A new trailer for Minoru Kawasaki’s daikaiju comedy Monster X Strikes Back: Attack the G8 Summit, which I first wrote about here, was released yesterday—and unlike the first teaser it includes some actual footage! There was some confusion over whether this movie would be a full-blown comedy or a serious attempt at an old school monster flick. Judging from this new trailer, Kawasaki seems to have struck a nice balance between his trademark wacked-out sense of humor and his love of the genre, but we’ll have to wait a while to know for sure. “Monster X” opens July 26, 2008 in Japan. Below you’ll find the teaser followed by the new trailer.

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The makers of Shonen Merikensack, the rock ‘n’ roll comedy which I wrote more in-depth about here recently released a clip of Aoi Miyazaki filming some scenes. It’s not very long but you can definitely tell she’s fitting right in with the comedic pacing of director Kankuro Kudo, screenwriter of “Ping Pong” and “Maiko Haaaan!!!”.

Miyazaki first caught everyone’s attention by playing hard-luck kids from dysfunctional families in films like Eureka and Harmful Insect, but has since expanded her repertoire considerably and continues to show off her acting chops. Earlier this year she even played 2 roles in the same movie. Now with Kudo’s help she’ll be adding spaz-out comedy to her resume. Check out the clip below and see how she’s doing so far.

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As I posted here yesterday, this year’s New York Asian Film Festival features an impressive lineup of Japanese films - many of which will be screened for the first time in the US. Ryo Iwamatsu’s Then Summer Came will be screened for the first time anywhere, so I figured it’s as good a time as any to write about it. We first heard about this one last summer around this time when it was going by its working title “Soshite Natsu ga Kita” which actually does mean “Then Summer Came”. The Japanese title was then changed to “Tamio no Shiawase” which means “Happiness of Tamio”. The film is Iwamatsu’s first as a director since 1993’s “Ohaka to Rikon”. He’s more widely known as an actor, with roles in films like “In the Pool” and “Adrift in Tokyo”, but his work as a playwright and director has earned him a lot of respect within the industry.

The story revolves around a father named Nobuo (Yoshio Harada) and his son Tamio (Joe Odagiri). Both of them are kind of irresponsible - stuck in the trappings of their past, with neither seeming to be able to shed their respective roles as father and son. With Tamio’s marriage to his girlfriend (Kumiko Aso) rapidly approaching, both men are overwhelmed by everyone telling them what to do. The pair go to extraordinary and occasionally ridiculous lengths to make sure the wedding is memorable.

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Takashi Miike‘s new film, God’s Puzzle (Kamisama no Puzzle) opens in Japan this Saturday and I’m still having trouble wrapping my head around what it’s actually about. That puts me in good company, however, because apparently Miike didn’t understand the plot himself when he first read it. The script, based on a novel by Shinji Kimoto, is rife with physics jargon and theoretical science. Knowing how important it is for a director to understand the material he’s trying to interpret, Miike came up with a clever solution - split the original lead role into twins. The thinking behind this decision was that Motokazu (Hayato Ichihara), the new main character that was not in the original novel could explain principles of physics in simple terms that an audience could easily understand. Hopefully that method of simplification combined with a whole lot of CGI-created visual representations will help bridge the gap between entertainment and a 2+ hour science lesson.

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Shingo Matsubara’s The Taste of Fish (Tsukiji Uogashi Sandaime) comes out this Saturday after already having premiered at Cannes back on May 15th, and with a sequel already in the works it looks like it will become a franchise of yearly films if it’s even moderately successful. It all seems a bit odd to me, mostly because I can’t picture Takao Osawa ever being known as “that fish dude” in the way Kiyoshi Atsumi became synonymous with Torajiro in the Tora-san series, but I guess time will tell.

The story is based on a 21-part manga series originally published in Big Comic. Osawa plays Shuntaro Akagi, a successful businessman who works in the human resources department of a general trading company. His life is going well both financially and personally, and marriage to his girlfriend Asuka (Rena Tanaka) may be on the horizon. One day Shuntaro’s superiors put him in charge of a large-scale corporate restructuring, and the list of people being axed includes an old boss who taught him the ropes. Shuntaro is extremely conflicted, but his attention is diverted when he has to help out at “Dragon Fish”, the fish trading company normally run by Asuka’s now-ailing father. Shuntaro is initially overwhelmed by both the characters he meets at Tsukiji Fish Market and the traditions that have been passed down through the generations of people that work there, but over time his sense of taste becomes more of an asset than his business savvy ever was and he starts to enjoy the quirkiness of his new job much more than the cutthroat nature of his old one.

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