While The Dark Knight dominated the weekend box office here in the US -- with a little love spared for Mamma Mia! and Transsiberian -- in Asia things looked a little different. The Good, the Bad, the Weird , which was just picked up by IFC for the US, opened in its native South Korea to outstanding returns, according to Variety.

The film, a salute to Spaghetti Westerns with a modern twist, is expected to surpass 2.2 million admissions over the weekend, which would make it the fastest to hit that mark this year, beating out police comedy Public Enemy Returns. Its opening day returns put it in the company of previous monster smashes D-War and The Host. We should hear more about The Good, the Bad, the Weird when it plays at Toronto in September.

The news is not as good in Japan, where master filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki's latest animated achievement, Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea, was expected to dominate. Opening on a record number of screens for a local picture (481), Ponyo is said by its distributor to have earned 83% of the total made by Miyazaki's blockbuster Spirited Away, which sounds good. But as reported by Mark Schilling in Variety, those numbers may be misleading.

• Rosario Prestopino (1950-2008) - Makeup Artist, Special Effects Artist. Worked on Italian horror filmmaker Lucio Fuci's Zombie, City of the Living Dead, The Black Cat, The New York Ripper and The New Gladiators, as well as Lamberto Bava's DemonsDemons 2, Dario Argento's Terror at the Opera, Michele Soavi's The Church, Philip Haas' Up at the Villa and Mario Girolami's Zombie Holocaust. He died of a heart attack May 13, in Rome. (IMDb)

• Danton Burroughs (1944-2008) - Chairman of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Inc. Handled licensing of properties created by his grandfather, Edgar Rice Burroughs, to films, television and other media. We can probably thank him for such adaptations as Disney's animated Tarzan and the studio's upcoming John Carter of Mars. He died of heart failure May 1, in Tarzana, California. (Variety)
• Carlo Colombaioni (c.1933-2008) - Clown. A favorite of Federico Fellini's, he acted in and advised on circus sequences directed by the filmmaker. He contributed to Fellini's La Strada, The Clowns, Amarcord, Roma and Casanova. He also appears in Claude Goretta's The Wonderful Crook and Yvan Le Moine's The Red Dwarf. He died May 16 in France. (Telegraph)
• Warren Cowan (1921-2008) - Publicist. Legendary in Hollywood, he co-founded PR firm Rogers & Cowan and represented Kirk Douglas, Frank Sinatra, Tony Curtis, Lucille Ball, Judy Garland, Steve McQueen, Natalie Wood, Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn and the Doors, among others. He also pioneered the idea of independent Oscar campaigns, beginning with the push for Joan Crawford's performance in Mildred Pierce, for which she ended up winning the Best Actress trophy. Recent films for which he's credited as unit publicist include The Secret Agent, Shade, Metroland and One Man's Hero. He died of cancer May 14, in Los Angeles. Read Valerie Van Galder's (President of Marketing at Sony) moving tribute to Cowan over at MCN. (LA Times)

Recently we passed on the news that Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki had completed the storyboards for his upcoming animated film Ponyo on a Cliff, and now it appears that a release date has been set.

Nausicaa.net says we can expect the film to be released in the middle of July, very likely on Saturday, July 19. Their source is Variety Japan. According to a publicist for Studio Ghibli, Miyazaki's animation studio, more information on the film will be made available after the Tokyo International Anime Fair, which will be held March 27-30.

When can we expect to see the film in the US? I haven't seen a hint so far, but Miyazaki's previous production, Howl's Moving Castle, was released in Japan in November 2004 and in the US in June 2005, while the one before that, Spirited Away, took more than a year to reach US theaters. I'd love to see this one by the end of the year.

Ponyo revolves around a boy and goldfish who wants to become a girl. A family story of a very different sort has won favor with Hong Kong critics. The Postmodern Life of My Aunt features Chow Yun-Fat as an amateur Chinese opera singer who lures the 60-something heroine into a bogus scheme involving cemetery plots. David Rooney's Variety review says that's only one of the film's narrative strains.

