jürgen fauth’s muckworld

Slightly above-average sci-fi anime that, as usual, steals liberally from Star Wars, Akira, Blade Runner, and whoever first came up with BattleMechs. Pacing could be tighter but storytelling is solid enough, and the 3-D computer animation is first rate eye candy. You could do worse for genre entertainment with a Paul Oakenfold soundtrack.

Appurushîdo. Shinji Aramaki, 2004. ***

The tell-all trailer:

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:

Apparently, Japan is home to an underground industry of “pink films,” a genre of softcore porn that is still exhibited in theaters. Genitals are strictly taboo, but from the evidence of this film, generous helpings of cum and warped political allegories reenacted with GI Joe dolls are just dandy.

The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai is a repurposed version of a pink movie called Horny Home Tutor: Teacher’s Love Juice, in which a role-playing prostitute (Kuroda Emi) is shot smack-dab in the forehead by a North Korean assassin/rapist. Instead of killing her, the bullet gets lodged in her brain and turns her into a genius who gets off at the mere mention of Noam Chomsky. In her handbag, Sachiko finds the cloned trigger finger of George W. Bush, who appears to her at the bottom of a water bucket, and later, on a rooftop, where her bush is fingered while a deranged version of the infamous Mission Accomplished speech plays on a TV that materialized out of nowhere. (It’s the best masked impersonation of a U.S. president since Ultrachrist!)

After that, things get really strange. I might have fallen asleep and dreamt the part about the wind-up toy that saves the world from nuclear holocaust, but it’s clear that The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai is some sort of obscene, elaborate joke at the expense of the Bush Administration. With its flashes of violence and gross-out humor, endless sex scenes, and bizarro political commentary, it’s the trashy midnight weird-out that Grindhouse could have been. The Glamorous Life of Sachiko Hanai is currently playing at Cinema Village.

Hatsujô kateikyôshi: sensei no aijiru. Mitsuru Meike, 2003. ***

• The Glamorous Life Of Sachiko Hanai at Rotten Tomatoes
• Manohla Dargis’ Review
• Official Palm Pictures site, with trailer