July 14th, 2009
The Golden Rock - July 13th, 2009 Edition
Possibly a slow news day in the entertainment world. It’ll be a short entry today:
- Lovehkfilm has updated with some new reviews: Boss Kozo looks at the disaster that is Roy Chow’s Murderer, schlock C-grade horror action film Blood: The Last Vampire, and the Taiwanese film Yang Yang.Meanwhile, Sanjuro looks at Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s debut film The Guard From the Underground and yours truly look at the Korean independent film One Shining Day.
- As expected, the Gokusen movie ruled the Japanese box office over the weekend in the admission rankings. It made about 490 million yen from 409 screens. Toho expects that it’ll make about 4 billion yen when it’s all said and done, which is not too bad at all. However, for a drama that has scored an average of 22.7% over three seasons, it’s certainly much weaker than Rookies, whose film version opened with 1.2 billion yen from 428 screens after the drama had a season average of 14.8% last Spring.
Meanwhile, Knowing opened in 3rd place, and Monsters Vs. Aliens opened only at 7th place, though with the higher ticket price, it’s sure to go up by the time the numbers are out. And in its second weekend, MW has already dropped to 9th place, surely a disappointment for all involved.
- And according to Wise Kwai’s Twitter, Transformers 2 has now surpassed the box office record set by Titanic in Thailand. And a bit of hope for humanity is gone as well.
- In Spring 2009 Japanese drama ratings, Takuya Kimura’s Mr. Brain wraps up its short run with just a 20.7% rating for its final episode, giving it an average of 20.1%. This is the lowest season average rating for a KimuTaku drama since Gift back in 1997. Even though it’s the season’s highest-rated drama, the relatively large budget (guest stars, sets, special effects, the actors) certainly makes this a bit of a disappointment.
For Summer 2009, Ninkyo Helper, starring Tsuyoshi “nothing wrong being naked” Kusanagi, got off to a strong start with a 17.5% rating (especially considering how hard the My Sassy Girl drama flopped). On the other hand, Kanryo-tachi no Natsu suffered a huge drop from its 14.5%-rating premiere to a 9.1% rating for its second week. Not shaping up to be a great season already.
- At the Taipei Film Festival, Leon Dai’s No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti took four awards, including the Grand Prize.
- Like Hong Kong, people in the Taiwanese film industry are now looking to China to develop their long-dormant commercial film industry. That’s how films like Kung Fu Dunk get made, people.
- Don’t know how the Twtich writer got to see it, but there’s a review for Francis Ng’s Tracing Shadow there anyway.
- Shooting has begun for Takashi Miike’s Thirteen Assassins, but they’re apparently shooting in an unexplored part of Japan, because Yamagature Prefecture definitely doesn’t exist on any map. Didn’t know screenplay is written by Daisuke Tengan, son of Shohei Imamura and a director as well.
- It’s trailers time! Twitch has the teaser for the new Jija “Chocolate” Yanin movie Raging Phoenix. Definitely not the same movie as Chocolate.
Want to see what the ex-Deputy Director of China’s film agency SARFT is doing? He produced Looking For Jackie, which is being bashed on Mainland audiences on the film opinion site Douban right now.
Yes, it’s that Jackie.
- As Jason Gray mentioned on his blog, Midnight Eye has updated with some new reviews, including Kore-eda’s latest.
July 15th, 2009 at 6:42 am
HK and TW can complain all they want about China’s market ruining their films, but the fact is, they need and want China’s market, unless they’re going to stay indie, or have cheap wire-fu.