On Thursday Climber’s High director Masato Harada held a special screening of the film for a group of schoolchildren in Ueno Village, Gunma Prefecture—the area of the tragic 1985 plane crash on which the story is based. Also in attendance were the film’s star Shinichi Tsutsumi and singer Chitose Hajime, who performed the theme song Hotaru Boshi (firefly light) for the kids and offered flowers for the victims enshrined there. The film is based on a novel by Hideo Yokoyama and was first adapted to live-action in a television drama that aired on NTV in 2005 in which lovable helmet-haired Koichi Sato played the lead role. Public release is coming later today in Japan.

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On August 12, 1985 a roving reporter working for a North Kanto newspaper named Kazumasa Yuki (Shinichi Tsutsumi) happens to be preparing to scale Mt. Tanigawa when a tragic Airplane crash occurs in the area. He’s given the go-ahead to cover the story and must face tremendous pressure from his paper to be the first one to get the scoop, all against the backdrop of unthinkable human tragedy. The first trailer can be found here.

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On August 12, 1985 a roving reporter working for a North Kanto newspaper named Kazumasa Yuki (Shinichi Tsutsumi) happens to be preparing to scale Mt. Tanigawa when a tragic Airplane crash occurs in the area. He’s given the go-ahead to cover the story and must face tremendous pressure from his paper to be the first one to get the scoop, all against the backdrop of unthinkable human tragedy. The second trailer can be found here.

watch »

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In the current culture of foreign movie coverage, where 1-line blurbs can make or break your international sales appeal, Check It Out, Yo! is a good example of a movie that gets unfairly torpedoed by its own premise (not to mention title) right off the bat. That 1 line goes something like this: Three guys from Okinawa attend a concert of local rap group “Workaholic” and get so excited by the reaction of the crowd that they immediately decide to start a band of their own to impress chicks. While this idea sounds like it could quickly spiral into a stupid Hollywood-style teen sex comedy, it’s actually more of a goofy take on innocent young love and the ridiculous lengths teenagers are willing to go when every unrequited crush seems like the end of the world.

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Not 100% Japanese movie-related but I just saw this article on how Google is being forced to hand over all records of videos watched on YouTube along with users’ IP addresses to Viacom in an attempt to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created, and it reminded me of some finger-wagging I’ve been meaning to do. I’ve been a fan of YouTube since the beginning and I’ve probably learned more stupid, pointless crap there than anywhere else (which I enjoy immensely), but it’s not without its negatives. In the beginning YouTube was a seemingly-endless wonderland of Japanese variety shows, movie clips, and hard to find odds and ends. Then Google bought them out and every mega corporation, foreign and domestic, started seeing them as a target.

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