Sorry for the multiple Friday Free for All posts, folks, but I just couldn’t let this one go.

For the September issue of play magazine, Ignition entertainment managed to get gorgeous Wii side-scroller Muramasa [Editor's note: ??] top billing on the front cover. Bottom billing, too. This amazing, dare we say sensual cover was drawn by Vanillaware’s George Kamitani, and yes, it’s a tip of the…hat to Hokusai’s sexy/creepy classic “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife“. Only this time with swords. [via Kotaku]

I call it tasteful yet understated, the kind of artwork a man could really airbrush on the side of his rape van.  But I’m probably biased, my favorite Transformer was always Octopus Thong.

[PS - as posted in the comments section by Renton, here's the more, er, direct version]

According to Variety, Warner Bros Japan will produce the strangely punctuated film, Sushi King! Goes to New York, based on a Japanese television show.

Yukihiko Tsutsumi ("Memories of Tomorrow") helms and Koichi Domoto of boy band Kinki Kids [stars of the above video] stars as a genius sushi chef who goes to New York to perfect his skills and face off against the local competition…Dialogue will be half Japanese and half English. 

Pretty much any time you hear the phrase "Japanese boy band" you know you’re dealing with blog gold.  It would seem that this is like the Japanese version of You Got Served, starring the Japanese version of Justin Timberlake.  All 26 of Kinki Kids’ singles have debuted at number one, and they just wouldn’t be Japanese if their videos didn’t make me feel like I’m on mushrooms. Just once I want to sit in on the pitch meeting for one of these things.  "First you sit in tree.  Then squirrel girls come.  Mushroom cry, then butterfly." 

You’ve gotta wonder what Japanese bedtime stories are like.  "Sleep tight, don’t let the evil octopus strangle you in your dreams."  "You know what happens to little children who don’t eat their vegetable, right?  Their guardian spirit gets beheaded by robots."

Tobey Maguire (who looks pretty much like what I expect a guy named "Tobey" to look like) is on to produce and possibly star in a motion picture adaptation of Robotech, whose rights were recently acquired by WB.  

A sprawling sci-fi epic, "Robotech" takes place at a time when Earth has developed giant robots from the technology on an alien spacecraft that crashed on a South Pacific isle. Mankind is forced to use the technology to fend off three successive waves of alien invasions. The first invasion concerns a battle with a race of giant warriors who seek to retrieve their flagship's energy source known as "protoculture," and the planet's survival ends up in the hands of two young pilots.

Yeah, okay.  Ever noticed how Japanese anime characters always have enormous eyeballs?  I think it's like Japanese artists' fantasy of what it must be like to not be Japanese.  As if non-Asians all stand around with our gigantic eyes going, "OH MY GOD, I CAN SEE EVERYTHING. THERE, BEHIND THAT BUILDING – IT'S A SCHOOL GIRL BEING MOLESTED BY AN OCTOPUS.  QUICK EVERYONE! TO THE ROBOT CAVE!"

At least, that's what it's like in my fantasy of what's going on in the head of a Japanese animator.

UPDATE: See the rest of the Django pics here. Holy crap! There's an Asian cowboy with Union Jack chaps standing next to a guy wearing the sweetest fucking helmet I've ever seen. I have a raging nerd boner.  But a Japanese western?  Gimme a break, I mean, that's like casting Tom Cruise as a samurai, or Charleton Heston as a Mexican.  

The first still of Quentin Tarantino in Takashi Miike's Sukiyaki Western Django (aka Sushi Western) has hit the web.  

Supposedly, Tarantino plays a “mysterious dude by the name of Ringo who appears at the beginning of the movie and fights with an unnamed Japanese cast member, who plays the lover of a female assassin disguised as a town dweller, to be portrayed by Momoi Kaori.”

Say what you want about Tarantino's acting abilities (I actually enjoyed him a lot in From Dusk Till Dawn), I'm pretty excited about a Miike western.  This is, after all, the guy who did Ichi the Killer and Gozu, two of the strangest and most hilariously violent films ever made – films that are as Japanese as tentacle porn and panties from a vending machine.  Ichi the Killer included a scene in which a guy cuts off his own tongue, and another in which a guy gets his face cut off and thrown at a wall.  Gozu included gratuitous lactating, as well as a woman giving birth to a full-grown man.  It's probably the weirdest movie I've ever seen, and I've worked in the porn industry.

I can only imagine a Miike western will include a cowboy breast feeding a donkey, or an Indian getting sliced in half by a wagon train while he masturbates to the disembodied cow udder he's wearing as a headress. I've got a couple Miike clips after the jump.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck, finally has a trailer online.  I've always said that Brad Pitt would make a convincing cowboy, because he has big cracked lips.  They tickle my neck sometimes, it makes me giggle and I have to pull away.

What with the long title, and the fact that Casey Affleck clearly states his name to be Robert Ford in the trailer, it would seem to lead logical folks to conclude that Pitt gets killed by Affleck.  So there's gotta be something more going here, like giant spiders, or tentacle porn, maybe.

And wait, doesn't half this trailer involve Casey Affleck comparing himself to Brad Pitt?  What's next, Frank Stallone and Tom Brady in The Parent Trap?