The Associated Press reports that he Hong Kong Film Critics Society rewarded the picture this week with three prizes: Best Film, Best Director (Ann Hui) and Best Actress (Siqin Gaowa, who plays the heroine). Other awards went to Tony Leung Ka-Fai (Best Actor, Eye in the Sky) and Wai Kai-Fai and Au Kin-Yee (Best Script, Mad Detective).

Some mornings I wake up feeling like an old, old man slouching toward death, and other days I'm magically transported back to my childhood -- like today! That's because Nausicaa.net is reporting that the storyboards for Ponyo on the Cliff, the latest masterpiece from Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, have been completed.

Our own Monika Bartyzel brought us official word on the project in March 2007. She noted that Ponyo on the Cliff is an original work delving "into the lives of a 5-year-old boy named Sosuke, the image of whom will be visually modeled after Miyazaki's grandson, and a princess goldfish named Ponyo who is aching to become human." One of the things I love about Miyazaki's work is his ability to take you by the hand and lead you into unknown territories, so I really don't want to know more about the plot than that simple description.

As a point of comparison, Nausicaa.net compares the number of cuts in the storyboards (1,138) with those in Miyazaki's previous films, which may hint at Ponyo's eventual running time. The completion of the storyboards by Miyazaki is roughly equivalent to the completion of principal photography on a live action film, which means the film is well on its way. If you can read Japanese, you can perhaps get more information from the official Studio Ghibli production diary.

If the current, perhaps temporary, poster (pictured) represents the style of art that will be presented, it looks somewhat different than Miyazaki's previous films -- still wonderfully detailed, but with softer textures, almost as though the characters are merging more with the backgrounds. I'm very eager to see the finished film, which should hit screens in Japan later this year.

After a few months of silence, we've finally got official word on Hayao Miyazaki's next animated feature. The Howl's Moving Castle creator has been the center of anxious buzz for a while. In January, I posted that his upcoming film might be based on the Chinese children's novella, I Lost My Little Boy. While this rumor turned out to be false, Miyazaki was definitely right about the title having "no" in it twice. The next film is called Gake no ue no Ponyo, which translates into Ponyo on a Cliff.

Instead of an adaptation, this will be another original work for the animated filmmaker. The story delves into the lives of a 5-year-old boy named Sosuke, the image of whom will be visually modeled after Miyazaki's grandson, and a princess goldfish named Ponyo who is aching to become human. As for more details, Ghibli World says that the film will deal with themes of "father," "mother" and "cliff," which I'm sure is all the specifics you were looking for, right? "Cliff" makes things ominous, but the president of Studio Ghibli, Toshio Suzuki, has said that "Almost 70 to 80% of the film takes stage on sea. It will be a director's challenge on how they will express the sea and its waves with freehand drawing." Hmm. Waters and cliffs and I'm sufficiently confused. How about you?

[via Twitch]

In a world where animation often comes from the likes of young artistic animators and superHiro effects artists, Hayao Miyazaki is today's Walt Disney -- older and very successful. The man turned 67 yesterday, and with many years and vast achievements under his belt, rumor has it that he's set to retire. But first, he's completing his super-secret current film. Rumors have been circling over what the film will be about, but now the cat might be out of the bag -- or be a hopeful ploy to de-rail us.

According to Film Ick, it has been confirmed that the rumors that started circulating in 2005 are true -- he is adapting a Chinese children's novella named I Lost my Little Boy. (Does this go against what he told R30 in July, that the film's title will use the word "no" twice, or is he just changing the name? Or, are we all just going crazy in small rumor morsels and false information?) Anyhow, the film revolves around a boy dying from heart disease who still manages to go on great adventures. What's even more interesting than the plot is how it came to be. The Ick story claims that the novella is "very obviously inspired" by Miyazaki, and rumor has it that Totoro is mentioned in the book. If the latest word is right on key, it'll be interesting to see how Miyazaki adapts a work that is an adaptation of his own work. Will it become hyperreal? That just might be the case since Wikipedia has news that he's creating the film's storyboards in watercolor because of the movie's "unusual visual style."

