilling and the film’s co-writer.  With two other contributors, the four discuss the impact of another war film on the Japanese, the message, and about its intents were successful.

- Yesterday we mentioned Mika Nakashima making the cover of Rolling Stone Japan, and now Oscar-nominated actress Rinko Kikuchi is on the cover of the British i-D Magazine.  She is not the first Japanese actress to appear on the cover, though: Chiaki Kuriyama made the cover back in 2004 thanks to her role in Kill Bill.

- It’s reviews time! Twitch offers a review of Kelvin Tong’s Rule #1, starring Shawn Yue and Ekin Cheng in their first official screen collaboration (they had an unofficial partnership in Shamo. You’ll know what I mean).  Then Variety’s Ronnie Schieb offers a review of Makoto Shinkai’s Five Centimeter Per Second, which I almost immediately dismissed because he dismissed the song in the film before he even bothered to understand it. Japan Times’ Mark Schilling offers a review for Gachi Boy (Wrestling with a Memory), the latest from the director of Song of the Sun. There’s also an interview featuring the director, who apparently made his actors perform their own wrestling stunts.

- Wrestling With a Memory will have its Asian premiere at the Hong Kong International Festival, and I already have a ticket to one of its showings. Not sure to what it can be credited to, but the festival is seeing an incredible 40% surge in online ticket sales from last year. Then again, after hearing horror stories of the festival’s ticketing system last year, no wonder more people decided to buy it the year the system happens to work.

- Eiga Consultant also looked at the box office performance of Wrestling with a Memory’s opening weekend. From 284 screens, the wrestling comedy/drama made 67.87 million yen, which is only 55% of another Toho + Fuji teen comedy Check It Out Yo!

Meanwhile, The Golden Compass made 550 million yen from 667 screens, which is 70% of The Chronicles of Narnia. Considering that Narnia made 6.85 billion yen, will The Golden Compass make it to 5 billion yen? Also, the ratio of the box office take for the subtitled version to the dubbed version is 53:47, which supposedly means that the film is attracting people of all demographics (in film market jargon, we say “demographics,” not “age”). Also, in case you’re wondering why the Box Office Mojo reported gross is so high, that’s because they included last weekend’s preview screenings.

- I think this would qualify as self-promotion: The Foreign Film Importer-Distributor Association of Japan will be giving its top award to Gaga Communications, who imported hits such as Babel, Earth, and the current box office topper The Golden Compass.

- Under “yet another comic going to TV” news today, the comedy comic Tokyo Ghost Trip is getting the live-action treatment.

- It’s trailers time! First, there’s the Japanese teaser for John Woo’s Battle of Red Cliff, and it still just looks really expensive, but not much else. Next is the trailer for the Mainland Chinese film Pk.com.cn, which may be the weirdest trailer I’ve seen all year. Considering that it’s from the conservative Mainland (more later), that’s kind of a good thing.

- With the National People’s Congress happening in Beijing right now (an ironic title, by the way), the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television of China are restating their rules on what movies are OK and what movies are not. In simple words: Most movies are not OK, but simple peasant stories with subtle allegories of government dictatorship will probably be. Zhang Yimou, you’re not out of work yet!

- Speaking of a filmmaker not out of work in China, Twitch has an interview with Stephen Chow and the star of his latest film CJ7.

-  Hayao Miyazaki spoke about his latest film Ponyo on a Cliff this week, and reading him describing the film just makes me look incredibly forward to it already. It seems like it’ll be a return to simpler fantasy tales like Totoro.

-  Kaiju Shakedown looks at another one of Takashi Miike’s latest films, which producer Haruki Kadokawa says is based on a novel that he read while he was in prison. Prison may be a good place to find films to adapt, but I still wouldn’t want to go there.

- Jason Gray looks at the lineup for the upcoming Nippon Connection Festival in Frankfurt, Germany. Man, that’s one hell of a lineup.

- Japanese artist/attitude girl/real-life Nana Mika Nakashima will be the first Japanese artist to appear on the cover of Rolling Stones Japan. The question is, why did it take a year for Rolling Stones Japan to put a Japanese musician on its cover?

