jürgen fauth’s muckworld

I suppose it’s not considered in particularly good taste to watch school children killing each other off for entertainment, but the dexterity with which director Kinji Fukasaku milks the “murderous game” concept for drama and satire is remarkable.

The setup could be described as Mean Girls with machine guns crossed with Lord of the Flies by the way of the Schwarzenegger trash classic Running Man: in future Japan, a class of forty students is selected to fight to the death on a secluded island. Everybody is given a random weapon and kept under control with exploding necklaces. Like Highlander, there can be only one survivor. Multi-talented Takeshi Kitano combines his game show host and actor personalities in his role as the former teacher who cruelly oversees the fight.

Once the “game” is established, Battle Royale excels in using overly familiar high school scenarios and reimagining them with deadly weapons. Here are the popular girls, for whom the cut-throat competition to be the #1 princess just got a lot nastier. Here are the geeks who stick together and hatch a plan, the lovebirds who try to find their own way out, the freshly transfered students hiding secrets, the boys with the tragic crush on the wrong girl.

We get to know a good many of the forty quickly diminishing students, and most of them could have jumped right out of a sitcom — but the stakes here are cranked up so high that what usually would have been an ordinary schoolyard confrontation becomes a matter of life and bloody death. Even more so than last year’s Brick, Battle Royale is terrifically engaging because it literalizes what everybody already knows: high school is murder.

Batoru rowaiaru. Kinji Fukasaku, 2000. ****

The trailer:

Civic Duty steals liberally from Falling Down, Rear Window, and Dog Day Afternoon to milk September 11 paranoia for a contrived, rickety potboiler. Peter Krause (Nate from Six Feet Under) plays Terry Allen, a laid-off accountant who becomes obsessed with a middle-eastern neighbor he suspects to be a terrorist (Khaled Abol Naga.) Allen’s unsupportive wife (Kari Matchett) ditches him at the first sign of trouble, and the FBI agent assigned to the case (Richard Schiff) is no help. Finally, Allen investigates at gun point, and, being an accountant and all, utters hardboiled lines like these: “The checks come to more than double of what your tuition is!” Production values are strictly TV movie of the week, and the ending would have made me angry–if I still cared. Marcy’s thoughts: “If you went crazy and took a hostage, I don’t think I’d turn you in.” Thanks, baby! Love you too. Civic Duty opens May 4.

Civic Duty. Jeff Renfroe, 2006. *

• Civic Duty on Rotten Tomatoes
• The trailer

My review of Grindhouse is up.

In short: come for Planet Terror (****), get the hell out before Death Proof (*)

Grindhouse. Robert Rodriguez, Eli Roth, Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, Rob Zombie, 2007. **

• Grindhouse on RT
• Grindhouse Photo Gallery

Marty’s Hearty Head Shot Show. Confident entertainment, especially if you like tough talk and cell phones.

The Departed. Martin Scorsese, 2006. **

[tags]film, 2 stars, thriller, cops, guns, murder, martin scorsese, leonardo dicaprio, matt damon, jack nicholson, mark wahlberg, martin sheen, vera farmiga[/tags]

Didn’t hate this quite as much as Marcy, but some of that probably has to do with watching it in installments, my own little miniseries of misery. Not the ideal way to watch anything, but I simply couldn’t stand to sit through it all at once.

What’s Babel about? Global scenes of suffering, vaguely interrelated, adding up to nothing whatsoever. The title suggests that there’s a point made about communication with all that screaming and bleeding, but what exactly is it? Seemed to me, the take-away was: guns make bad presents. I already suspected as much.

Babel. Alejandro González Iñárritu, 2006. *

• Marcy’s Review
• Rotten Tomatoes

[tags]alejandro gonzalez inarritu, film, 1 star, suffering, tokyo, mexico, marocco, guns, blood, brad pitt, cate blanchett, gael garcia bernal[/tags]

An effective noir thriller, appropriately shot in black and white, with a perverse game of Russian Roulette at its center. Whiffs of Intacto.

13 Tzameti. Géla Babluani, 2005. ***

• 13 Tzameti at Rotten Tomatoes

[tags]film, 3 stars, thriller, murder, guns, russian roulette, games[/tags]