Battle Royale
Well, 2 weeks after JR lent me the DVD, I've finally watched Battle Royale.
For those of you who don't know, the premise of the story is that since Japan's unemployment rate reached a shocking 15% (I know, we only have a 10.1% unemployment rate here, so that's bad), and since 800,000 students boycotted school, Japan's parliament enacted the BR Act, which means that every now and then, a lucky class determined by impartial lottery gets sent to an abandoned island (not a desert island, since it appears to have everything from abandoned vehicles, to a clinic, and a warehouse in it) and, wearing collars set to explode if there is no winner in 3 days or if they try to remove them, they have to kill each other until only one student is left.
Kooky, but par for the course in Japanese cinema. And it's a wild ride as long as you turn your brains off. There is some attempt at characterization here and there, some effective, some not (the jogging scene was... uh). Actually a particularly effective scene plays itself out in the lighthouse... and I won't spoil it for the rest of you. Suffice it to say there's a lot of blood, a lot of violence, and a lot of Japanese captions a la Evangelion that drive certain pieces of dialogue home.
The thing that really struck me about the movie, though, is at the very end, during the basketball game flashback, where during happier times, the class wins some sort of championship.
The scene was entitled "Requiem: Class B (Friends)".
For those of you who don't know, the premise of the story is that since Japan's unemployment rate reached a shocking 15% (I know, we only have a 10.1% unemployment rate here, so that's bad), and since 800,000 students boycotted school, Japan's parliament enacted the BR Act, which means that every now and then, a lucky class determined by impartial lottery gets sent to an abandoned island (not a desert island, since it appears to have everything from abandoned vehicles, to a clinic, and a warehouse in it) and, wearing collars set to explode if there is no winner in 3 days or if they try to remove them, they have to kill each other until only one student is left.
Kooky, but par for the course in Japanese cinema. And it's a wild ride as long as you turn your brains off. There is some attempt at characterization here and there, some effective, some not (the jogging scene was... uh). Actually a particularly effective scene plays itself out in the lighthouse... and I won't spoil it for the rest of you. Suffice it to say there's a lot of blood, a lot of violence, and a lot of Japanese captions a la Evangelion that drive certain pieces of dialogue home.
The thing that really struck me about the movie, though, is at the very end, during the basketball game flashback, where during happier times, the class wins some sort of championship.
The scene was entitled "Requiem: Class B (Friends)".
