- Johnnie To seems like a far more productive version of Wong Kar-Wai; while he does put out up to two movies a year, he can’t seem to decide what to do. News reported that shooting for a PTU TV series have been underway with different directors, but now comes the announcement that Johnnie To himself is going be making 5 films under the PTU series, with one being a theatrical release and the others being straight-to-video releases. He’s also in post-production for two films - Sparrow, which he’s been shooting on-and-off for a while, and his third of “The Iron Triangle,” co-directed by Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam. He’s probably shooting three more films we don’t know about that has no script, but who cares? He’s Johnnie To. As long as he keeps churning out more Exiled than Yesterday Once More, I ain’t complaining.

Source: Variety Asia

- Zhang Yimou is always caught between a rock and a hard place. First, his movies kept getting banned because of “subversive elements,” now that he appeases to the party, the party bites right back. According to Yahoo News, the Communist Party training academy (what the hell is that anyway?) has publicly criticize Zhang Yimou’s Curse of the Golden Flower for leaving a “feeling of nausea that would not go away.” They even said “Fine art is not built on money. Good movies are not based on banquets of glitzy scenes and effects, and less so when violence and sex are involved.” Maybe they should watch Raise the Red Lantern, or better yet, To Live. Oh, wait, they banned both movies!

Source: Yahoo News

- Jason Gray has put up more news about Beat Takeshi(or Takeshi Kitano)’s new film “Kantoku, Banzai!” (Long Live the Director). It seems both more intriguing and mind-numbling at the same time.

Source: Jason Gray

- More on the Youtube-JASRAC negotiations from Variety Asia. Apparently now Youtube is planning on building a Japanese version of Youtube as well, and is negotiating with companies to put contents on their Japanese site. Good thing they’re rejecting JASRAC’s request to require users to register their addresses. If you want people to stop infringing copyrights, why not make them available yourself, and make some advertising bucks out of it? This is the country that won’t even let users from outside Japan watch the ads for their dramas on the internet, so they probably won’t listen to foreigners.

Source: Variety Asia

- It’s not really news, but apparently the new Eddie Murphy film Norbit is crappy. Really crappy.

Source: Hollywood Elsewhere

- Apparently Steven Soderbergh is not making only one Che Guevara film, but TWO. I like Steven Soderbergh when he’s making edgy mainstream films (that would include Ocean’s Twelve, mind you), not experimental art films. Then again, I like Paul Thomas Anderson, so maybe some people out there actually like Soderbergh’s stuff.

Source: Hollywood Elsewhere

- I’m gonna keep peddling Khalil Fong’s album “This Love” here. For film fans who need convincing, he even did a song named after Wong Kar-Wai’s broken-hearted protagonist Su Li-Zhan. Link’s here . This is a talented guy, so give him some love by buying the album here.

- A wag of the finger to Joy Sales for their pan-and-scanning of the VCD for Jackie Chan’s Rob-B-Hood (yes, a poor college student does have to resort to the VCD these days). It goes from widescreen during the credits to full screen for the opening sequence, then widescreen again for the rest of the credits. Why not just widescreen the entire film like everyone else does? It’s not like it costs extra money to leave the widescreen print on, it’s already on the DVD. And no, Rob-B-Hood was not shot on Super-35, so don’t even start that.

More of the widescreen-vs-pan and scan (also known as “full screen”) argument here.

Lastly, I’ve now gotten hooked on RSS feed, and was looking into how to set one up myself. Turns out a real RSS 2.0 feed is too complicated, and Blogger already set an atom one down at the bottom. So use your aggregator and click on the feed link on the bottom to subscribe. That is, if you are inclined to do so.

- Box Office Mojo posted its own official Japan box office numbers from this past weekend, and there’s a slight discrepancy - While yesterday’s Eiga Daisuki ranking shows Monster House at 10th place with Battle Of Wits at 3rd, the Box Office Mojo ranking shows the new film Dear Friends at 10th place, and Battle of Wits at 4th, behind Marie Antoinette. What gives?

