Finding a good Japanese film to take home on video isn't always the easiest thing to do. Most video stores have poorly stocked foreign
film sections, let alone enough Japanese titles to warrant a label and a shelf.
Sure, every shop carries the requisite couple of Akira Kurosawa films, usually the
"Seven Samurai" and
"Rashomon," and maybe there are a few anime titles (invariably mis-stocked as a "cartoons" in the children's section)
and maybe there's that one Juzo Itami flick from the '80s,
"Tampopo."
And that's it.
Selection is not only a result of a particular store, but also geography. If you're in The BIG Big City,
your situation looks better. Even a big chain like Tower Video often has a decent
foreign movie section.
For a better variety, there are those godsend places where film students hang out, dank crowded retail dens where the staff throw
attitude and flaunt knowledge of celluloid arcana. Think
Quentin Tarantino before he sold "True Romance."
(or for that matter, after--Factoid: Tarantino used to work in
an L.A. video store before selling his first script.)
In New York, we're talking about a place like Kim's Video (and Mondo Kim's in particular
on St. Marks Place in the East Village) where
you will find the best collection of home videos and DVDs for sale or rent in all of New York, if not the East Coast.
In Los Angeles there's a place called Cinefile that's probably the best video store in the
entire Western Hemisphere,
maybe even the world. (Ed. Okay, let the Best Video Store War begin! Drop us a line if you know of a place better than Cinefile or Kim's.)
Then there are those boutique places the size of a janitor's closet that reallyspecialize. These shops are so small you
wonder how they can turnaround enough sales volume to make rent. Case in point,
Cinema Nolita, a tiny tiny video store on Elizabeth St. in Lower Manhattan. There you will discover a stealthy
collection of foreign, independent and otherwise critically important videos and DVDS,
neatly arranged by genre, director, and country. Simply put, this joint is the bomb.
You get the feeling that Cinema Nolita might operate at a loss as part of someone's clever tax write-off, or perahps it was set up for a bunch of neighborhood celebs with
exiquisite tastes and an understandable preference for avoiding overly public retail outlets like Blockbuster (actually David Bowie and Moby
live around the corner), and that's just fine by us.
So imagine our surprise when we found "Battle Royale" and a newly issued copy
of "Branded to Kill" on DVD. That's right--time
for another time-honored Japanese Video Night at Air Massive HQ!
BATTLE ROYALE
"Battle Royale" is teenage violence taken to the next level: national extreme sports event.
Based on the bestselling novel by Koushun Takami and directed by the late Kinji Fukasaku,
the story is set in a Japan where each year one high school class is selected
for Battle Royale, or B.R., a last-man standing competition wherein a matter of days the students must fight it to the death
on an abandoned island.
Think of it as "Lord of Flies"
meets "Survivor" meets high school ...
BUT WITH GUNS! The game ends when all but one of the student body have been murdered.
To put the game in a socio-cultural context, consider the following backgrounder that appears at the begiining of the film:
"At the dawn of the Millenium, the nation collapsed. At 15% unemployment, 10 million were out of work, 800,000 students
boycotted school. The adults lost confidence, and fearing the youth, eventually passed the 'Millenium Educational Reform Act' ... AKA:
The B.R. Act."
The blood-letting is staggering. The violence is mindless, though it's mostly unleashed in the name of survival. With some
forty-plus students in the class, one would think that killing off each and every one of them, which the film thoroughly and
graphically documents, would quickly become tedious. It doesn't. People die in all sorts of fascinating ways and circumstances,
some predictable, but many more in ways you may never have imagined.
The variety of death is partly due to the variety of weapons. At the beginning, as the Battle Royale contest officially begins, each
student is handed a bag containing a weapon. Some get guns, crossbows, and axes. The less fortunate get flashlights and compasses.
With its endless stream of bloody murders and catty high-school politics, the movie may come across
as just another teen-horror-exploition flick, but even so, it works. In spite of the violence, the movie is strangely compelling. The pace never slows. The narrative is steadfastedly unpredictable,
leading to Battle Royale's surprising conclusion.
The film stars, among others, "Beat" Takeshi Kitano ("Hanabi," "Brother," "Sonatine") as
the students' "teacher," a man on the verge of becoming mentally unhinged while struggling to manage a spiraling dysfunctional family relationship from afar.
This guy has major issues.
The heroes of our story are two students, a girl and boy determined to survive the game despite the fact that inexoribly, as the
rules of B.R. clearly state, there
can only be one survivor. The tragedy is that even if one of the students manages to win the contest, it will only be because
everyone else--friend and foe alike--is dead.
Ultimately, Battle Royale stands as a kind of What If scenario that plays out one possible method for dealing with a generation of
Japanese teenagers ever more violent, unruly and disaffected within a culture that imposes great pressures on its youth and
an educational system at its wits' end on how to deal with them.
Battle Royale will always be among the most influential works of legendary director Kinji Fukasaku's filmographic legacy. The movie was his penultimate
piece of cinema and its sequel, "Battle Royale II," was the last movie he made before
succumbing to bone cancer in 2003.
Quentin Tarrantino is supposedly a fan of "Battle Royale" and was inspired to
cast one of the film's stars, the actress Chiaki Kuriyama,
as the school-girl-uniformed assassin Go Go Yubari in his recent
(and brilliant) cinematic blood-fest, "Kill Bill Vol. 1." -- Jay Han + Ivan Corsa
RELATED LINKS
+ Comprehensive Battle Royale Film Web Site
+ Battle Royale Review -- Jason Korsner / BBCi News
+ Bio: Kinji Fukasaku [IMDb]
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February 11, 2004 | NYC -- Post Mortem: Janet Jackson - Justin Timberblake
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Now that everyone is trying hard to put Nipplegate behind them and get on with their so-called
lives, Damien Cave reports in Rolling Stone that the Janet Jackson - Justin Timberlake bared-breast
(warning: links to breast photo) stunt cum "wardrobe malfunction" during the Super Bowl Halftime
Show will probably not positively effect sales of Jackson forthcoming album, "Damita Jo" ...
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