The official website for Tokyo! added a full trailer to replace the useless teaser they uploaded back in May. To find it just go there and click the trailer box in the bottom left of the city navigation. Aside from the fact that they used godawful Sorenson H.263 video encoding it’s looking really good. In Joon-ho Bong’s segment, Shaking Tokyo, Teruyuki Kagawa plays a recluse who hasn’t left his apartment in 10 years but an infatuation with his pizza delivery girl (Yu Aoi) and a well-timed earthquake force him outside. In Michel Gondry’s Interior Design, Ayako Fujitani (Steven Seagal’s daughter, but I promise she didn’t inherit the douche gene) plays a directionless girl named Hiroko who’s dating a filmmaker named Akira (Ryo Kase). As Hiroko frets about her uselessness she begins to (literally) transform into a piece of furniture—but somehow she actually feels relieved by the process. In Leos Carax’s Merde a strange raving foreigner rises from the sewers and terrorizes citizens of Tokyo before getting picked up by the police. However, as his trial moves forward people begin to have mixed feelings about his treatment and he becomes a bit of a pop culture phenomenon.

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Shun Nakahara‘s upcoming film, The Cherry Orchard (Sakura no Sono) will be released on November 8th in Japan and the official website was updated with a trailer earlier today. Nakahara also directed the 1990 film of the same name and are both are based on a Akimi Yoshida manga, but this version is not a remake. In this version a girl named Momo (Saki Fukuda) transfers to a prestigious all-girls high school. Momo is initially resistant to the school’s strict rules, but she eventually meets new friends through the drama club and their bond grows throughout the spring. Oscar promotion is using this film to showcase some of their young talent, especially the newest rising star, Saki Fukuda. In an attempt to generate some more publicity they shoehorned in a few extra roles for some of their top established talents. Ryoko Yonekura plays Momo’s violin teacher, Rei Kikukawa plays her homeroom teacher, and Aya Ueto plays the lead singer of her favorite band. Popular AKB48 member Yuko Oshima also stars as one of her friends, Midori.

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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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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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