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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- 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.

We took a short break with the news stuff because of the general lack of news this week. But now we’re back.

- In Japanese drama ratings, several dramas have already wrapped up. Sadly, no drama has wrapped on their season-high ratings yet. Especially disappointing is the finale to this season’s hit drama Galileo, which wrapped up with a season-low 19.6 rating, which makes me wonder what they did to piss of the viewers. Nevertheless, it’s by far the hit of the season with a 21.9 average rating overall. Abarenbo Mama also wrapped up with an OK 14.2 rating after hitting a season low last week. Meanwhile, Dream Again and Mop Girl also saw a rebound in their ratings for their final episodes, wrapping up with 11.9 and 9.4, respectively. Even the super disappointment of the season, Hatachi No Koibito, managed to recover slightly for an 8.2 rating for its finale.

That should wrap up The Golden Rock’s coverage of this disappointing Japanese drama season.

-  The nominations for the Japanese Academy Awards were announced. I was wondering where Tokyo Tower was when those other small awards were being announced, and now it shows up with a leading 13 nominations. That means it was nominated in every single category it was eligible for. While these type of films tend to end up sweeping the awards, this year there’s also Always 2, whose first installment swept that year’s awards. The hit sequel scored 12 nominations, with it not nominated only in the best actress category.

Also, there’s the current awards favorite, Masayuki Suo’s I Just Didn’t Do It, which picked up 11 nominations. With no clear leaders in the nominations (they tend to just nominate the same movies in every category, regardless whether the lighting direction in Tokyo Tower is good or not), these three will probably be be very close in awards count by award night.

Partial list on Variety Asia

Complete list (in Japanese) at the website.  I’ll try and translate it in a few days if I have time.

- Honestly, this news is even more exciting than the Japanese Academy Awards: Chow Yun Fat has just signed on to the live-action Dragonball movie to be produced by Stephen Chow. This movie just got itself some street cred.

- Almost forgot those Oricon charts. Exile ends up selling 670,000 copies of their latest album after they announced a million copies were shipped (as in shipped to stores, not sold, while V6 wins the singles chart, though Zard’s posthumous single managed to be right behind at 2nd place. Don’t be surprised if “Tupac”-like rumor starts popping up about Zard.

More details at Tokyograph.

Forget Exile, Koda Kumi is still the queen of the Oricon charts, selling 7.3 billion yen worth of CDs and DVDs in 2007. Meanwhile, Sen No Kaze Ni Natte wins best-selling single, and Mr. Children has the year’s best-selling Japanese album.

- Hong Kong’s new Film Development Council is working on greelighting the first project to use their pool of US$38.5 million. However, while the conditions about the major talents being from Hong Kong are reasonable, the ones about having at least 50% financed by private sector and the director/producer having released at least two films in the last ten years….not so fair. Oh, and they’re not even judging on artistic merit, which means a Jingle Ma comedy - commercially appealing, but probably artistically vomit-inducing - can potentially get government funding.

-While TBS opens up another new slot for drama on Saturday night at 8pm (not a prime drama slot if you ask me), Fuji TV has named their next drama at the breakout Saturday 11pm slot. Lost Time Life will be made up of 9 separate stories (running, I assume, for 9 episodes), each about how a person would choose make up the time they waste in their lives. Interesting, but potential cheesy.

That’s it, The Golden Rock is going on vacation. That means daily posts will not happen until after the new year. There’s still a few entries coming up, but this will be the last news post of the year, unless something big comes up.

 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.

- Because it’s only one place’s box office, we’ll put the box office entry in here too. Thursday opening day numbers are out for Hong Kong, and Johnnie To/Wai Ka Fai’s latest Mad Detective came storming out of the gate. Despite the category III restrictive rating (only for one scene that’s pretty borderline II-B anyway), the mystery drama made nearly HK$650,000 from 35 screens. With its targeted adult audience, it should make about HK$3 million by the end of the weekend, which means it’ll end up doing much better than recent Milkyway movies such as Exiled and Eye In the Sky. It’ll probably even do better than Triangle.

In Love With the Dead, the latest from Danny Pang (of the Pang Brothers) made only HK$330,000 from 32 screens after making HK$450,000 in sneaks last weekend. Perhaps the young will come out and see Stephy tear out her hair this weekend and bump up the figures. Hollywood horror film 30 Days of Night opened on 24 screen for a take of HK$200,000. Andrew Lau’s Hollywood debut The Flock did much worse, making only HK$62,000 from 18 screens, and the Korean-Japanese co-production romance Virgin Snow made only HK$55,000 from 12 screens.

