PiFan and Stuff

Even though the Puchon International Fantastic Film Festival goes until Saturday officially, Thursday night saw the closing ceremonies and awards handed out. And the big winner was the Thai thriller “13” (also known as 13 BELOVED) taking home the two top prizes.

Directed by Chookiet Sakveerakul, "13" won both the Best of Puchon prize, awarded by the Puchon Choice jury, and the European Fantastic Film Festival Federation Asian Award.

As far as attendance goes, this year's PiFan looks like it was the strongest in years -- the percentage of seats sold was the highest in five years (which is as far back as I have data for). So that looks pretty impressive.

Anything else? It was a fun week. The weather was the best I can remember at PiFan. Only a couple of days of rain, only a couple of days of brutal heat... but mostly quite nice. Great weather for sitting outside and having a beer. Writing for the Cine 21 dailies was an odd experience, but quite enjoyable.

Professionally, meeting Benson Lee of PLANET B-BOY was certainly the best bit of serendipity for me. He gave me plenty of information that is going straight into my book. Also, his film is really, really well done. Totally worth watching.

And I finally got to see MIRROR MASK, which pleased me no end.

.....

In other, non-PiFan news:

TRANSFORMERS appears to now be the biggest foreign film ever in Korea. It just topped 6 million admissions on Thursday (or about $40 million), beating LORD OF THE RINGS: RETURN OF THE KING. Just 21 days after its release, the metal mayhem movie is still in 367 theaters, so it should keep climbing for a while.

MAY 18's release has been moved up a day. It will be getting a full, nationwide release on July 25 now (at least I think the old press releases said July 26). CJ Entertainment is convinced they will get a great opening weekend, but everyone there seems unsure of how the film will do in the weeks after that. Anyhow, I hope to blog about the movie in the next day or so.