Nevertheless, the Battle of Wits opening is weaker in numbers than I thought, since the release is fairly wide at 246 screens, it only took in 130 million yen (that’s about 1.09 million in US dollars, according to Mojo) for a 528500 yen average, which amounts to only about US$4400 per-screen. And average ticket prices in Japan is 1500 yen (adult price is 1800, but advanced tickets are sold at 1300 yen, and students are charged 1500 yen as well), so do the math. Since, according to Eiga Consultant, it did do 114% of The Promise’s opening weekend business (and possibly with considerably better word of mouth and a popular source material), it might do respectable business for a Hong Kong film. Then again, Hong Kong films usually don’t even see the top 10, so we’ll see.

Meanwhile, Japanese films are staying afloat quite well, with Dororo losing only 15% of its business, and Shall We Dance director Masayuki Suo’s “Soredemo Boku Wa Yattenai” losing only 14% and will probably stay strong thanks to word-of-mouth and recent promotion by the director himself. The multiple-Oscar nominated The Departed, however, not doing so well, losing another 40% of its business over the weekend, along with Letters From Iwo Jima, which finally seems to be dying down after an astonishing 9 weeks in the top 10.

Source: Box Office Mojo

- Takeshi Kitano (or known as Beat Takeshi) has recently completed his 13th film, which will supposedly with a mishmash of homages to Ozu, science fiction, and I guess whatever oddball stuff he can come up with. It will open in June.

Source: Japan Zone (please scroll down if you don’t see it)

- Twitch has been provided with stills from Soi Cheang’s new film Shamo. This time a manga adaptation, the presumably hardcore action flick will star former pretty boy Shawn Yue, whom I always thought has great potential as an actor. The original comic apparently featured many gay rape scenes (it does partially takes place in prison), but the director himself said that they have been left out of the film.

Source: Twitch

- The team behind the controversial “Lost in Beijing” is now prepared to defy the censors and show the film uncut in Berlin….at least for the market screenings. But they have yet to decide which version to go with for the public screening. Come on, stick it up to the man!

Source: Variety Asia

- Variety likes to end their first paragraph of film reviews with a little prediction of their box office takes, because apparently being professional means you can watch movies early enough to predict their box gross, not analyze (like yours truly). A Korean film critic apparently likes to follow Variety’s vein by predicting the highly anticipated new film by Park Jin Pyo (You Are My Sunshine) “Voice of a Murderer” would flop. Despite, you know, “You Are My Sunshine” being the highest-grossing Korean melodrama ever, and that a crime film that tries to cash in on major collective memory happens to hit box office jackpot (read “Memories of Murder”).

Then comes news that “Voice of a Murderer” made $10.1 million with 1.46 million admissions, AND screen counts actually increased day by day.

I’ll bet a certain someone in Germany is happy about that.

Source: Twitch, Variety Asia.

- Those silly censors at the Chinese government strikes again. They have approved a heavily-cut version of Li Yu’s “Lost in Beijing” (starring Tony Leung Ka-Fai) to screen in Berlin. Apparently, the censors demanded 53 cuts (totaling about 15 minutes), include a scene of a car driving down a dirty alleyway with water since it gives a bad impression of Beijing. Man, people must think America is a pigsty after all the dirty alleyways with water they show in their movies.

Now producer Feng Li has to consider showing the approved version or open defy status quo and showed the original version in Berlin. Of course, he has to consider the last filmmaker that did that got banned from making films for 5 years.

Source: Variety Asia

- Japanese box office rankings for the past weekend is out. Dororo remains in the first place, as Pursuit Of Happyness in second. The biggest major opening this week would be Andy Lau’s A Battle of Wits. I don’t have an official screen count or numbers, but this is considered a pretty major opening for a Hong Kong film (It did get nominations at the Hong Kong Film Awards, so it’s a Hong Kong film, yeah? Good), let alone an Andy Lau film. This is probably due to the fact that it’s based on a popular Japanese comic, not the fact that Andy Lau is prominently featured in the poster
Source: Eiga Daisuki!

- Rinko Kichuchi from the brilliant “Babel” (that’s right, the more you hate it, the more I’ll love it) has signed up for a role in Rian Johnson’s (who made a great debut with Brick) con-man noir drama The Brothers Bloom. Here’s to hoping she just won’t become the fetishized Asian femme fatale there to satisfy the male gaze.

Source: Twitch

Ah hell, it’s Hollywood, that’s what probably will happen.