Juri Ueno’s next film project, tentatively titled Gorilla Butterfly, is now in the process of casting extras for various scenes. I don’t think the initial press conference has been held yet so details are sparse, but we do know it’s being distributed by Toho and co-produced by Altamira Pictures and Ueno’s talent agency, Amuse.

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2 years after her break-through, Oscar-nominated performance in “Babel” and a few months before her next Hollywood flick, “The Brothers Bloom” is released, Rinko Kikuchi is in talks to star in Map of the Sounds of Tokyo, directed by Isabel Coixet. The film will be produced by the Spanish company Mediapro but is set in Japan. The story involves a fish market employee (Kikuchi) who doubles as a contract killer. The Spanish-born Coixet has formerly directed various critically-acclaimed dramas like “Elegy” starring Penelope Cruz and “My Life Without Me” starring Sarah Polley.

Source: The Hollywood Reporter

Check out “The Brothers Bloom” trailer

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Forget everything I’ve written about this year; all I really care about is Shinobu Yaguchi‘s Happy Flight. Okay, maybe that’s an overstatement—but it is the movie I’m most excited about in 2008, hands down. Most people know of Yaguchi for his two teen idol zeroes to heroes blockbusters, Waterboys and Swing Girls, but before that he had quite a run on tough luck comedies. Throughout the 90s he released movies like Down the Drain, My Secret Cache, and Adrenaline Drive in which people would get caught up in the worst possible situations that just snowballed from there as if they were on a mission to prove out Murphy’s law. Sure he clings to formulas for dear life, but it doesn’t really matter because his scripts are always funny and his actors always seem to hit the right comedic marks.

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The official website for Takahisa Zeze‘s Pandemic (Kansen Rettou) went live today and there have been all sorts of new developments since the movie was first announced at the beginning of the year. The release date has been officially set at January 17, 2009. Some new cast additions include Ryoko Kuninaka as a nurse named Takako, Yuji Tanaka as Takako’s husband, Chizuru Ikewaki as the wife of the first infected patient, Takanori Takeyama as a freelance virus researcher, Koichi Sato as an ER doctor, and Tatsuya Fuji as a university professor and expert on the influenza virus.

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The official website for Shosuke Murakami’s mobile phone novel adaptation, Threads of Destiny (Akai Ito) now features two new video clips: For some more behind the scenes footage of Nao Minamisawa shooting the first teaser, click here. For the 2nd teaser, click here. As I posted here a few weeks ago, the story will be split between a Fuji TV drama and this movie which will act as the middle part of the story. Additional cast for the second half of TV drama were announced a few days ago. New additions include Sayuri Iwata as Haruna, Hiroshi Yazaki as Yuya, Kasumi Suzuki as Yuuri, and Ryo Tajima as Mitsu.

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