- The Japanese attendance report have come in, and Earth, the feature film version of the BBC documentary Planet Earth, managed to top the box office. I don’t know if it was the stunning imagery or Ken Watanabe’s narration, but Eiga Consultant seemed to have predicted that it would win this weekend, leaving me as the only person that’s surprised that a documentary can top the box office. Meanwhile, the sports film Giniro No Season (or Season of Snow) opens at third place. More when the numbers come in.

- Korea Pop Wars have decided to go with original Korean won figures for its box office report, so now we can use multiple sources for the Korean box office report - one with the original won figure, and one with admissions statistics (which I still think is relevant). This week: only 3 movies in the top 10 are Korean, but two of them took not only the top 2 spots, but also have fairly impressive opening weekends.

Korea Pop War figures

Twitch attendance figures 

- Before Peter Chan Ho-Sun’s The Warlords opened, Chan declared that if Feng Xiaogang’s The Assembly would make 2 billion yuan in China, The Warlords would make 2.5 billion yuan. Guess what? The latest Chinese box office figures show that The Assembly has surpassed The Warlords in total box office figures with no signs of slowing down. Note that The Assembly also costs considerably less to make.

It was a public holiday in Japan on Monday, so that means no box office reports and no TV drama ratings either. I’ll wait until tomorrow.

- Hong Kong box office was generally weak this past weekend (at least on Sunday). The top 10 films’ box office gross ranged from HK$116,000 to only HK$256,000. On top finally is Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, which made only HK$256,000 from 25 screens for an 11-day total of HK$2.8 million. However, if not for the HK$10 increase per ticket (due to running time), it would’ve lost out to National Treasure: Book of Secrets, which made HK$247,000 from 32 screens for a 25-total of HK$17.08 million.

As for opening films, Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium actually came out on top with HK$231,000 from just 11 screens for a 4-day total of HK$720,000. Meanwhile, Thursday’s winner The Deaths of Ian Stone fell all the way to 8th place with HK$166,000 from 12 screens (this is actually slightly higher than its opening day gross) for a HK$690,000 4-day total. Johnnie To’s Linger remains dead on arrival with only HK$167,000 from 22 screens with just HK$620,000 after 4 days. It may not even reach the HK$2 million mark when it’s all over.

In holdovers. Wong Kar-Wai’s My Blueberry Nights did end up passing the HK$2 million mark, making HK$201,000 from 14 screens on Sunday. After its second weekend, the road drama has made HK$2.13 million.

HK$7.8=US$1

-  The Philippine non-profit organization The Cinemalaya Foundation has picked the ten projects for a grant from the organization to help complete in time to compete at its film festival in July. The films apparently have to articulate Philippine culture, made on digital technology, and filmmakers have to have done less than 3 films.

- In case you wanted it, an English-subtitled trailer is out for Stephen Chow’s latest CJ7. The bad news? It’s dubbed in Mandarin. This is starting to bring back memories of The Magic Gourd, which is probably a bad thing.

- At least Chow tells you that this movie is going to be pushing for tears, which wouldn’t be my own definitely of “heartwarming”. But hey, he’s the one making millions of dollars, and I’m the one paying US$8,000 a year for film school, so what do I know?

But I am a critic, and I’m looking forward to CJ7 less and less now.

-  With the Chinese total box office growing by 20% in 2007, I can bet more Hong Kong filmmakers will turn to pleasing Mainland Chinese audiences to make the big bucks. However, will this lead to more artistically successful filmmakers staying in Hong Kong? In other words, will Hong Kong cinema go in the way of Taiwanese cinema?

- There’s a trailer for the new Korean comedy Radio Days, and it looks like it might be good. I emphasize “might” because dramatic elements in Korean comedies are always a bit of a wild card.

- According to Kaiju Shakedown, My Name is Fame director Lawrence Lau is making a film based on the alleged assassination attempt on Taiwanese president Chen Sui-Bian starring Simon Yam and Gordon Lam. Which conspiracy theory will it follow?

- An interesting discovery today that borders on lame. A Hong Kong cram school commercial that parodies the CJ7 teaser with a guy walking around a dump looking for A’s. Isn’t it a little too early to be parodying it already?

