Actress Hazuki Riona (31) is making her return to the big screen after three and a half years. She will be at the Venice International Film Festival, which opens August 30, to promote the movie “Sakebi” (Scream). She has a supporting role to star Yakusho Koji (50). She will accompany director Kurosawa Kiyoshi (51) and producer Ichise Takashige (45) in her first visit to an international film festival. Hazuki has made headlines in recent years for her tumultuous personal life. She has already been married twice, after earlier romances with stars like actor Sanada Hiroyuki and baseball player Ichiro, but neither marriage lasted more than a few months. She had a child during her second marriage.
• The weekend saw the annual 24-hour TV marathon on NTV. This year’s theme was “kizuna” (ties), which led to some smaltzy but also some genuinely moving segments. One particularly sad documentary saw actress Hirosue Ryoko visit the site of the 2004 massacre at the school in Beslan, Russia in which over 340 people died, more than half of them children. It looked at the stories of some of the children who survived the horrific ordeal. On a lighter note, the centerpiece of the show is always a long-distance run by a celebrity, and this year it was the turn of Japan’s lankiest comedy duo, Ungirls. If ever there was a pair who looked like they couldn’t manage 100m, let alone 100km, it’s these two. As always seems to happen, they managed to arrive at the Nippon Budokan right on time for the end of the show. But it’s all for a good cause. The charity event, which managed a second-best ever average audience rating of 17.7% in the Kanto region, brought in almost ¥300 million in donations.