Originally slated for September, Kensaku Watanabe‘s Cheer Cheer Cheer! (Fure Fure Shojo) is now officially scheduled for release in Japan on October 18, 2008.

In the years since Waterboys and Swing Girls set the bar impossibly high and created an insatiable market for similar movies, the zeroes-to-heroes formula has grown into sort of the Mad Libs of Japanese cinema. The plots pretty much always go something like this:

A group of [girls/boys/teens] decide to take up [quirky activity] simply to [shallow, selfish motive], but end up developing a genuine love for [aforementioned quirky activity] and decide to participate in the [local event with a big crowd to win over].

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Masayuki Miyano’s first feature film as a director, Lala Pipo is shaping up to be the most bizarre project announced for 2009 yet. The title is based on a misunderstanding of the English phrase “a lot of people” and the film stars Hiroki Narimiya as an enthusiastic adult video scout who recruits an office lady (Yuri Nakamura) to star in a porno. It’s based on a novel by Hideo Okuda, and the screenplay was adapted by filmmaker Tetsuya Nakashima (Kamikaze Girls, Memories of Matsuko). Comedienne and television personality Tomoko Murakami also appears as a tubby AV star. Teaser after the break.

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9 months after director Ryuichi Honda‘s next movie, GS Wonderland was first announced, we finally get the first teaser. It’s low-quality and tiny, but at least it’s something. You can check out all 36 glorious seconds of Chiaki Kuriyama standing around looking cool at the film’s brand-spanking-new official website. Set in a 3-year “Group Sounds” boom starting in 1968 and inspired by the Britpop explosion, Kuriyama stars as an organ-player named Miku who’s forced to cross-dress as a man to be part of fictitious Group Sounds band, “The Tightsmen”. The film is now slated for November release, so a lot of new stuff is bound to crop up in the next few months. All the more reason to subscribe to our RSS feed.

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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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Shinobu Yaguchi’s new airline comedy. Coming out in Japan on November 15. 2008. For the second teaser, see this link. For the full trailer, see this link.

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