Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.

Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Battle Royale

10:27 / 29.09.01

Has anyone seen this yet? Recommended.
Lord of the flies meets survivor in a grotesque and darkly comic fashion.
And of course, Takeshi Kitano.

Ellis

08:55 / 02.10.01

I want to see this movie so badly but can't find a cinema near Greenwich which is showing it.

17:57 / 06.10.01

It's on at Bradford Pictureville where I'm going to see it. Anyone interested check Pictureville.

18:44 / 08.10.01

I'm desperate to see this. I get the feeling I may miss the cinema release, though.

12:26 / 10.10.01

I really wanna see this.

Don't think it's showing anywhere round here though.

22:00 / 15.10.01

I didn't miss the cinema release!

You have to see this film. My favourite of the year so far.

It's going to be a cult classic. There's just so much to it, you don't know where to start. I won't spoil anything for you: just see it!

Heartbreaking, hilarious, intelligent: a teenage bloodbath of epic proportions.

11:38 / 16.10.01

I wwaaannaa sseee it!

12:00 / 16.10.01

Oh the hype the hype.. I want to see this just after reading these comments - somewhere in london is surely showing it? hmm a quest for my afternoon at work..great stuff...

15:44 / 16.10.01

weird loads of fun while it was on what with all the death an stuff (everyone gets an ice-cool checkout line as well) but after leaving and walking home it just wasn't that in my head any more. too much melodrama perhaps? more examples of a confusing culture gap that i thought i'd long ago learnt how to jump (but the end of ring 2? can anyone help?)perhaps but the guy's 'mysterious' smile at the end? left me cold. very memorable though was the 21STCenturyTao ending ( 'Walk on' stressed and streamlined into 'Run'). actually i take it back and i loved it.

i just didn't want to be such a loser any more

21:08 / 16.10.01

Your in London aren't you Rizla, the films on at the Ritzy at Brixton - just thought I'd let you know - going to see it tonight, hopefully I wont be disapointed....

ONLY NICE THINGS

21:28 / 16.10.01

Ellis - the Jubilee Line from Maritime Greenwich to Green Park puts you within walking distance of the Odeon Panton St., which is showing it. There *is* very little "local" cinema in London - Greenwich is better served than many.

11:34 / 17.10.01

quote:Originally posted by Chaosbear:
Your in London aren't you Rizla,

no, sadly.

13:31 / 17.10.01

Guess thats why it says Leicester under your name then, I'll get my coat....

ONLY NICE THINGS

11:08 / 19.10.01

Saw it day before yesterday. It's superb. But it's nothing the fuck like "Lord of the Flies", and if one more person makes that comparison I will kill them. With a scythe.

18:39 / 19.10.01

quote:Originally posted by The Lower Haus:
Saw it day before yesterday. It's superb. But it's nothing the fuck like "Lord of the Flies", and if one more person makes that comparison I will kill them. With a scythe.

Put down that thing.
Battle Royale is based on a science-fiction blockbuster (900+pages in the original Japanese) with a load of subtleties that the movie misses due to the usual movie-from-book problems.
Alas, looks like no-one's overly eager to translate the thing - I actually had to buy a dinner for my Japanese language teacher and have him telling me the story between bites!
There's a lot of cutting social satire, in there, and a whole alternate timeline to supply the setting with a right-wing Japan leading a sort of Pan-Asiatic Co-Prosperity Sphere etc.
Great stuff (by the sound of it)

So, Lord of the Flies?
Let's say the two books come from the same place.
And Battle Royale was not endorsed by Stephen King

ONLY NICE THINGS

00:04 / 20.10.01

Does anybody read books these days?

Lord of the Flies involved a group of public schoolboys marooned accidentally on an untouched island after a cataclysm, probably a limited nuclear exchange. Without adult society, the children descend into self-destructive savagery. There are fatalities.

Battle Royale involves a group of school children coerced into cohabiting on a recently-evacuated island. Compelled by adult society, the children are forced to kill each other. However, the descent into savagery is opposed by many of the children, recognising it as a construct imposed from above by adults. There are fatalities.

Regarding the lost subleties form the book, there is a link or two on Venusberg which I have not the energy to track down.

15:40 / 20.10.01

quote:Originally posted by The Lower Haus:
Does anybody read books these days?

I do, witness my shaky financial position and bad need for 48-hours-long days.
I just do not let book-reading spoil my manners

I was not saying the two books are alike.
I said they come fronm the same place - meaning the authors were exploring the same areas, if with different intents and using different maps.

But I'll check the Venusberg link, anyway.

20:40 / 21.10.01

I thought that BR was a bit shite. It's that weird mix of the sentimental and the insanely violent. Plus some truly awful dialogue.

It doesn't really have much to say about society or human nature. It just kicks off with the blood.

Our Lady of The Two Towers

11:59 / 22.11.02

"She's smiling! She's definitely smiling!"