-  Twitch brings us the first teaser for Hirokazu Kore-eda’s latest Aruitemo Aruitemo, which looks like a return to modern drama after his previous outing Hana.

- The global domination of Walt Disney continues: Disney Japan will be using Japanese animation houses to produce animation targeted at a Japanese and Greater Asia audience. Theese will start broadcasting in Japan in April.

-  While the information aren’t exactly all straight, and it lacks true balance, The Hollywood Reporter Asia has a feature on China-Hong Kong co-productions that’s fairly worth reading.

- This week on the Daily Yomiuri Teleview column, columnist Wm Penn looks at more dramas coming on Japanese TV come the Spring season, including the one where Kimura Takuya becomes the Prime Minister of Japan. In case you don’t know what that equates to, imagine an entire drama where Andy Lau plays the Chief Executive of Hong Kong.

- Despite saying the wrong thing on radio and people saying she apologized the wrong way, Koda Kumi will most likely open her nationwide tour on schedule.

Again a short entry, but that’s it for today. We’ll wrap the weekend up tomorrow

- It’s Japanese drama ratings time! Saito-san sees its season-low ratings, as well as One Point Gospel. The Negotiator wraps up with an OK-13.2 rating (not too far below its premiere’s 16.7 rating). Meanwhile, Honey and Clover’s freefall continues to 8.0 this past week, while Bara No Nai Hanaya managed to recover slightly with a 16.5 rating. Lost Time Life stays steady, Edison No Haha saw a pretty good boost, and Sasaki Fusai No Jingi Naki Tatakai’s ratings increase didn’t last longer than a week.

- This news was first found at Eiga Consultant. The 2005 German documentary Our Daily Bread broke attendance record during its 4-month run at one Tokyo theater. Both reports contribute the film’s success to concerns about food safety for Chinese-made food, but there’s also Japan’s tendencies to put wrong expiry dates and screws in food that added to the concern.

- Meanwhile, the controversial Bollywood epic Jodhaa Akbar has now surpassed the 1 billion rupee mark at the box office. Meanwhile, courts overturned the Madhya Pradesh government’s ban, while violent protests interrupt screenings and screenings are still blocked in some regions.

In case you want to know what the hoopla is all about, Hollywood Reporter has a review.

- Under “Edison Chen’s career freefall” news today, his latest Hong Kong film Sniper has now been pushed back to May from a planned March 29th release date. However, distributor Media Asia states that it’s because the Mainland Chinese authorities has yet to approved the film, which is necessary for all co-productions (this also means the cops win by default at the end of the film).

On a side note, distributors in Taiwan for Pang Ho-Cheung’s Trivial Matters has decided to add in the advertising that this film is Edison Chen’s final film before he announced his retirement from showbiz. This is inaccurate, since he still has Sniper and possibly Stephen Fung’s Jump.

-Poor China: The EU and the United States are always bullying the poor authoritarian country. First it was over intellectual property, and now the two political giants are going to the WTO over China’s block of foreign media agencies. China granted the Xinhua News Agency with sole discretion on giving out media license to foreign organizations, which apparently blocks out other news agencies such as Reuters and Bloomberg.

- Chinese TV and film writers, inspired by their American counterparts, met up to talk about how to protect the copyrights of their intellectual property. The thing is, unlike Hollywood writers, they’re not even looking for more money: They just want their rights protected and their work respected.

- I missed out on this a few days ago when it was on Nippon Cinema: There’s a teaser out for the sequel to the kiddie-oriented live-action adaptation of Gegege No Kitaro. It seems like they’re aiming for a more serious film this time around, but trailers have been deceptive before, so I’m being extremely cautious about this one.

-  Not only will the upcoming Japanese epic sci-fi trilogy 20th Century Boys be Japan’s highest-budgeted film ever at 6 billion yen, it’s now been announced that the film will feature a cast of 300 people. In other words, expect to see a lot of “policeman #_” when the credits come up.

- I never knew that Takashi Kitano has his own awards show, AND he gives awards to his own movies there!

- With actions being taken to help the industry and a reversal of the ban on Indian films, will Pakistani cinema slowly flourish?