-  Despite protests from major Thai filmmakers, The Thai Parliament has passed the Thai film law, which gives way too much power for the government to ban films. At least they can always make movies in China. Oh, wait…….

-It’s trailers time! Twitch again provides all three trailers today: one for the Korean body-switching thriller The Devil’s Game, one for the fairy tale-gone-nightmarish Korean horror film Hansel and Gretel, and one for Tak Sakaguchi’s directorial debut Be a Man! Samurai School.

- It’s Awards time too!  Tang Wei will pick up the Asian Female Star of the year award at the Cineasia convention in macau.

Meanwhile, the Japan newspaper Sports Hochi also gave out their yearly film awards, with Masayuki Suo’s I just Didn’t Do It picking up best film and best actor. Meanwhile, Shiro Ito picked up a surprisingly best supporting actor award for Shaberedomo Shaberedomo and Maiko Haaaan!!!!, and I mean surprising as in his performances in those weren’t particularly award-worthy. Another small surprise is Nobuhiro Yamashita picking up best director for his two films this year: The Matsugane Potshot Affair and Tennen Kokekko.

Lastly, the Japan Record Award winners were announced. The sad part I only know three of those songs, and only two of those are worthy winners in my mind.

- Johnnie To’s Linger stars Mandarin-speaking actors Vic Zhou and Li Bing-Bing, which means that the movie will obviously be in Mandarin. However, according to Grady Hendrix, the movie will be shown in Hong Kong in Mandarin instead of Cantonese, despite the fact that it’s already been dubbed in Cantonese. By the way, Grady, Heidi is the operator in the studio.

- Takeshi Kitano appears on Japanese TV in variety shows often enough already, but audiences still can’t get enough of him: His latest acting role in a made-for-TV miniseries scored an average of 23.75 rating over Saturday and Sunday nights. That’s an even higher average rating than the highest-rated drama this season, and it was on the weekend.

- This isn’t a political blog, and this news isn’t meant to be political, but am I right in saying that a documentary that asserts the Japanese WWII war criminals are the equivalent of the seven samurais is probably a little absurd?

- It’s trailers time! Both courtesy of Twitch today- First, the English-subtitled trailer for the Thai action-fantasy film Siyama (yes, there’s supposed to be time traveling elements in the film that is completely ignored in the trailer). Then, the non-subtitled trailer for the gross-out Korean sex comedy Sex is Zero 2. You can already tell it’ll be grosser than the first film, which doesn’t necessarily make me want to watch it.

- Courtesy of Kaiju Shakedown are 5 clips from Pang Ho-Cheung’s latest film(s) Trivial Matters. With bong-smoking, swearing, and talk about oral sex, I’d be surprised if they can get away with a II-B this time.

- I’m starting to hate my vacation dates: Not only will I be missing Trivial Matters (unless it’s such a big hit and it plays through New Years), I’ll also be leaving Japan the day before the Nodame Cantabile special is scheduled to air on Japanese TV. D’oh!

- At least I’ll be back on time to see the new digital broadcast by Hong Kong free TV stations. Of course, I’ll have to first sink some money for a digital decoder or buy a HDTV. Which means I’ll probably be missing out anyway.

- Under “they mean really well” news today, the Beijing Film Academy produced a documentary about the China Disabled People’s Performing Art Troupe, and even took it to the American Film Market. However, despite some interest, it couldn’t find any buyers and it won’t even premiere in its homeland until March.

Meanwhile, Thai filmmakers are making their final protest calling for modification to the new Thai Film and Video Act, which could bring further censorship into the film system, despite the addition of a ratings system.

- Remember Lost in Beijing, the much-edited Chinese film that was forced to remove multiple scenes (including shots of dirty Beijing streets) before it cleared the censor board? The uncensored version was shown on Hong Kong screens (with a category III rating, which meant “no one under 18 allowed), and the censored version will finally be shown on Chinese screens with a wide release this week. Apparently, the critical nature of Chinese society remains in the film.

-  The European Union is getting more and more impatient with China over piracy, to the point that they’re threatening to go the principal’s office World Trade Organization about it.

- Huge Chinese blockbusters are not even going to premiere at the People’s Auditorium anymore: Now they’re going premiere in Olympic-sized venues!

- The Chinese father-and-son drama The Red Awn picked up the top prize at the Thessaloniki International Film Festival in Greece.