7 posts tagged “movies”

This is cool. The first season of Sonny Chiba's "Shadow Warriros" will be released as a boxset on April 17, 2007 and can be purchased at Amazon.com. [Via twitch.]

We'll have to wait until New Year's Day (what, like a couple days from now) to buy a fukubukuro from CD Japan so until then, we can stare at their place holder page. Here's more info on it:

2006 is almost over and that means its time for our annual fukubukuro sale! The CDJapan staff has spent the last week choosing items from our stock that we think you'll enjoy, and assembling them into bags to represent a number of genres on our site.

Now for the fun part. Have a look at our fukubukuro sale page (products go live New Year's Day so for now the page is just a place holder) and find a bag that you like.

So here's the deal; You'll be able to see at least two of the items in the bag, and the cost of every item in your bag should be well over the cost of buying each item seperately. However, each bag also contains a secret item which you won't see until the package arrives at your house.

Now, we won't be answering any questions about the secret items, but I can promise you we've made sure that each secret item fits in with the feel of its bag.

I had a chance to see Zhang Yimou's latest blockbuster "Curse of the Golden Flower" (Apple QuickTime trailer link) yesterday and I must say that as expected, it's on a much larger scale than "Heroes" and "House of Flying Daggers". I may have to check it out again at the theater and I'll definitely be buying this one on DVD. By the way, Li Man is amazing.

Yay! Zhang Yimou's latest wuxia masterpiece "Curse of the Golden Flower" starring Chow Yun Fat and Gong Li starts this Friday. This'll probably be the last movie I see in the theaters for the year and what better way to bring in the end of 2006!

The film "Midnight Sun" (the original Japanese title is "Taiyou no Uta") turned out to be a lot better than I had expected. As a fan of J-pop singer YUI, I've had the film on my to-watch-list and actually ended up watching most of the episodes of the TBS TV version starring SAWAJIRI Erika as AMANE Kaoru and YAMADA Takayuki as FUJISHIRO Kouji. The TV version was (the series just ended) interesting enough to make me sit through nine episodes (I still have the final, 10th episode in queue) but I still wondered how the film that preceded it compared to its longer TV version. Thanks to a HIFF members-only sneak peek of the film ahead of its festival showing on October 22nd and 26th, I was able to finally watch it on the big screen.

I'm sure we'll see an influx of people from Hawaii who'll be searching the web for info on J-pop singer-songwriter (yup, she writes her own stuff!) YUI in the coming days so I've compiled a bunch of links below.

YUI on Wikipedia.
YUI on Google Video.
YUI on YouTube.

(I uploaded an acoustic version of the song "Good-bye days" under the "Audio" links section.)

YUI's music is available for online purchase at cdjapan.co.jp or at YesAsia.com. The film soundtrack is also available at both online stores. (Note: unlike soundtracks released in other countries, those released in Japan normally do not include the theme songs.) You'll find YUI's CD single release for "Midnight Sun"—which includes the two other songs of hers that were featured in the film, "Good-bye days" (SRCL-6278), under YUI for Kaoru Amane (YUI for 雨音薫).

I highly recommend the film to fans of J-pop music and Asian cinema, and the DVD will be released in Japan on November 22nd (without English subs). You can bet on an Asian-wide release with English subtitles to follow that one and maybe we'll see it released domestically here too.

(Previously blogged over at Karakui.com.)