The Golden Rock - June 23rd, 2007 Edition

- Hate to say it, South Korea, but your Korean Wave in Japan has pretty much ended, no matter how much you might deny it.

- Then again, looks like Rain (the Korean superstar, not the Beatles Cover Band from Nevada) will just continue invading North America after the lawsuit against his use of the name was dropped by a judge. Dance on, Rain. Dance on.

- This year's buzz words in the movie industry seem to be threequels and international co-production. A bunch of producers, government film officials, fund managers, and lawyers put together a panel at the Shanghai Film Festival to pretty much preach about the importance of international co-productions. Just no more big martial arts epics, please.

- It didn't happen at the festival, but Singaporean media agencies signed a co-production agreement with Japanese media producers, officially marking yet another Panasian co-production deals. zzzzzzzz...........

- Me: "Hey, Japan Times!"
Japan Times: "Hey, Golden Rock!"
Me: "What reviews do you have for us this weekend?"
Japan Times: "We have a review of the Cannes Grand Prix winner The Mourning Forest, which is playing only in one theater in Tokyo right now."
Me: "Thanks, Japan Times!"

- Twitch has more on Love My Life, which seems to be the Japanese version of the lesbian film Spider Lilies. No, I don't think it's a remake, I just like to group all my lesbian films together.

- Earlier this week I wrote about the May-December romance Last Love flopping at Japanese box office. Daily Yomiuri tells you what's so special about the film and its aging star.

- The website for the John Woo-produced gangster film Blood Brothers has a second trailer up, and Twitch is oh so bloody excited about it! It does look nice, but I could hardly get myself all that excited about anything other than Sun Honglei's role as the villain.

- This is in no way confirmed, but Amazon seems to be listing a DVD called Kill Bill - The Whole Bloody Affair on their site for release on November 6th, If this holds up, this might be the singular uncut version of Kill Bill that Quentin Tarantino said he was putting together for DVD a long time ago. I still won't be selling my Japanese DVD of Kill Bill 1 though, especially if Tarantino doesn't restore the fight scene with color.

- American distributor ADV has picked up the well-received Japanese animated film 5cms per second. Now you downloaders have no excuse to download it anymore; they're even going to give it a theatrical run, for crying out loud.

- The Chinese state-run broadcasting authority stopped two television stations from playing any commercials after they continued to run banned ads for some shady weight loss products despite being warned. I can't argue whether it's right for them to do it or not because I hate both the broadcasting authority and medical informercials, but the authorities certainly did their jobs by warning against bribing censors. Those censors could at least do what they were bribed to do, for crying out loud.

That's it today, or I'll run out of news by tomorrow.