The music of Kinji Fukasaku’s Battle Royale is probably as memorable as the film itself, setting the mood for just about every scene. Amazingly, Masamichi Amano only had one week to compose all the music for the film. Not an easy task, considering music is constantly prevalent in the film and he needed to fill 90 minutes. Working without sleep, Amano conducted a symphony orchestra of 120 musicians for two days while continuing to compose during breaks. Unfortunately the film’s soundtrack, originally distributed by Culture Publishers Inc. in Japan, went out of print a long time ago and has been difficult to track down ever since. Amazon currently has 2 copies of the import CD in stock and they’re priced at a staggering $63.99 USD. Well from now on there will be no need to scour Ebay or pay jacked up import prices because Milan Records is releasing the OST exclusively through iTunes on July 22nd. Full track details below.

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A blind shamisen player named Ichi (Haruka Ayase) travels alone along the road. Upon noticing her disability and seemingly helpless state, unscrupulous people constantly try to take advantage of her. However, what they don’t realize is that in spite of her frail image she is an accomplished sword master, and she makes short work of anyone that confronts her with the aid of a blade hidden in her walking cane. One day she gets caught in a battle between two rival yakuza groups, and eventually discovers love for the first time. You can find the full trailer here.

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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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With 8 months to promote Takashi Miike‘s live-action adaptation of the popular 1970s cartoon Yatterman it makes sense that the film’s PR team is keeping things close to the vest so far. But earlier this morning NTV viewers got a *very* brief sneak peek at a scene from the film. It’s tough to make anything out in the scene shown but given what we know about the cast so far it’s safe to assume that’s Arashi‘s Sho Sakurai as Yatter-Bark’s builder Gan-chan looking up at his creation with teen idol Saki Fukuda in the background in her role as Gan’s partner Ai-chan and a CGI-created Omotchama buzzing around the laboratory. Live-action shooting wrapped last month and everything seems to be on schedule for a March 2009 release. Clip after the break.

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