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According to Asian Pulse, "Taketori Monogatari has directly and indirectly inspired many Japanese manga and anime, such as Sailormoon and Inuyasha. This beloved story is considered to be the oldest surviving example of Japanese narrative... A little baby is found inside the stalk of a glowing plant by a bamboo cutter. He takes her home, and raises her with his wife as their own daughter, and they give her the name Kaguya-Hime (radiant-night princess). She grows into a beautiful adult woman, with many suitors, even the Emperor of Japan – and she rebuffs them all. Then, things become even more complicated as her true lineage becomes revealed, and her special relationship with the moon."

Although this famous tale has been the subject of many movies (Empire Online notes that it was also the subject of Kon Ichikawa's Taketori Monogatari, aka Princess from the Moon) this is the first time that Ghibli has ventured into folklore territory.

Asian Pulse also revealed that the revered Miyazaki, who wrote and directed Ponyo, Howl's Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke, and My Neighbor Totoro, just to name a few, is in discussions to do two more features in the next three years.

The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter is slated for a 2010 release.

• Breaking News - Hong Kong action director Johnny To delivers this watchable Woo-alike about a police force that loses the support of the public when a robbery goes bad and is covered by a local news program. The set pieces are pretty tight, even if the drama and the statement To tries to make about the power and responsibility of the media doesn't fully come through.
• Free Enterprise: Special Edition - A self-effacing turn akin to Marlon Brando's in The Freshman and Pauly Shore's in Pauly Shore Is Dead is William Shatner, sending up the cult of personality that has followed him since the original Star Trek series ended its five year mission two years early in 1969. When fanboys Rafer Wiegel and Eric McCormack meet their boyhood idol, he is far from the super-cool man for all seasons they have long worshiped. He's bent on staging a one-man musical version of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, a great running joke that culminates in the brilliant payoff that is the Shatner/The Rated R rap duet, "No Tears For Caesar". Writer-director Robert Meyer Burnett has created a love letter, not just to Trek, but to anyone who has ever loved anything with fanatical passion, and this long-overdue 2-disc treatment gives it the respect it was not afforded when it was first released in 1999. Check out the Pop-Up Video style trivia track, which annotates the geekery, new special effects, the making-of feature Where No Man Has Gone Before, and the unaired TV pilot, Café Fantastique, which features the real fans who inspired this smart, hardy-har-har trek. A sequel, My Big Fat Geek Wedding, has been listed on the IMDB for nearly 3 years now, and Mindfire Entertainment's website features a rudimentary mention of it, though no firm details are available as yet.
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Special Edition - Death, and the gloomy heft that comes with it, visits Hogwarts in the fourth and most satisfying installment in the ongoing series so far. When an evil thought vanquished literally rears its ugly head again, Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermoine (Emma Watson) team up to expose it. Like the overwhelmingly dark Revenge Of The Sith, this is the first to bear the PG-13 rating (for "sequences of fantasy violence and frightening images"), though its decidedly down ending makes it feel more like The Empire Strikes Back. It is not unreasonable to expect studio Warner Brothers to keep their three leads on through Harry Potter and the As-Yet-Unwritten-and-Untitled Year 7 Story. This, of course, is despite the fact that they will be in their early 20's by then, but let us not forget that at least one of the 90210 kids was practically eligible for Social Security by the end of that run. Even at 157 minutes, the book has still been truncated, but it is doubly encouraging to know that kids will know what is missing and will sit still for that long in order to be able to go on smartly about it. The second disc is chock-full-o' extra goodies, and is available in full- and widescreen editions. A single disc version is also available.

Films are never marketed as just "live-action," because that wouldn't make sense. Is the "live-action" movie a drama, a comedy, horror, or something else? This is obvious, but I mention it because it's exactly the kind of approach used to market and distribute animated features. When the Best Animated Feature Award was introduced for the 2002 Academy Awards, it seemed to give some legitimacy to animated features, but it also gave the wrongful impression that animation is just animation, and not, as is clearly the case, a method of making a film that can be scary, or dramatic, or weird, or funny, or any other adjective you can come up with. Animated features run the same gambit as any live-action flick, but when it comes to marketing and distribution they're often crammed under the "Animation" rubric.