- The Daily Yomiuri’s weekly Televiews column takes a look back at this year’s Kohaku and other lame Japanese New Year’s  Eve programming, many of which I missed because i was watching Kohaku like any Japanese person ought to.

- Singapore and Malaysia’s first gangster flick is coming out this Lunar New Year. Too bad it looks like successful commercial director Jack Neo’s seemingly lame telling of the My Wife is a Gangster formula. This may just be worse than Kung-Fu Dunk for Singapore’s Lunar New Year market. I shudder at that thought.

- Another Asian film is heading to Berlin. This time it’s Shin Onna Tachiguishi Retsuden, the omnibus film co-directed by Momoru Oshii along with five other directors. I didn’t even know it opened in Japan already.

- It’s hard to believe, but 50 Chinese websites have apparently “voluntarily” stopped providing illegal downloads of movies in a crackdown by authorities to stop piracy in China.

- Twitch’s Stefan has a review for Johnnie To’s Linger, which follows my general feelings towards the film. However, The Taipei Times seems to like it quite a bit. Does the Mandarin version make that much of a difference?

- The picture link below is of the latest Japanese pop duo to hit the pop world:

sisters.jpg (not work-safe)

- This week, a new music chart to cover: The Taiwan G-Music chart, which makes up the retail sales of three retail chains in Taiwan. It’s updated every Friday night, so I’ll be covering them in the weekend entries.

This week, three debuts lead the charts: The new album from Taiwanese boy band Fahrenheit gets 10% of total sales, Japanese diva Ayumi Hamasaki’s latest takes up 6.7%, and another boy band 5566’s latest album takes up 4.4% of total sales. Last week’s winner, TV-made boy band Lollipop (yes, I do have Channel V at home), drops down to 4th place this week with only 4% of total sales. Hong Kong-based Mandarin artist Khalil Fong’s first album in Taiwan actually went up one spot this week from a quiet 16th place debut last week, making up 0.92% of total sales (up from 0.84 % last week).

- The Hong Kong press is reporting today that Lust, Caution will not be going uncut in Japan. With strict laws about showing the pubic regions, Ang Lee’s erotic drama will go still out with an R-18 rating (no one under 18 admitted), despite suffering 6 cuts that include the now-infamous shot of Tony Leung and shots where pubic hair can be seen. While they don’t really kill the impact of the film (I suspect some shots will simply cut before it reaches the offending regions), it’s sad when any film cannot be shown in their entirety.

Source: Oriental Daily (no link), Apple Daily (who inexplicably link it with a story about the WGA awards. Maybe they ran out of space in the paper)

- Speaking of censorship, Lost in Beijing director Lu Yi talks about her film being banned after already suffering multiple cuts and a theatrical release.

- Japan Times’ Mark Schilling reviews Giniro No Season, the new film from the director of Umizaru: Limit of Love that probably won’t repeat the latter’s success.

-  In box office news, I want to correct my earlier report that Trivial Matters only made HK$2.37 million. A friend corrected me that it had made HK$3.33 million when it dropped out of the top 10. Also, some theaters previously showing the horror flop Yes, I Can See Dead People are now taking it off screens and replacing it back with more showings of Pang’s omnibus comedy. Hell, I didn’t even expect it to be playing after two weeks, which makes me happy that it’s enjoying good enough word-of-mouth to have such legs after the crowded Christmas market.

Because of the lack of news for the weekend, I’m padding this entry with a Hong Kong box office report as well.

- It was a fairly weak Thursday opening day at the Hong Kong box office, as all the top 10 films’ gross range from HK$63,000 to HK$124,000. It’s so weak that an European horror film, The Deaths of Ian Stone, managed to take the top spot screening on 12 screens. Meanwhile, Johnnie To’s somber romantic-supernatural-drama Linger (whose Mandarin version seems to be completely missing from Hong Kong theatres, despite it being the version Johnnie To prefers) opened on 22 screens and made only HK$112,706. I don’t see it getting past HK$2 million. Lastly, the Hollywood family film Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium has the second-best per-screen average, making HK$90,000 from 10 screens.

More about the weekend next Monday or Tuesday in the Box Office report.

