On Thursday Climber’s High director Masato Harada held a special screening of the film for a group of schoolchildren in Ueno Village, Gunma Prefecture—the area of the tragic 1985 plane crash on which the story is based. Also in attendance were the film’s star Shinichi Tsutsumi and singer Chitose Hajime, who performed the theme song Hotaru Boshi (firefly light) for the kids and offered flowers for the victims enshrined there. The film is based on a novel by Hideo Yokoyama and was first adapted to live-action in a television drama that aired on NTV in 2005 in which lovable helmet-haired Koichi Sato played the lead role. Public release is coming later today in Japan.

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In the current culture of foreign movie coverage, where 1-line blurbs can make or break your international sales appeal, Check It Out, Yo! is a good example of a movie that gets unfairly torpedoed by its own premise (not to mention title) right off the bat. That 1 line goes something like this: Three guys from Okinawa attend a concert of local rap group “Workaholic” and get so excited by the reaction of the crowd that they immediately decide to start a band of their own to impress chicks. While this idea sounds like it could quickly spiral into a stupid Hollywood-style teen sex comedy, it’s actually more of a goofy take on innocent young love and the ridiculous lengths teenagers are willing to go when every unrequited crush seems like the end of the world.

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Not 100% Japanese movie-related but I just saw this article on how Google is being forced to hand over all records of videos watched on YouTube along with users’ IP addresses to Viacom in an attempt to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created, and it reminded me of some finger-wagging I’ve been meaning to do. I’ve been a fan of YouTube since the beginning and I’ve probably learned more stupid, pointless crap there than anywhere else (which I enjoy immensely), but it’s not without its negatives. In the beginning YouTube was a seemingly-endless wonderland of Japanese variety shows, movie clips, and hard to find odds and ends. Then Google bought them out and every mega corporation, foreign and domestic, started seeing them as a target.

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Cinema fans and my F5 key should thank Jason Gray for pointing out that the trailer for Kiyoshi Kurosawa‘s Tokyo Sonata has finally been added to its official website. The film took home the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes back in May. Its story revolves around a salaryman whose family slowly falls apart after he loses the job that defined him. I’m sure that’s a drastic over-simplification given Kurosawa’s past work, so check out Midnight Eye for an early review with lots of words. I notice the trailer’s theme music is Debussy’s “Clair de Lune”. Hopefully this film can live up to the last critically-acclaimed masterpiece to make use of that, School Day of the Dead.

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Talk about coming out of nowhere. Today we present you with Gachi-ban, a movie that seems to have appeared out of thin air and yet already has a trailer and is primed for a limited 1-week showing starting July 19 at Cinemart Roppongi. Does this lack of prior PR mean it sucks? Quite possibly, but judging from the trailer it will at least give the kids some over-the-top delinquent schoolboy ass-kicking to tide them over until Crows Zero 2 comes out next year.

Created by long-time pinku director Hideo Jyoujyou and co-written by Masao Iketani (Yakuza’s Kindergarten), the film is pretty much a direct spoof that makes no effort to hide that fact that it’s trying to capitalize on the success of Takashi Miike‘s Crows Zero with a quickly-produced “high-tension yankee movie”. The difference, however, is that they’re replacing Miike with Jyoujyou and Shun Oguri with Shunsuke Kubozuka (Saikano, Yo-Yo Girl Cop). Something tells me they won’t be hitting the 2.4 billion yen mark that “Crows” reached.

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