Note: This blog expresses only the opinions of the blog owner, and does not represent the opinion of any organization or blog that is associated with The Golden Rock.
- It’s Oricon charts time! As expected, B’z tops the single chart with their latest, selling 180,000 copies to make it their 40th consecutive number-one single. This also puts them above SMAP as their 41st consecutive single in the top 10. Meanwhile, Dreams Come True scores a number-two debut on the same week as the film based on their songs open this past weekend. The new single sold more than 81,000 copies, which would’ve earned it a number 1 spot on any other week. Lastly, Mika Nakashima’s latest could muster only a 5th place debut with 13,600 copies sold. If the daily charts hold up, expect L’Arc~En~Ciel’s latest to top the charts next week.
On the album chart, two compilations topped the chart. Yuki’s compilation is far and away the number 1 album with 180,000 copies sold. Far far behind is Yuzu’s compilation, which sold 95,500 copies. Last week’s winner Ai Otsuka’s album (this one’s for you, Tokyograph) drops to 3rd place with a still-pretty-strong sales of 66,000 copies, and last week’s second place album, the latest from Shiina Ringo’s Tokyo Jihen, tumbles to 5th place with just 26,700 copies sold. As for daily rankings, Spitz’s latest album should take the top spot if they hold up through the week.
Today in Pusan Film Festival news:
- Director Peter Greenaway would like you to know that cinema has been dead since 1983. Yeah, I saw his 1999 film 8 1/2 women - it wasn’t much of a movie indeed.
- This year marks the first ChinaBizCamp, where Chinese film industry professionals teach Korean audiences how to sell their movies in a market that restricts foreign films imports to 20 a year and where piracy is rampant partly because of said laws.
- There’s an interview with director Lee Chang-Dong, who is currently a jury member on the New Currents section. His award-winning Secret Sunshine is opening in Hong Kong today.
- After weeks of secrecy, China has revealed that they submitted the carefully calculated war drama The Knot as their pick for a nomination for best foreign film at the Academy Awards. For weeks, there were speculations that China would also pick Lust, Caution (Taiwan’s entry) after Peter Chan announced that The Warlords won’t be ready on time.
- The Japan box office numbers are out, but there are no standings, and the “pure love” film The Sign of Love (from the twosongs by the group Dreams Come True) only got into the admissions ranking. As a result, I wouldn’t call it the most accurate ranking. Still, you can find out that Hero is still on top (and showing little sign of slowing down), and Pan’s Labyrinth had an OK opening on a 28-screen limited release.
- A quick rundown on the Hong Kong mid-week numbers: Lust, Caution made another HK$1.04 million from 60 screens for a total of HK$24.61 million. Resident Evil 3 made HK$530,000 from 36 screens for a 6-day total of HK$6.37 million. Oxide Pang’s The Detective is slowing down with just HK$140,000 from 28 screens for just HK$4.79 million after 13 days (yes, I did pay to see this as well. More on an entry on the spin-off later). There’s no real wide releases this weekend, which means it’ll be Lust, Caution on the top of the charts on Friday again.
- Universal, who is already co-releasing the Japanese action flick Midnight Eagle in Japan, has also signed on to release the film in North America. However, the trailers have left me fairly cold, so how are they going to be selling in to American audiences?
(Yes, I know the trick answer is: they don’t try to tell it. They just keep in on the shelves a couple of years, then release it straight to DVD with some sexy woman on the cover)
- There was no Friday update of the hong Kong box office, so I couldn’t predict what happened yesterday. On Sunday box office in Hong Kong, Lust, Caution continued to perform extremely well, earning HK$1.9 million from 61 screens. After 12 days, Ang Lee’s erotic thriller has already made an amazing HK$22.76 million. According to the Hong Kong Film Blog, it’ll beat Basic Instinct as the highest-grossing category-III film in history (no one under 18 may be admitted) once it grosses an additional HK$5 million, which will probably happen by the weekend.
From the same distributor in Hong Kong is last week’s only opening film Resident Evil. On 36 screens, the second sequel from the sci-fi horror series made HK$1.4 million for a 4-day total of HK$5.27 million. Continuing with a bit of legs is Oxide Pang’s The Detective, which is hanging on with another HK$310,000 on 28 screens. After 11 days, the mystery thriller has made HK$4.53 million. The Hong Kong loser from last week’s mid-autumn festival Beauty and the 7 Beasts limped through Sunday with just HK$100,000 from 14 screens for just HK$2.37 million after 12 days. Quite frankly, I’m even surprised that this got past HK$2 million.
