The Golden Rock - October 6th, 2007 Edition

- 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.

- It's reviews time! Japan Times' Mark Schilling has a review for the new Yoshimitsu Morita film (I presume he made this before the Sanjuro remake) Southbound.

That's it for the day. Time for this blogger to get some much-needed sleep.