[via Twitch]

America's current favorite anime creator Hayao Miyazaki has picked up the old pen once again and started work on his next project in Tokyo. Although the project has yet to be named, it does have a targeted release date wayyy down the road in summer 2008.

Miyazaki, of course, brought us Howl's Moving Castle in 2004 and can also claim the Japanese box office record with his 2001 flick Spirited Away. If I started listing every famous and enjoyable work the talented guy has done I could easily fill up a paragraph or two -- the man is a one man force of nature when it comes to Japanese cinema, and nearly every project he touches is worth your time to watch. I have no idea what this new film will be, but I'm sure we can all promise ourselves it'll be well worth watching once it makes it to American shores.

• Breaking News - Hong Kong action director Johnny To delivers this watchable Woo-alike about a police force that loses the support of the public when a robbery goes bad and is covered by a local news program. The set pieces are pretty tight, even if the drama and the statement To tries to make about the power and responsibility of the media doesn't fully come through.
• Free Enterprise: Special Edition - A self-effacing turn akin to Marlon Brando's in The Freshman and Pauly Shore's in Pauly Shore Is Dead is William Shatner, sending up the cult of personality that has followed him since the original Star Trek series ended its five year mission two years early in 1969. When fanboys Rafer Wiegel and Eric McCormack meet their boyhood idol, he is far from the super-cool man for all seasons they have long worshiped. He's bent on staging a one-man musical version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a great running joke that culminates in the brilliant payoff that is the Shatner/The Rated R rap duet, "No Tears For Caesar". Writer-director Robert Meyer Burnett has created a love letter, not just to Trek, but to anyone who has ever loved anything with fanatical passion, and this long-overdue 2-disc treatment gives it the respect it was not afforded when it was first released in 1999. Check out the Pop-Up Video style trivia track, which annotates the geekery, new special effects, the making-of feature Where No Man Has Gone Before, and the unaired TV pilot, Café Fantastique, which features the real fans who inspired this smart, hardy-har-har trek. A sequel, My Big Fat Geek Wedding, has been listed on the IMDB for nearly 3 years now, and Mindfire Entertainment's website features a rudimentary mention of it, though no firm details are available as yet.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Special Edition - Death, and the gloomy heft that comes with it, visits Hogwarts in the fourth and most satisfying installment in the ongoing series so far. When an evil thought vanquished literally rears its ugly head again, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermoine (Emma Watson) team up to expose it. Like the overwhelmingly dark Revenge Of The Sith, this is the first to bear the PG-13 rating (for "sequences of fantasy violence and frightening images"), though its decidedly down ending makes it feel more like The Empire Strikes Back. It is not unreasonable to expect studio Warner Brothers to keep their three leads on through Harry Potter and the As-Yet-Unwritten-and-Untitled Year 7 Story. This, of course, is despite the fact that they will be in their early 20's by then, but let us not forget that at least one of the 90210 kids was practically eligible for Social Security by the end of that run. Even at 157 minutes, the book has still been truncated, but it is doubly encouraging to know that kids will know what is missing and will sit still for that long in order to be able to go on smartly about it. The second disc is chock-full-o' extra goodies, and is available in full- and widescreen editions. A single disc version is also available.

As Martha previously reported, Studio Ghibli's adaptation of Ursula K. Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea (renamed, for some reason, Tales of Earthsea) is on the way. Studio Ghibli has been pimping the upcoming film on their website for a while now, while Earthsea fans waited anxiously to see if this version will be any better than the miniseries. According to IMDB, Le Guin wanted Hayao Miyazaki to direct it, but he was tied up directing Howl's Moving Castle. The new film ended up being directed by Hayao Miyazaki's son, Goro, and apparently dad didn't want his son directing it. There's familial support for you.

Catsuka has the trailer up (a downloadable Realplayer file), and it looks very, well, Studio Ghibli - not a bad thing, if you're a fan of Studio Ghibli's animation style, which I am (the elder Miyazaki's Howl's Moving Castle and Spirited Away are two of my faves). Earthsea fans - what do you think? We can't really tell much about the story's adaptation from the trailer, but it looks very pretty, doesn't it?

[ via Kaiju Shakedown, who heard about it at Twitch ]