HK$7.8=US$1

-  Speaking of Johnnie To, actor Simon Yam is reportedly ecstatic about Sparrow heading to Berlin and competing for best actor, as he should be. What you should note is what he says about the movie:

「當然開心，這部片跟阿杜以前的電影很不同，是部很有人情味的輕鬆喜劇，我亦從來沒有做過這種角色。」

“Of course I’m happy. This film is very different from To’s earlier movies, it’s a relaxing human comedy, and I’ve never done that kind of character.”

1) Linger was supposed to be very different from To’s earlier movies. It was bad.

2) What character hasn’t Simon Yam played?

Original Chinese report here.

- Someone first passed this story to me in a email, but Screen Daily has a subscription system, so I’m relying on Variety Asia. Hong Kong box office has risen overall, though it has again fallen for Chinese films. This reports also says that there are now 192 screens for 42 theaters in Hong Kong. So now you know what a big deal it was when Spiderman 3 took 100 screens.

- Zhang Yuan is one of the few Mainland Chinese directors whose work I watch out for. Though I’ve only seen one of his films (Seventeen Years), I’ve been intrigued at a lot of his other films. That’s why it was a bit of a shocker to not only read about his supposed drug arrest, but to read that it was broadcast on national television in China. However, I smell a staged arrest to serve as an example here…

- The new Japanese film Kids, which features a really strange mustache on the usually clean Hiroshi Tamaki (see the trailer), will have a day-and-date release in Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, presumably to capture the Lunar New Year box office. However, no promotion is yet underway here in Hong Kong.

- Jason Gray has a more complete list of the Kinema Junpo awards, including the individual acting and directing awards.

- The year’s first Oricon charts see the “Kohaku effect,” as songs there were feature in the annual musical showcase tend to enjoy a boost in sales afterwards. Only one of the top 3 singles is actually new, and the other two were favorites of this year’s show (I know, because my mother called all the way from America during my trip to ask me to pick up the Masato Sugimoto single). Even Kobukuro’s Tsubomi, which was released in March last year, saw it being boosted back up to the top 20.

The other big news of the charts is Ayumi Hamasaki’s latest album making only a second place debut behind Kobukuro’s album, though the 20,000-copy loss may be because the album was released on New Year’s day.

Report by Tokyograph

- Lust, Caution has been placed in Top Ten Hall of Shame by America’s Women Film Critics Circle. Specifically, it’s there because of its depiction of: “Adam and Eve in Old Shanghai. Female-assisted destruction of a nation while falling in love with torturer/rapist.” At least now Ang Lee can’t complain that it didn’t win anything in America.

See the rest of the winners/losers here.

Source: Apple Daily

- A random search on Youtube have led me to the final trailer for Stephen Chow’s CJ7. While the voiceover is in English, the dialogue are all Cantonese. For some reason, I’m not quite excited about this one. Maybe it’s the over-reliance on special effects, though Kung-Fu Hustle suffered from that as well.

While the January 31st release date is still set in several regions, its release date in North America has apparently been pushed back to March 7th, after it was supposed to be the first place to open it. Be happy, guys, it’s still only two months behind.

-  Continuing with reports about China’s crackdown on everything dirty (except the streets and the air), authorities reportedly confiscated 149 million magazines, discs, and other publications that were deemed pornographic.

- The Associated Press’ Min Lee gives a review for Wong Kar-Wai’s English-language debut My Blueberry Nights. I saw it today, it was OK. That’s about it.

- Manami Konishi, who I last saw in Udon, will make her singing debut with the ending theme for her latest film, Sweet Rain: Shinigami No Seido, co-starring Takeshi Kaneshiro as the God of Death (Seems like Warner Bros. Japan has found their niche!). You can hear the song in the trailer.

- Someone who attended one of the early screenings for Lawrence Lau’s new film Besieged City (his first since My Name Is Fame) submitted a review to Kaiju Shakedown. The review starts off promising (the writer gave it a standing ovation at the screening), but then ultimately decides that he/she doesn’t really like it. Ouch.

- Affected by continuing lowering record sales (yet another 17% decline this year), Hong Kong’s IFPI has decided to once again lower the standards for a gold and platinum album. What? You mean My Cup of T didn’t sell well enough to be a gold album?!

- This year’s Rotterdam Film Festival’s competition section has a fairly strong Asian presence this year, as six of the 14 competing films hail from Asia.

