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Toho certainly knows a thing or two about stretching out PR. Earlier today, a third teaser for Katsuyuki Motohiro‘s Bayside Shakedown: The Movie 3 was uploaded to their Toho Yokoku website. As I tweeted last week, a full trailer for the film also premiered recently on Japanese TV, but that version has yet to be “officially” uploaded.

Bayside Shakedown, aka Odoru Daisosasen, began as a police drama/comedy series which aired on Fuji TV in 1997 and garnered high enough ratings to warrant a bunch of subsequent TV specials and a big budget film series. Kameyama has been closely involved with the franchise since the beginning, having produced the original drama.

The third film again follows longtime protagonist Shunsuke Aoshima (Yuji Oda), who’s recently been promoted to Chief Detective only to be saddled with eight difficult cases including murder, burglary, and a serial bomber.

“Bayside Shakedown: The Movie 3” will be...

Japan’s prospects for winning the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film are looking bright this year. As Japan was the winner of this category in 2008 as well, this would mean two consecutive years - certain to be a great boon to Japanese cinema and its popularity overseas. Last year’s winner, “Okuribito” (Departures), received not only an Oscar, but also rave reviews internationally. This year’s contender, “Dare Mo Mamotte Kurenai” (Nobody to Watch Over Me) was chosen on the 9th of September. DareMamo, as it is popularly known, was released in Japan in January this year. It is directed by Ryoichi Kimizuka, well-known in the West for the horror titles Parasite Eve and Kansen (Infection), as well as Japan’s record-breaking box-office film, “Odoru Daisosasen” (Bayside Shakedown).

Clear the decks. The Force is on its way. Star Wars: Episode III -- Revenge of the Sith, the sixth and final episode of George Lucas' singular sci-fi epics, is expected to ignite the somewhat sleepy start of the summer blockbuster season as it takes off this coming weekend in 102 overseas territories. Meanwhile, Kingdom of Heaven, Episode III's 20th Century Fox stablemate, passed an overseas milestone by chalking up a cume to date of $103.8 million after a $28 million weekend from 99 markets, with Fox accounting for $89.8 million from territories under its jurisdiction and Pathe extracting $6.7 million from France and Medusa Films, also $6.7 million, from Italy. On its second weekend, Kingdom showed once again that historical epics generally do better abroad than in the home market. But it failed to overwhelm Japanese moviegoers, who favored their own branded crime-action series Bayside Shakedown, which held the top spot with a second-weekend take of almost $3 million from 282 screens -- for a market cume of $12.7 million -- to Kingdom's opening weekend of $2.4 million from 492.