-  Twitch has a link to an interview with former Ghibli studio head Suzuki Toshio, who talks a bit about Hayao Miyazaki’s upcoming Ponyo on a Cliff.

-  Believe it or not, Maggie Cheung has not appeared in a film since 2004, and she says she’s actually quite OK with that.

- Courtesy of the informative EastSouthWestNorth is an entry from Danwei about the current state of Chinese cinema. Yes, it’s making money, but where is it headed?

- Jason Gray has a advance review of Gururi No Koto, Ryosuke Hashiguchi’s first film in six years. The teaser on the website (click on the link next to “information”) doesn’t say much, but that, along with the review, has gotten me fairly excited about the film now.

By the way, the film stars Lili Franky. Yes, the Lili Franky who wrote Tokyo Tower - Me, Mom and Sometimes Dad.

- Actress Takako Matsu, usually seen in TV dramas and films, just picked up the Best Actress Award at the Yomiuri Theater Awards for her performances in two stage productions.

- Even though I’m a bigger fan of another author named Murakami, it’s worth reporting that Ryu Murakami’s novel Coin Locker Babies’ film adaptation, which has been on-and-off for years, may still be happening……eventually?

- Watch out, Oricon, the Billboard charts is heading to Japan. It will be compiling data from radio airplay from 33 radio stations and sales figures from 3,000 retailers to make a top 100 chart that will likely differ from the weekly Oricon singles sales chart.

- It may seem strange to those who don’t really know the Japanese film industry, since you may expect a film studio to so something like this instead: major television network NTV has announced its slate of film for the 2008 fiscal year, which will range from the latest film from Hayao Miyazaki to a crime film starring Takeshi Kaneshiro as a killer in 1949 Japan. Most mainstream films in Japan are actually at least partially financed by major television networks. NTV, for one, have made a ton of money from the Death Note films (including the currently-in-release spinoff L: Change the World).

- Japanese actress Youki Kudoh, who was last seen in L: Change the World, will be in her second Jim Jarmusch film, about a “mysterious loner working outside the law.” Whatever that means.

- Lastly, Variety’s Derek Elley gives a brief review to the hit Korean handball movie Forever the Moment.

Time to wrap the weekend up:

- Newly elected South Korean president Lee Myung-Bak is planning to not only deregulate the Korean broadcasting industry, but also disband the Ministry of Information and Communication. All of this in an effort to bring Korean telecommunication and broadcasting technology back up to standards.

- Meanwhile, Japan public broadcasting network NHK is seeing its revenue from “mandatory” license fees go up after the network saw one million households refusing to pay their fees after several scandals at the network. However, the management committee still refuses to reduce the license fee, despite several discount schemes being enacted later in the year.

- Three more Asian films are going to the Berlin International Film Festival, though only to the Panorama section. They include Kim Ki-Duk’s latest and the homosexual coming-of-age film Hatsu-Koi (which was a pain in the ass to find any information on it).

- This week’s Televiews column on the Daily Yomiuri covers the manga adaptation genre so prevalent in Japanese dramas, and manages to find a good one in the new drama Saito-san.

- Currently 16% of the Chinese population has internet access (the current average is 19%). However, 16% of over a billion people is 210 million, which is only 5 million behind the United States. However, such massive growth also means massive problems such as the censorship of cyberspace and widespread copyright violation.

- Of course, China has other problems, including interviewees who can’t seem to answer questions on their own.

- The classic Japanese animated series Gegege No Kitaro turns 40 this weekend, and one Japanese network is celebrating with a new installment of the series on Thursday nights at 12:45 am, which changes the characters a bit from the Kitaro you know and love. I still didn’t like the movie, though.

- Congratulations to singer Mieko Kawakami for winning Akutagawa Prize, one of the most important literary awards in Japan.

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 Since we did do that minute-by-minute coverage of The Golden Horse Awards, I guess we should probably link you to the complete list of winners.

- Ahead of the award ceremony, Ang Lee also admitted that he made one important edit in the Mainland Chinese version of Lust, Caution at the request of the Chinese censors to make the heroine seem less sympathetic to Chinese traitors.