- With the general population continuing to grow older, Japanese television networks are slowly making their programming appeal more to an older audience while also cutting down on kids programming. Next year at Kohaku: More enka, less Johnny’s groups!

- Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul might have been bullied around by the Thai government last year for his film Syndromes and a Century, but no government censorship is going to keep a man down, as he has produced a short video on Youtube called Prosperity for 2008.

- Korean producers are trying to pressure the government to impose harsher penalties for piracy. Right now, the fines for intellectual property violations are apparently too low to have a lasting effect for violators, who provide illegal downloads on various internet sites.

- Oh, look, there’s a new post on the spin-off.

-  On my Japan trip report, I lamented missing the Nodame Cantabile special on TV, which was shown on the 4th and the 5th over two nights. The first night’s rating of 18.9% kept to the series’ average of 18.8%, and part 2 managed to hit 21%, which is lower than the finale, but would still qualify as the series’ second-highest episode.

- In related ratings news, the yearly Japanese New Year’s eve musical extravaganza Kohaku has seen its ratings slip year after year, and it continued to stay relatively low this year with an average rating of 36.15%, which is the second-lowest rated Kohaku on record. Just as the report writes, since NHK is a public broadcaster, ratings are simply a matter of pride, and as long as it continues to beat the competition (it seems to be the  highest-rated non-sports TV program of the year), it’ll stick around for a while.

Or they should just have Smap perform half the damn show.

- Last thing about Japanese TV ratings, I promise: Fuji Television reigns supreme again as the highest-rated network for the 4th year in a row, scoring the highest-rated program of the year with the figure skating championships. They also got the highest-rated drama of the year with the first episode of Galileo.

- Anyone who thinks China is slowly becoming progressive with their films because The Matrimony, The Warlords, or Assembly got made is bullshitting. No progressive country would ban local filmmakers for two years at a time.  And no progressive country would certainly play the morality police by starting a 3-month campaign to crack down on “vulgar” products.

- Then again, I would appreciate the Japanese government cracking down on crappy adaptations of classic Japanese cartoons.

-  Korea Pop Wars’ Mark Russell takes a look at the Korean horror film Hansel and Gratel, which promises a lot, but delivers seemingly very little.

The blogger is on vacation right now in Japan, but that doesn’t mean he’s not tracking things in the Asian entertainment world: this morning I just saw a report on tv about divorcing Japanese celebrity couples.

Meanwhile, the 4 big movies are battling it out at the box office in Hong Kong, with Pang Ho-Cheung’s Trivial Matters making chump change on the side.

We’re also monitoring the middle finger Chinese authorities gave to Hollywood by allowing The Pursuit of Happyness to be played in China, but only on the country’s handful of digital screens.

Lastly, I realized the blog has hit its one year anniversary. I’ll acknowledge that properly in a day or two.

Until then, Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year to all of you!

I apologize for the incomprehensible front page blurb yesterday, and kids: remember to actually click “publish,” even when you’re too sleepy.

-  It’s review time! Twitch has two reviews of Peter Chan’s The Warlords: review one, review two.

I know no one wants to know what I think about The Warlords, but I’ll say it anyway: Battle of Wits was a better war movie. The Warlords had better drama. You know what that means? Peter Chan: Stick to what you know best.

Japan Times’ Mark Schilling has a review for the Japanese tearjerker Little DJ, and Kaori Shoji reviews the French-Chinese film Les Filles du botaniste, which is actually banned in China for its depiction of homosexuality.

The review of the last film also comes with an interview with the director.

- From the Daily Yomiuri is the Teleview column’s yearlong Teleview Awards, who gives the best drama award to the Winter 2007 hit drama Haken No Hinkaku.

- One drama that will probably not end up winning a Teleview Award is the Japanese drama adaptation of My Sassy Girl coming in the Spring starring SMAP member Tsuyoshi Kusanagi and Rena Tanaka. Still, it might actually be entertaining for what it is, or it could contrived and needlessly melodramatic. In case of most Japanese dramas, it’ll probably be both. They’ve got a SMAP member playing a Marine Biology Professor, for crying out loud.

That’s it for today. Tomorrow - perhaps a short review of Pang Ho-Cheung’s latest Trivial Matters. We’ll see how we recover.

 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.