- In North America, Lust, Caution expanded by 16 screens to the other major cities, and it made $369,000 at 26th place for a per-screen average of $21,705. However, I don’t expect it to have any commercial success later on due to the NC-17 rating and the not-so-positive reviews from Western critics.
- In Korean box office, Hur Jin-Ho’s Happiness (which looks kind of blah to me, and I’m a fan. Then again, I don’t understand a word of Korean) led the charts with 583,000 admissions, while Rush Hour 3 flopped with a 2nd place opening with just 354,000 admissions. This week, 5 of the 10 films on the top 10 were Korean, though most of the Hollywood films were just holdovers.
This week’s song is more for the album than the song itself. A month ago, I bought a compilation named Tokyo Cafe Vol. 2, which I guess plays songs that would recreate the feeling of being in a cafe in Tokyo. Even though it opens with a Lisa Ono song, the rest of the album isn’t quite like that. It combines R&B, acoustic guitar pieces, and even old pop songs like today’s song. You can find it on the Tokyo Cafe compilation as track 3, or find it on a compilation by the group, it’s Original Love’s “Kiss.”
More coverage of other people’s coverage of the Pusan Film Festival:
- I mentioned that New Taiwan Cinema filmmaker Edward Yang’s films are getting a retrospective in Pusan. I was wrong. He’s actually getting a posthumous Filmmaker of the Year award.
- Fuji’s Saturday 11pm drama Life wins the satisfaction poll conducted by Oricon. Last season, the time slot’s first drama Liar Game won second place with an even higher score than Life, proving that putting edgier dramas there may equal to success. However, people don’t seem very excited about SP, this coming season’s drama in that time slot.
- In light of the Olympics next year, there will probably be a lot of “ethically inspiring” sports films coming out of China. There are already two basketball movies. In fact, someone should make a movie out of this, it’ll be called Olympic Fever Gone Wild.
- Lastly, it seems like someone is trying to submit Lust, Caution as their region’s official representative for the best foreign film award at the Academy Awards, but China and Taiwan can’t seem to decide. Then again, Taiwan followed the rules and played the film for 7 days before submitting it, China didn’t. You snooze, you lose.
- Continuing our coverage of other people’s coverage of the Pusan Film Festival, Hollywood Reporter has an interview with John Woo’s producer Terence Chang, who’s in the town for a screening of Lion Rock Picture’s latest producing effort Blood Brothers. According to him, the disappointing film noir-wannabe was “well-received” in Venice and that “a lot of foreign people really appreciate the film.” You know, I always just use the “quite loved in Europe” thing as a joke, I didn’t think that would really happen, especially to a movie like Blood Brothers.
- Of course, if Hollywood Reporter has interviews, Variety has to have them too. So they have an interview with festival director Kim Dong-Ho, although a portion of the interview is devoted to Korean food and when he would be hanging out at the bars.
- While America’s film censorship body MPAA considers giving films with scenes of smoking an automatic rated R (restricted - no one under 17 admitted without parent or guardian), the Chinese government are actually listening to public complaints and will be asking TV/film producers to cut down on “unnecessary” smoking scenes. However, since there are no laws banning smoking, the request obviously simple remains a request.
- There’s a first teaser for the officially approved sequel/spinoff for Shaolin Soccer. Moving the action to the Lacrosse field, Shaolin Girl stars Kou Shibasaki as the titular character, it’s directed by Bayside Shakedown director Katsuyuki Motohiro, and will even feature cameos by some of Stephen Chow’s favorites. It looks pretty silly (OK, I get that the ball is going fast by the intense flame), but I have faith in Motohiro to deliver something watchable.
As the second round of filmmaking starts in film school, expect updates to be somewhat short in the next few days.
- The Pusan Film Festival is now fully under way. This year, there’s a retrospective on New Taiwan Cinema director Edward Yang, who passed away earlier this year from colon cancer. Variety Asia has a feature on Yang’s filmography and also another feature by Derek “Too Little Lust and Too Much Caution” Elley about his own experiences with Yang.
- Just as the film festival is starting, the Pusan (or Busan?) film critics are also taking the opportunities to give out their film and rising stars awards. Most of the awards have already been announced: Im Sang-Soo will win best director for The Old Garden, Song Kang-Ho will win best actor for The Show Must Go On, Yeh Ji-Won will win best actress for Old Miss Diary, and Tezza: The High Rollers will win for best screenplay. Also, Daniel Henney will win best actor at the rising star awards. I guess now I should check out My Father, I expect he would act better than he did in Seducing Mr. Perfect.
