Well, Its ol' Father Geek here at World Geek Headquarters in Austin, Texas annnnnnd I've got our man in the heart of Tokyo, pigmon, here with his latest report for our Asia-AICN column...

Dear Fathergeek-san

I'm sorry to send you this report so late. I had to work in the real world too hard this last week. Here is this week's report from Tokyo...

NEWS

* Finally the much ballyhooed major Hong Kong movie, Kar Wai Wong's "2046" has restarted shooting. A big press conference was held in Shanghai last week. Japanese pop star, in his feature movie debut, Takuya Kimura spoke that the new shooting was going smoothly.

"2046" started shooting in June,1999, but it stopped production in April, 2000. There were so many rumors flying around, such as Kimura had been fired, impossible financial problems, and so on. The Director said however that it was worth it to wait the 4 years for Kimura who had shown tremendous progress as an actor.

This big budgeted Hong Kong movie will be premiered at next year's big Cannes Film Festival in France.

* American wrestler/K-1 fighter, Bob Sapp, who is well known in Japan, appears as an anchor man in the forthcoming live action movie, "Devil Man".

* One of hottest TV commercials in Japan now is, New Canon camera IXY Digital commercial which features Milla Jovovich and Japanese soccer player, Hidetoshi Nakata. Milla wears 12 different costumes during this commercial.

* Director Shunji Iwai ("Love Letter" and "Swallowtail") will make his new movie, "Hana To Alice" for next spring's release. He has already shot this movie as a short film for an internet only project which showed in 4 diffrent parts. This is his first movie in 3 years. Ann Suzuki("Returner") and Yuu Aoi play high school students who share their love with one boy. Hmmmmmmmmmm...

* Here are the results of the feature film competition at the world's worst film festival... The Tokyo Film Festival...

And the winners (losers) are...

• Best Movie "Nuan"(China)
• Best Actor Teruyuki Kagawa("Nuan")
• Best Actress tie Christne Jean Fulslander("Santa Smokes") and Shinobu Terashima("Vibrator")
• Special Judge Award "The Suit"(Russia)
• Best Director Chris Valenteen & Tale Teller("Santa Smokes")
• Best Artistic Achivement "The Suit"(Russia)

* This year's monster hit at Japanese box office,"Bayside Shakedown 2" has been re-edited for foreign release. Producers cut some of the Japanese humor scenes which they felt will not be understood by the mass of western audiences. Also the sound is being re-done at Lukas' Sky Walker Sound north of San Francisco in the USA. This version will be released world wide next year (negotiation under way...).

BOXOFFICE

The week's winners were...

• 1 (New) The Matrix:Revolutions
• 2 (1) Kill Bill
• 3 (New) g@ame
• 4 (New) Ashura No Gotoku
• 5 (3) Tears Of The Sun

NEXT WEEK

Miike's "You've Got A Mail" review and etc....

See ya at the movies!

pigmon