The Golden Rock - July 20th Edition

Back a little earlier than expected with a somewhat shorter entry than usual. But I do bring good news AND bad news.

- In Hong Kong Thursday opening day box office numbers, despite Harry Potter and an assortment of foreign movies taking up screens in Hong Kong (Transformers is looking to do the same next weekend), Benny Chan's Invisible Targets managed to open strongly with HK$940,000 on 34 screens. Considering almost all multiplexes simply throwing it into smaller screens (Pot-tah still has those big screens), this is a really promising start. If these numbers hold up, it could be doing HK$4 million or so by the end of the weekend, and it might even cross the HK$10 million mark. By the way, Twitch has a review.

Still, Pot-tah and his buddies took the day with HK$1.35 million on 90 screens for a 9-day total of HK$28.16 million. Somehow, HK$40 million is looking a little farther than I thought. In other opening films, the Japanese cartoon Keroro movie took HK$530,000 on 27 screens, Next with Nicholas Cage (I already get to watch this on the plane in 2 weeks) took just HK$140,000 on 17 screens, and Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof took in just HK$50,000 on 6 screens after making HK$90,000 on previews the last few weeks. It probably won't even match Planet Terror's current total of HK$1.54 million.

- In other box office news, Pirates of the Caribbean has done what Spiderman 3 promised to but couldn't do - cross the 10 billion yen mark in box office gross in Japan.

- This Hong Kong Television and Entertainment Licensing Authority thing is getting out of hand. At the Hong Kong Book Fair, TELA officials were strolling around, randomly looking for shit to classified like the Gestapo, and they happened upon 17 books that were problematic and bullied the seller to stopped selling it without classification. Someone please stop them before they embarrass Hong Kong any further.

- Speaking of embarrassing, America is acting like the schoolyard bully-turned-yard snitch and threatening China to remove barriers for foreign music or risk having that added to their current complaint with the World Trade Organization. You mean let uncensored entertainment enter China in their unaltered original form, thus protecting the artistic integrity of the original works? Impossible!

- I didn't report on that Chinese cardboard box meat bun story because it was kind of nasty and had nothing to do with Asian entertainment. Little did I know that it IS Asian entertainment, because it was faked by a producer of the Chinese TV program.

No song of the day, but a full entry and back on the usual schedule tomorrow.