It was a big week in the world of film: Hong Kong voted for its industry favorites, the 58th Cannes Film Festival wrapped up and Star Wars broke several box-office records.
In Hong Kong, over 25,000 votes were cast by the public on the Internet to choose Chinese-movie favorites in celebration of 100 years of Chinese film. The poll was Web-based and included a choice from 103 Chinese films picked by filmmakers and experts last March.
Director Chen Kaige's Farewell My Concubine (1993) was voted the most popular Chinese film of the century. The film had won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993.
Director Wong Kar-wai's love story Days of Being Wild took second in the poll and John Woo's gangster flick A Better Tomorrow came in third.
Woo, who has also directed Face Off and Mission: Impossible II, was voted the most popular director, followed by Wong Kar-wai.
Favorite actor went to the late Leslie Cheung, followed by Jackie Chan, Francis Ng, Bruce Lee, and Jet Li.
Maggie Cheung was voted the most popular Chinese-film actress of the century.
On the other side of the world in Cannes, the Palme d'Or was presented to Belgian directors Jean-Pierre Dardenne and Luc Dardenne for The Child, which tells of a petty thief struggling with fatherhood and was influenced by both Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment and Robert Bresson's French film Pickpocket.
The Dardenne brothers won Cannes' top prize in 1999 for Rosetta, about Belgium's work and unemployment issues.
The festival's second-highest award, the Grand Prix, was given to Jim Jarmusch for Broken Flowers, about middle-aged Lothario (Bill Murray) who searches for the son he didn't ever know he had.
The honorable mention, the Jury Prize, was awarded to Wang Xiaoshuai's Shanghai Dreams, which tells of provincial China and proletarian unhappiness during the early 1980s.
George Lucas' Star Wars: Episode III: Revenge of the Sith broke records on opening night, and over the week, it shattered more, setting box-office records in both the US and the UK.
In the UK, it earned ?10.7 million on the opening three-day weekend and beat the previous record-holder, Shrek 2, by ?90,000.
Monster-In-Law, starring Jane Fonda and Jennifer Lopez, came in second; crusader epic Kingdom of Heaven slipped from first place last weekend to third; and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy rose one place to fourth.
In the US, Revenge of the Sith, was, of course, first at the box office. It took in US$50 million on opening day and compiled US$158,449,700 from Thursday through Sunday.
The final film in the six-part blockbuster was shown on more than 9,400 screens in more than 3,500 theaters and earned 68 percent of the three-day weekend's revenue generated by the top-12 films.
But the film didn't take the Friday-through-Sunday record set by Spider-Man in 2002. That record holds at US$114.8 million.
And the film couldn't defeat the 13-week slump that has plagued Hollywood. The film brought the box office up from last weekend's earnings by 67 percent, but the weekend's box office was down 3.5 percent from the same time last year.
``It's shocking,'' said Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations. ``We really thought this would end the slump.''
It was the other films that kept the US box office down. Second-place Monster-In-Law earned US$14.35 million for the weekend, and third-place Kicking and Screaming took in US$10.7 million.
Usually runners-up in the US box office play more of a contributing role to the total earnings. Last year, for example, Troy contributed US$23.9 million to the box office championed by Shrek 2.
The US box office's top-10 was finished by films that earned US$5 million or less during the weekend: Crash, Unleashed, Kingdom of Heaven, House of Wax, The Interpreter, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and Mindhunters.
In other news, actress Renee Zellweger received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame on Tuesday. She stars in the upcoming film Cinderella Man with Australian actor Russell Crowe.
And American Oscar winners Hilary Swank and Morgan Freeman visited Tokyo this week to promote Oscar winning film Million Dollar Baby. It opens in Japan on May 28.
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