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DVD Review: Battle Royale - Special Edition

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Battle Royale: Director's Cut

 

2000, Japan. Starring Tatsuya Fujiwara, Aki Maeda, Taro Yamamoto, Masanobu Ando, Kou Shibasaki, Chiaki Kuriyama, Takeshi Kitano. Directed by Kinji Fukasaku

 

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Kazou Kiriyama. In case you haven't guessed, he's crazy. And cool.

 

Just think: if this movie created an uproar in a country that generally doesn’t bat an eyelash or bother to raise an eyebrow at such ideas in their entertainment, what sort of reaction would it be likely to receive on these shores?

 

I can already hear Bill O’Reilly’s impassioned speeches, defending and protecting us all, droning on and on about the corruption of our children. He and those like him will deem Battle Royale exploitative and gratuitously violent and choose to focus on the gore or the likelihood of copycat incidents, rather than address our society’s real problems. (i.e. why we are raising more and more morons who cannot even comprehend the difference between fantasy and reality). The naysayers will do all these things, likely without having even seen the film.

 

The truth is teenagers (who possess the common sense and ability to understand it) NEED to see this movie. Like Requiem for a Dream was a slap in the face and a long overdue PSA about the dangers of drug use, Battle Royale is a well-crafted warning and thought-provoking message to the young and old generations of Fukasaku’s homeland and any other country that might benefit. The premise is confrontational, controversial and hard to swallow, but like the films of Spike Lee have proven time and time again, sometimes you have to be in-your-face, audacious and outspoken in order to grab people’s attention, keep it and have them actually listen to your message. Behind the façade of wall-to-wall classical music, histrionic opera tunes, guts and soapy melodrama there is a method to the madness. If your intellectual limitations don’t allow you to see or hear that, then society has a lot more to worry about than a simple movie.

 

While it doesn't have American distribution as of yet, it is extremely easy to find DVDs of Battle Royale anywhere on the net where foreign films are sold. I'd start with HKFlix.com.

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Holla at'cha, boy!

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