- Turns out the rumors out there about the Hong Kong “relay film” Triangle being brought back for a major re-edit after Cannes are not correct - the film only went back for audio remix and “print tuning,” which means everyone in Hong Kong will be seeing the Cannes version all the critics were panning about.
- I’m sure you all now know how well the uncensored prints of Lust, Caution have done in Asia, but what about the censored versions? As far as I know, a version that’s been cut by 11 minutes have been playing in at least Malaysia and Singapore. However, Malay censors went ahead and cut and another 3 minutes and barred anyone under 18 from seeing it anyway. Still, the formerly-erotic espionage drama. According to the distributor, the film is still doing rather well considering the genre, despite netizens aware and complaining about the censorship.
- Eiga Consultant, in light of the recent controversy surrounding actress Erika Sawajiri, posted poll results to why people showed up to her latest film Closed Note. The ratio of male to female audience is 37 to 63, and a majority of audiences are in their 20s and under. When asked why they decided to go watch the film, 26.8% said the content seemed interesting, and the second biggest reason, with 14.4% of audience choosing it, is actually because they were fans of Sawajiri (as opposed to fans of Yuko Takeuchi, which only made up 10.8% of the audience). How come no one says it’s because of the director, especially since he made one of the biggest Japanese romantic blockbusters in recent years?
- The first Asia Pacific Screen Awards, which isn’t even taking place in Asia, has announced its nominees. The fact that I don’t know most of the nominated films means that they really are trying to look for the best Asian films out there, rather than your usual crowd favorites. An especially pleasant surprise for me is Ryu Deok-Hwan’s best actor nomination for Like a Virgin. Who says you can’t give a great performance in a comedy?
- Under your daily Pusan Film Festival news today, Japanese broadcaster TBS (TV networks are actually the biggest film producers in Japan) is sending quite a few interesting films to the festival. While many people are surely interested in Takashi Miike’s Crow Zero, I myself find Kenji Uchida’s After School the most interesting after his promising debut A Stranger of Mine. Is it really not coming out until May?
- It seems like I made a mistake last week in predicting this week’s Oricon charts because the daily charts at the time had not included the new singles yet. So the predictions from last week are completely wrong. On the singles chart, YUI’s latest, the theme song for the film Closed Note, debut at number one with about 87,500 copies sold. BoA’s latest is far far behind at 3rd place with about 28.400 copies sold. Ayumi Hamasaki’s latest actually did not top the charts again, falling to 4th place with just 18,700 copies sold. Next week (and this should be correct), expect rock superstar band B’z’s latest single to top the chart.
As Tokyograph predicted, Ai Otsuka’s latest album topped the albums chart with about 208,000 copies sold. Not too close behind at second place is personal favorite Tokyo Jihen’s 3rd album, which sold about 101,000 copies in its first week. Angela Aki’s album falls to 3rd place in its second week, and I can’t believe Hideaki Tokunaga’s cover album is still going this strong at 4th place. Next week, expect the album chart battle to be between Yuki’s or Yuzu’s compilation albums.
- I’m combining the box office and the regular entry into one today. The Japanese box office numbers came out, and there are a bunch of discrepancies between the numbers and the admissions ranking. Apparently the Isao Yukisada film Closed Note may have attracted less people than Perfect Stranger, but it make more cold, hard cash, putting it at 2nd place. The same thing happened between Fantastic 4 and No Reservations. Also, La Vie En Rose actually opened on 196 screens, which makes it 8th place opening kind of disappointing.
Actually, Closed Note’s second place opening isn’t all that swell, either. While it is 176% of the opening for Sugar And Spice ~ Fumi Zekka, it’s only 94% of the opening for Yukisada’s Haru no Yuki, which means the film will barely pass the 1 billion yen mark in box office.
- As a young aspiring filmmaker, this news is quite disappointing: The new Film Development Council of Hong Kong has announced their terms for disburse the HK$300 million film fund - by giving it to commercially-appealing films made by experienced filmmakers/producers. That means your director or producer has to have made at least 2 films, but yet your budget has to be kept under US$1.55 million (HK$12.1 million). Not that they’ll actually give you more than 30% of your budget anyway.
Do these people actually know how much it cost to make an audience-friendly, commercially-appealing movie these days? Your average movie star take at least HK$4 million already, and what commercially successful HK movie this year actually cost just HK$12 million? Obviously, the money should’ve gone more to developing young talents, but what can I say? I go to film school in Hong Kong, so that makes me biased by default.
- Creepy news coming out of Belgium, it seems like a note was found near where severed body parks were found in a park that may be connected to the Death Note comics. I think the killer forgot the part where he’s not supposed to do the murdering himself.
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