The debut directorial effort of renowned Japanese photographer Kazumi Kurigami, due out in March of 2009.

A voyeur (Masatoshi Nagase) secretly photographs a mysterious woman (Rie Miyazawa) from his stark apartment which faces hers. He becomes transfixed as he witnesses her go through her daily routines, and stacks videotape after videotape of the footage he takes. One day while following her, he comes across a bloody car wreck in which the victim crashed his luxury car into a guardrail. In the crowd of witnesses, he notices the woman he’s been following and inadvertently releases the shutter of his camera, snapping photographs of her reaction. Later, he hands over a bag of videotapes to his client (Koji Yakusho) and asks him who the woman is. He is becoming totally obsessed with her, and their paths will soon cross again.

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The Japanese trailer for Max Mannix’s Rain Fall (Ame no Kiba); starring Gary Oldman, Kippei Shiina, and Kyoko Hasegawa has been added to the film’s official website.

In the film, which is based on the first in a series of six novels by American author Barry Eisler, Shiina plays a half-Japanese assassin named John Rain who’s forced to serve as bodyguard to the daughter of one of his victims (Hasegawa) who is thought to hold the key to exposing high-level governmental corruption. Rain is a former member of the U.S. Special Forces. While serving in Vietnam, he was betrayed by a man who later became the head of CIA operations in Tokyo, William Holtzer (Oldman). With nowhere to run, Rain depends on a trustworthy nemesis and Keisatsucho agent named Tatsu (Akira Emoto) when he needs advice.

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Yusuke Yamada’s best-selling novel, “Real Onigokko”, was set in the year 3000 and centered around an arrogant king who dealt with overpopulation by coming up with a sadistic game in which everyone with the surname “Sato” would be chased down and murdered for sport. Director Issei Shibata only had about 100 million yen (~$1 million USD) to film his live-action adaptation, pretty much ruling out any shot of setting it in the year 3000. Instead, he based his version in an alternate version of modern-day Japan. He probably could have stopped there, but he also felt the need to give the film’s main character the “special power” of shifting back and forth between the normal world and the alternate world where the chasing game exists. Unnecessary? Probably. Convoluted? Hell yes. But the basic elements of the original story are kept mostly intact, and those are still pretty damn cool.

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Scheduled for release on January 17, 2009, Pandemic involves large-scale virus that infects 25 million people. Satoshi Tsumabuki plays a doctor working to save lives at a field hospital and Rei Dan plays a medical officer from the World Health Organization. For the first trailer, see this link.

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Live-action adaptation of Osamu Tezuka’s manga serial from the late 70s. When a top secret chemical compound called MW infects an island near Okinawa, the military is sent in to kill all the victims and cover up the incident. A survivor named Michio Yuki (Hiroshi Tamaki) grows up to become a highly-successful banker, but he is slowly being driven mad by the effects of MW. After committing a series of ruthless crimes to get revenge against the people responsible for the cover-up, he decides that the only way to truly get revenge is to unleash MW on the world and exterminate the entire human race. Takayuki Yamada stars as Father Garai, a priest desperately trying to save Michio’s soul but not necessarily doing much to stop his crimes.

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