- Let’s look at the Japanese TV drama ratings. As previewed last week, Galileo dipped below 20% rating for the first time all season, though only to a 19.9 rating. It’s no disaster yet, but it’s still the lowest rating of the season, though its average rating is still at 22%. Other dramas that saw their season-lows this past week: Abarebo Mama (at 11.0), Suwan No Baka (at 6.8), Hataraki Man (which dropped ALL THE WAY to 7.9 from 13.2 the previous week), Kimpachi Sensei (at 7.1), Joshi Deka (at 7.1), Mop Girl (at 9.2), and as always - Hatachi No Koibito (at 6.4).

On a positive note, Iryu 2 is on an upswing, with its ratings going up for a second week in a row. Utahime is also climbing a slow road up, and SP is still as solid as ever with a 14.6 rating.

- As I report once in a while in my box office reports, Hong Kong theatres inflate ticket prices for films that run longer than 135-140 minutes (because it means less shows). It seems like they will be doing the same for the holiday season for films that don’t even run at that length. According to Hong Kong Film Blog, one theater is setting a policy where all ticket prices will go up by 5 dollars from the 18th to January 1st. While this theater is enacting the policy because of theater policy, another theater chain is only increasing ticket prices for the two biggest films of the season and blames the distributor for the increase. So who’s the villain? Theater chains or distributors?

- I saw Maiko Haaaan!!! at the Hong Kong Asian Film Festival and thought it was hilarious (A real review is still in the works).  However, not all of its humor will translate outside of the Japanese language (which is probably why there’s no Hong Kong distributor for it yet), Nevertheless, American distributor/champion of eccentric Japanese films Viz Pictures will be releasing the films in the United States in March.

- John Woo’s enormous and troubled epic The Battle of Red Cliff finally wrapped principal photography, though second unit photography is continuing until February. And by troubled, we mean there were rumors of deaths on the set, though producer Terence Cheng denies them.

- As the Korean Wave begins to recede, a new Japanese wave is slowly hitting the shore of Korea, as 21 films in the past 2 years were actually based on original Japanese content, much higher than the 5 produced between 2001-2005. Does it have anything to do with cramming too much into a marketplace that doesn’t have enough talents to begin with?

- Similar to the Animatrix project, Three Japanese animation house will produce several short animated films ahead of the release for that latest Batman movie, The Dark Knight.

- It’s reviews time! Japan Times’ Mark Schilling looks at Yoshimitsu Morita’s remake of Tsubaki Sanjuro, which he says passes the grade, though Kurosawa did it better. Twitch’s Todd Brown reviews Makoto Shinkai’s 5 Centimeters Per Second, which I loved even when I saw the trailer. I might review this when I have the time.

I don’t know if it counts as a review, but Daily Yomiuri has a report about the hit Japanese teen romance Koizora, though it seems like a hybrid of a plot description and a film review. The fact that my girlfriend hated the original “cell phone novel” doesn’t seem promising to me.

- The Korea Export Insurance Corp. will apparently now offer partial compensation through an export insurance policy for films targeted at an international market and/or has secured pre-sale deals that flops. I assume D-War doesn’t need that insurance.

- Japanese short film Frank Kafka’s A Country Doctor by Koji Yamamura picks up the Grand Prize at the animation festival I Castelli Animati in Italy.

- This weekend in Japan is the first film festival to feature films made entirely on cell phones. I expect the whole festival either to be on very small screens or on big screens filled with pixelated images.

- Somewhat related is the Daily Yomiuri’s Wm Penn pointing out the importance of cell phones in Japanese dramas this past year, including rescue tool, romantic triangle symbol, and character coding device.

- According to the official website,  Stephen Chow’s latest CJ7 is opening in North America 2 weeks earlier than Hong Kong. I know they want to open it in time for Lunar New Year in Hong Kong, but what’s up with that?

- If you’re in Los Angeles, be sure to check out the Toho Festival, featuring old Japanese monster flicks 4 weeks in a row!

- Japan Times’ David McNeill has a 2-part feature on the slew of films looking at the Nanjing Massacre this year from Chinese, Japanese, and Western perspective. Too bad the only Japanese perspective one seems like it might be a right-wing nut job (Seeing how “Japanese people don’t mistreat corpses like that, it is not in our culture” isn’t exactly the best evidence against the massacre). Then again, it’s not like the Chinese ones are going to be completely fair either.