Saw it yesterday on DVD. This was odd, because it's released in the UK as part of the Tartan Extreme range, so there were adverts on the Disc for things like the Ring films and Audition. But there is actually nothing extreme about this film. If all the schoolkids were replaced by, say, university students, no-one would have thought twice about it. And if you don't find the idea of schoolkids shooting each other somehow automatically morally repugnant then it's not that interesting.

Yeah, so effectively a rejigged 'Lord of the Flies' with more Piggys and more weapons. I was hoping that it would be intelligent or that it would go the way of something like Fight Club but there was no examination of violence. A couple of people that try to build structures against people killing each other get killed off fairly quickly by their more extreme classmates and I found it fairly difficult to tell schoolkids apart. It only got interesting when a couple of kids managed to hack the control system and I thought that the soldiers were going to end up being dumped in the game themselves but no, before the kids can mobilise they're picked off by one of the older boys.

Disappointing and drab, though the teacher is a laugh at the start.

The Natural Way

12:37 / 22.11.02

Haus! Haus! Dig out that scythe!

13:44 / 22.11.02

The Flaming Lips used footage from BR as visuals to some recent shows. Definitely a cool cool movie, very hard to find in the US (was it ever released in the UK?).

Sorry, I've forgotten my web-fu, but the DVD can be found at www.diabolikdvd.com, as well as other web video retailers.

13:46 / 22.11.02

Originally posted by MMLotF
It's released in the UK

Oh, duh.

20:34 / 22.11.02

>>>I found it fairly difficult to tell schoolkids apart<<<

Are you saying that all those slant-eyes look alike? Eh? EH??!?

Our Lady of The Two Towers

19:18 / 23.11.02

At the risk of being ostracised by everyone here I'm going to say, to some extent, yes. But, most of the kids have no character and aren't named until they're killed, so I think most of them are there just to be killed off without people caring anyway.

Elijah, Freelance Rabbi

22:38 / 23.11.02

i have BR on cd downloaded, pretty good, no sound though, a pal of mine got it on dvd, gotta see it with sound.

22:58 / 23.11.02

i liked it, though i saw it only once. what i found funny was the mixture of extreme violence and the unrequited, cheesy, dawson's creek like teenage love angle 'oh i love him so much! too late, theres an axe in his back, and i did it'. damn that suit wearing sexy male character. makes me wanna be japanese even more.

ONLY NICE THINGS

21:44 / 24.11.02

I'd say that the characters are distinguished extremely well, given how little screen time each one is given. It's often pretty broad-brush stuff, but that seems to tie into the primary-coloured narratives of teenagerhood - the way that half the kids are not just trying to survive, but to compelte their narratives of clique, resentment and crushes.

Yet another difference from "Lord of the Flies", which has one joke, involving Piggy overindulging in fruit, IIRC, is that it hilarious. Lots of top physical comedy, culminating in Takeshi's brilliant finale.

11:10 / 25.11.02

so there were adverts on the Disc for things like the Ring films and Audition. But there is actually nothing extreme about this film.

Well if a bunch of people killing each other in an extremely violent manner isn't 'extreme', then there's nothing terribly 'extreme' about just about any other legally available film..

As with all these other new Japanese movies, my feeling about BR is that I have absolutely no idea exactly what it's trying to say about society, but I don't particularly care because it's so fucking rad..

..it just reduces me to base impulses - I don't have anything more intelligent to say than "Class of school kids slaughtering each other. Cool."

And tomorrow I'm getting to show it to a room full of people who've never seen it before. ooh yeah.

16:18 / 25.11.02

It's like (when you were at) school, though. There's a whole class, and you know some of them pretty well, and others you have an impression, only, what they're like.

I reckin.

SPOILER ALERT

*****************

I love this film - what about Beat's fucking painting at the end? how evil is that shit? Only Donnie Darko and Lost Highway have cut as much mustard recently for me.

Aye.

*****************

Foust is SO authentic

17:02 / 12.05.03

Fun movie. I loved how utterly inept most of the kids were when it came to killing; most of them couldn't hit the ground with a gun.

I laughed out loud when the one girl started stabbing that guy in the groin.

Some bad dialogue, and a pretty big plot hole. The initial scene seems to be a television broadcast of the homecoming for a previous winner, yet none of the characters know about BR. How's that work?

17:33 / 12.05.03

Battle Royale a fine excursion into the Japanese threat of teen violence and rising upset amongst its youth. The delicate balance between violence, philosophy and manga/comics is blended superbly.

17:50 / 12.05.03

I'm reading the novel right now. Interesting.

19:01 / 12.05.03

I really liked this film, I've haven't been shocked out of densitisation (s.p?)in a while. I liked the way some of the kids tried really hard but were just crap, and how it covered every type of reaction to the situation. Was it a novel before it was a book or is the book just a movie adaption? Anyone know?

19:04 / 12.05.03

It was a novel first, then a manga series, then a film.

19:38 / 12.05.03

The novel's fairly interesting, if you can slog through the most poetically-challenged japanese-to-english translation i've seen in a while. "Unrelenting" would be a good word for it.