Month: July 2007 (Page 2 of 2)

So we are well into this year’s Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival, and so far things seem to be working fairly smoothly. I have had no problems getting tickets and experienced no lineups… although that might be because I got my tickets early at the CGV theater. I am told Boksagol had more lines.

So far I have mostly hung out with the usual crowd — Mario from Fantasporo, Derek from Variety, PiFan organizer Thomas, Johannes Schonherr and his Teutonic hordes. Good times.

Opening night was okay. The opening ceremonies were the shortest I can recall at PiFan, at barely 30 minutes long. Very much appreciated, especially after the 100-minute government suck-up at last year’s opening. Best part at this year’s opening (besides getting to say “hi” to Kang Soo-yeon and Ahn Sung-ki) was this odd Korean trio, three girls playing on traditional instruments. But they did not play traditional music, they played SOMEWHERE OVER THE RAINBOW and ONE MILLION ROSES (the famous Russian song that is popular in Korea and Japan). No idea why they chose those songs.

Opening party afterward at Tiger World, as a couple of commenters pointed out earlier, was pretty dubious. But opening parties always are. Later, at the “2-cha”, was much better… just sitting outside, drinking beer and eating decent food. Very civilized. Hopefully there will be more of that tonight.

As for movies… Being a recovering geek, I felt compelled to check out the GETTER ROBO movie (better known as STAR AVENGERS to North American types). Basically it was three episodes from the 1998 TV revival. And it was pretty bad. Animated in the style of the original series, but with the story deeply warped and changed. It looked like the animator took STAR AVENGERS and added liberal amounts of PRINCESS MONONOKE and tentacle porn (although not so much as to make the series interesting).

Then I checked out a couple of documentaries by Yves Montmayeur, one about Christopher Doyle and one about Korean directors. It was okay, but nothing revelatory. After the films, there was a chat with Montmayeur, Park Chan-wook, Ryoo Seung-hwan, and Min Kyu-dong… Aside from a couple of amusing, self-depreciating jokes by Park, again there was not much to talk about. It was not a bad event at all, but it did not exactly advance our understanding of the Asian movie scene.

Would like to say more, but I am off to a press conference now. Some fun films this evening, and hopefully some beer, too.

What an amazing weekend for TRANSFORMERS. Its first weekend was fairly impressive, but its second weekend was one of the strongest follow-ups ever in Korea. Certainly the strongest second week for a foreign film.

In its second weekend, TRANSFORMERS scored 1.49 million admissions nationwide, which was almost the same as the previous weekend. It might have even been stronger. When was the last time a blockbuster improved on its attendance in the second week? Right, never. Those big Hollywood films usually plunge, down 40-60% after their debuts.

In fact, TRANSFORMERS topped the 4-million-attendance mark in just 11 days, and already has sold 4.2 million tickets. At this rate, the robot rumble seems all but assured to smash the current record for top foreign film in Korea, which is LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING at 6 million. Which would be a pretty significant record to break. With Korean hits topping 12 million admissions, 6 million is quite a gap (and that is for foreign films distributed by Korean companies… general opinion is for foreign films distributed directly by the foreign company, 5 million is the peak). Once TRANSFORMERS breaks that record, international distributors will have to re-evaluate the importance of Korea.

In addition, TRANSFORMERS nearly maintained its stranglehold on the nation’s movie theaters — down a tick to 73.8% of all the tickets sold in Korea, from 75.5% last weekend. Not even THE HOST can boast that.

FYI, TRANSFORMERS is also playing on 893 screens. Also pretty incredible, especially for a second weekend. I know a lot of people are calling for restrictions on the number of screens a single film can appear on, but I am not so sure that is a good idea. TRANSFORMERS also had the strongest per-screen average by far, indicating that people were getting to see what they wanted to see. It is not like there was pent up demand to see something else. Is it the theater owners’ fault that audiences here have such uniform tastes?

Title – Weekend Admissions – Total Nationwide Admissions
1. Transformers – 1,490,200 – 4,202,100
2. Black House – 139,400 – 1,169,300
3. The Descent – 102,600 – 123,100
4. Taxi 4 – 85,400 – 99,200
5. Ocean’s 13 – 71,000 – 1,332,500
6. Shrek 3 – 58,000 – 2,792,700
7. Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End – 13,500 – 4,548,300
8. Secret Sunshine – 7,000 – 1,594,000
9. Love & Other Disasters – 5,300 – 262,000
10. The Girl Who Leapt Through Time – 4,300 – 50,800

Note: It appears that Film 2.0 has changed the way it track box office data. Instead of providing weekend information for Seoul and nationwide cumulative admissions, we now get nationwide for both. Which makes sense. Good for Film 2.0 if they can pull that off all the time.

It is getting pretty close to this year’s Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival, or “PiFan” as it is known. Although PiFan is always quite enjoyable, this year I will be experiencing the festival more in depth than usual because I have been asked to write for their daily publication. I am not quite sure what that will entail, but I guess I had better figure it out pretty soon.

You can read about PiFan at its website here.

(Strangely, this poster was originally red. No idea what uploading it caused a color shift into purple/blue. If anyone has any theories, please let me know).

In case you do not know, PiFan is a Fantastic Film Festival — meaning a festival specializing in fantasy and related genre films (science fiction, horror, just plain weird). In fact, there are a lot of festivals of this sort in Europe (see their Federation here), but they seem to be less common in this part of the world. Japan had two (in Yubari and Tokyo), but both have fallen on hard times and are pretty much done.

Anyhow, Bucheon is not far from Seoul, and the festival is quite worth checking out. The all-night screenings can be particularly fun (if a tad grueling). I am personally more a fan of the older film retrospectives. Lots of stuff for everyone.

Note: You need to be a little bit careful because some of the films will not have English subtitles… in particular the Japanese giant robot films and the Dario Argento movies.

Pretty amazing — TRANSFORMERS pulled in 75.5% of the box office last weekend. Three out of every hour tickets sold were to a Michael Bay movie! The mind reels.

Title – Weekend Seoul Admissions – Total Nationwide Admissions
1. Transformers – 337,209 – 1,313,278
2. Black House – 39,820 – 825,034
3. Ocean’s 13 – 24,920 – 1,153,541
4. Shrek 3 – 16,295 – 2,677,564
5. Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End – 4,168 – 4,510,855
6. Captivity – 3,474 – 180,811
7. Secret Sunshine – 3,674 – 1,570,121
8. Hwang Jin-yi – 3,477 – 1,167,290
9. Never Forever – 3,348 – 76,751
10. Love & Other Disasters – 3,477 – 244,430

Funny to see films Nos. 6-10 pretty much in a dead heat.
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Sorry for the lack of updates at the moment, but as I have said before, the book is in its end stages. Just finished another chapter… uploaded some pics to the publisher.

And, just because this was not tough enough, I decided to raise the level of difficulty by breaking my wrist and elbow. Well, just a little. Actually, I fell and hurt myself three weeks ago now. Thought I had a little hairline fracture on the Ulna, right at the wrist. It was annoying, but I could handle it (and type). But on my follow-up visit, the doctor notices the elbow was cracked, too. So now I have a really big splint on my entire arm. It does not even hurt anymore… just makes me feel like an idiot.

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Best theory/summation yet on the end of the THE SOPRANOS is here.