Even Roger Ebert has his WTF moments.
Category / Film
#4 — battle royale ii
Now drinking the Korbel used to top off the Hangman’s Noose.
I’ve watched a little bit of Battle Royale II and, based on the fifteen minutes I’ve seen so far, let’s just say that it’s not as interesting or as eye-popping as the first one. If anything, it seems to be more of a confused retread. The kids who slaughtered each other on the island have now, get this, declared war on adults. And somehow it all ties into terrorism. In fact, there’s now a faction group of “BR supporters” which numbers ten million — a political bloc that seems to think that kids killing each other on an island is a fabulous idea. (And you thought the United States was a scary place.) Inexplicably, the game has spread to Japan and now one can personally enroll in the program through the Internet. (Gee, that’s an extremely stupid idea given that you have a 1 in 40 chance of staying alive.)
It’s safe to say that this plot makes no sense. First off, let’s do the math. 365/3 days of killing = 121 survivors per year. Since we saw in the first film that there is some downtime between classes killing each other, this would suggest to me that the number falls far shorter of this 121 survivor rate. Let’s put it at 50 survivors.
So in Battle Royale II, it’s three years after the first film, which would give us around 150 survivors. Since the Japanese government controls these massacres, it seems to me that they would be quite capable of either corralling the surivors or taking them out. If they have the resources to kidnap schoolbuses and send them to an island, then certainly they will be able to control 150 vicious loose cannons.
Further, if there have been 150 survivors, that would mean that there have been 5,850 deaths of children. Even if these kids were vicious, why would anyone advocate that much death? Now we’re talking a figure of “10 million BR supporters.” Now Japan has a population of 127 million. Which would suggest that 8% of its population thought highly enough of rampant childhood homicide to campaign for it.
Either Japan, as presented in the Battle Royale films, is a very fucked up place or there is something seriously wrong with the story logic.
More importantly, the fact that Beat Takeshi is nowhere to be found on this film sucks ass.
The Silliest Article Ever Published at Slate
With the release of Aidan Wasley’s Star Wars article on Slate today, all day job malingerers can finally find an article that is absurd on almost every level. To compare George Lucas with the likes of John Ashbery’s poetry, Peter Greenaway and Matthew Barney’s Cremaster films is to remain highly suspect, as Yoda is an amusing little character but poetic in the most puerile of ways (“Do, or do not. There is no try.”) and Barney scaling the Chrysler Building’s elevator shaft (without CGI, yo) is more impressive than some half-baked lightsaber duel near a lava flow.
Let’s be clear on this: the Star Wars sextet is not pomo. Not in any real way. There is no blurring of distinctions. A space opera is a space opera. We do not see any fragmented moments that are meant to be mourned, any form of self-referential narration (The Force? Are you fucking kidding me?) other than that yellow scrolling text, any moment where George Lucas himself appears within the story as author, and, particularly in the most recent trilogy, anything that even approaches a minimalist design. Further, the idea that a series of films with some of the most atrocious B-movie dialogue ever written can be considered “intellectual” is tantamount to inviting a bunch of grad students to seriously consider the literary merits of Run’s House.
And let’s be clear on this, Wasley: Anytime an audience goes into a theatre, they are going to be “self-conscious” of a fucking narrative. It’s called paying attention to a movie. And unless an audience member is too busy making out because the movie in question sucks or ingesting an interesting and possibly illegal substance to enhance the visuals, assuming that the audience member is not a dumbass, he is sure as fucking fuck going to be self-fucking-conscious of what’s going on. Because ten fucking bucks is a lot of fucking money.
“Lucas even seems to acknowledge these stumbles toward excess within the structure of the films themselves.” No, pal, it’s called focus groups.
“Lucas is firmly committed to digital cinema, but in this single shot we see him acknowledge, perhaps a little sheepishly, his technology’s erasure of a fortuitous or exciting human accident.” No. It’s called one-upping Firefly.
Bill’s Excellent Adventure
This interesting Bill Murray profile doesn’t explain why Murray transformed himself into such an asshole to portray Hunter S. Thompson in Where the Buffalo Roam, but it does describe much of his latter career. Among the things discussed: the set of Tootsie, an oversensitive Lucy Liu and how he came to be the darling of indie filmmakers. (via Chekhov’s Mistress)
‘Tis the Season for Filmcrit Compilations
While the blogosphere din has been abuzz about Ron Hogan’s forthcoming The Stewardess is Landing the Plane! and John Scalzi’s The Rough Guide to Sci-Fi Movies, there’s another film criticism volume making the rounds that’s worth your while. Jami Bernard’s The X List: Movies That Turn Us On (Da Capo Press) would seem, from an aperçu, to be one of those collections that commingles two fantastic topics of interest: sex and movies. But within its pages, one finds not only reevaluations of reviled movies (J. Hoberman, for example, recontextualizing Basic Instinct as a study of pathology rather than a homophobic onslaught, Peter Travers defending Ken Russell’s vulgarity in the vastly underrated Crimes of Passion), but a loving tribute to teat provocateur Russ Meyer from Roger Ebert, David Sterritt remarking upon how Gaspar Noe’s Irreversible can be seen as a culturally galvanizing film, and David Edelstein ferreting out the sexual politics of the Hammer classic Horror of Dracula.
Aside from the considerable space devoted to Salon contributors, I’m rather astonished that no one in this collection has seen fit to comment upon Betty Blue, Kiss of the Spider Woman or even the sexual dynamic between Sigourney Weaver and Ben Kingsley in the frequently overlooked Death and the Maiden. But Bernard has done a commendable job of collecting enough thought-provoking essays (including several by the always thoughtful Jonathan Rosenbaum) which suggest that titilation isn’t always the primary concern when it comes to cinematic eroticism and that sex, often perceived as the tawdry entry point, is often an effective method to draw larger conclusions about humanity at large.
The book also alerted me to something I didn’t know: apparently, there’s an uncensored version of Baby Facemaking the rounds which once played the Castro Theatre (and that I unfortunately missed). Thankfully, Warner may be releasing this newly discovered print as part of a major Pre-Code Hollywood DVD box set next year.