Comedian Hiroshi Tamura’s autobiographical novel, Homeless Chugakusei, has sold over 2 million copies in Japan since it was released last year. As Tokyograph reported back in December, there was a bidding war for the film rights, with Toho winning out in the end. In recent months that popularity has also yielded a manga adaptation and a Fuji TV drama. Gee guys, overexpose much?

The movie stars WaT’s Teppei Koike as a 14-year-old who finds himself homeless for a summer when his family falls apart. He ends up living in a nearby park where he only has rain water to bathe and gets so hungry he tries to eat grass and cardboard. Akihiro Nishino and Chizuru Ikewaki also star. Check out the brand new full trailer below.

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Coming to Tokyo’s Theater Pole-Pole on July 26th is Yoko Tashiro’s new documentary, Kuusou no Mori about two families of vegetable farmers living together in Shintoku-cho, Hokkaido. Tashiro kept tabs on the Yamada and Miyashita families over a 7-year period as they raised their kids without much money and farmed vegetables without the benefit of machinery, but still managed to lead happy lives. The trailer, which you can find below, has only been viewed 300 times since it was posted a month and a half ago so this one probably isn’t primed to take the world by storm—but hey, if it’s worth 7 years to film it’s certainly worth 5 minutes to post something about.

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Director Fumihiko Sori joined Ichi stars Haruka Ayase and Takao Osawa yesterday for a preview screening of the film and greetings from the stage. As is typical for these press events nothing particularly informative came out of it, but a lot of praise was poured on Ayase for being able to handle all her own fight scenes without the benefit of a stand-in and a relatively short amount of time to train. Sori was particularly impressed by her natural reflexes and fighting spirit.

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Two weeks ago the official website for Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Tokyo Sonata added a trailer to the upper left corner of the front page. Earlier today Fortissimo Films uploaded the same trailer in much higher resolution along with a teaser. To find them go here and click the button highlighted in the image below. Once you get to the player the buttons on the side of the TV switch between teaser and trailer.

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The official website for Shosuke Murakami’s mobile phone novel adaptation, 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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