Stay reading for the blog’s live coverage of the Golden Horse Awards.

Before we go on to our usual Wednesday posts (Oricon charts), let’s look at how Johnnie To/Wai Ka-Fai’s Mad Detective is doing mid-week.

- On Tuesday discount day in Hong Kong, Mad Detective kept going strong with nearly HK$620,000 from 35 screens for a 6-day total of HK$5.01 million. With this pace and almost no competition this coming weekend, this could become the most successful Milkyway film since summer’s Hooked on You, and may even be Milkyway’s first film to hit the HK$10 million mark since the Election flicks. Everything else did not so well. Maybe more this weekend if now.com uploads the Thursday numbers.

-The Oricon charts were pretty quiet this week, with Tokio’s new single winning the top spot by selling just 46,000 copies. Erika Sawajiri, seemingly still trying to recover from her PR nightmare a few months ago, could only sell 26,000 copies of her latest single for a 7th place debut.

On the albums chart, Kazumasa Oda beats his own record by being the oldest artist to have a number 1 album with his latest, selling 176,000 copies in the first week.

More details at Tokyograph

- Yoshimitsu Morita’s remake of Akira Kurosawa’s Tsubaki Sanjuro might have debut at 4th place with just 160 million yen, but its opening was 54% of the opening for Yoji Yamada’s Love and Honor, which made a total of 4 billion yen. As for the audience breakdown, Eiga Consultant reports that the male-female ratio is 39:61 (!!!), those in their 40s made up 37.1 % of the audience, those in their 30s took up 22%, and those in their 20s took up just 17.2 %. Not sure how old those other 23.7% of the audience was, though.

When polled why they decided to watch it, 28.2% of the audience said it was because they were fans of star Yuji Oda, and 25.8% thought the content looked interesting. Period dramas such as Tsubaki Sanjuro tend to have stronger legs in the long run, so it looks like it will make it to 1 billion after all. It all depends on word-of-mouth, as is the case for most films in Japan that couldn’t open big.

- All Soi Cheang fans out there take note: his latest film Shamo, which has been stuck in limbo since it played at the Cannes market, is not likely to be released until March 2008, despite scoring 3 nominations at the Golden Horse Awards.

- Under “waste of time in a society based on timeliness” news today, you can watch Japanese comedy clips while waiting for your drink to come out of the vending machine. Does that mean now it’ll take 30-60 seconds for a drink to come out of the damn vending machine?

- It’s reviews time! From Variety’s Russell Edwards (this guy seems to make a daily appearance in this blog) is a review for Matsuo Suzuki’s Welcome to the Quiet Room. From Twitch/Lovehkfilm guest reviewer JMaruyama is a review of the hit Japanese drama Hero.

- I wonder if any fans of Korean movies ever sat there and thought that Korea needed disaster movies, because those people just had their wishes come true.

- Courtesy of Jason Gray, the website for Hayao Miyazaki’s latest film Ponyo on a Cliff is now open. However, there’s not much on it.

- Twitch has a trailer for the Korean serial killer flick Rainbow Eyes. And that’s all I have to say about that.

- NHK last scored a huge hit with Korean drama star Bae Yong-Joon when they aired Winter Sonata. Nearly 4 years later, they’re hoping for another hit with his latest period drama The Four Guardian Gods, which will also play in Japanese cinemas on a weekly basis in addition to the TV airings.

- Last week, we reported several Taiwanese films flopping on home turf and elsewhere. Kaiju Shakedown now introduces a few non-teen-targeted Taiwanese films this year, not including the two we mentioned last week.

- The Japan Media Arts Festival revealed their winners, with the sleeper animated hit Summer Days With Coo winning the grand prize in the Animation Division. The more surprising winner is Wii Sports picking up the Grand Prize in the Entertainment division.

- Under “Just for kicks” news today, here’s a clip of the least talented person to go on Bistro Smap ever. By the way, they call that bubble bursting thing “Paris Reaction,” which I can you can say the same for quite a few guys. Not me, though.