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Renzo's Rant

Battle Royale


A while ago I watched the Japanese movie Battle Royale, which virtually no one in North America has seen, except for those poser kids who think that watching Dragon Ball Z and listening to Dragon Ash makes them Japanese, and therefore qualified to describe themselves as samauri warriors, yakuza gangstas, or sake oenophiles. Anyway, it's a really cool movie, based on an even cooler (apparently) book. Contrary to popular belief, it's not banned in America, but American distributors are too pussified to release it. This is not surprising, considering that it's about 42 fifteen year olds that have to violently kill each other.

The premise, in a nutshell, is this: Japanese society is falling apart. The youth have become rebellious and extremely dangerous by doing such horrific things as skipping school and disliking math. As a form of control, the government implements a new martial law-esque enactment: every year an unsuspecting grade 9 class is taken to a remote island and forced to kill each other with randomly distributed "weapons" of varying efficiency (think pot lid versus 12-gauge shotgun), until there is only one left.

The contest isn't the focus of the plot, it's just the plot device to explore the relationships between the kids. The high school becomes symbolic of the real world: are your friends really friends, or will they shoot you in the back at the first opportunity? Are the cool kids really better than everyone else, or are they actually the loneliest? Is there some reason why all Japanese schools have sailor suits as their uniforms?

Now, as cool as this sounds, it's not a typical Hollywood action movie. The killing isn't glorified, and there's a strong anti-violence theme to the movie. Also, the kids are actually played by teenagers, not "teenagers" as we have seen in American movies:

But back to Battle Royale. There's roughly a half-dozen really kick-ass characters, and about 35 others that have about 2 seconds of screentime before being killed. The cool ones include the villain Kiriyama, who looks like a Japanese David Bowie in Labyrinth; the kids' teacher Kitano, played by Beat Takeshi, Japan's answer to Quentin Tarantino; Chigusa, who only has 5 minutes of screentime but is the film's most memorable character based solely on her demasculating method of killing some guy; and the mysterious hero Kawada who was surprisingly the only main character to wear a headband. How about that? Remember, kids, ethnic stereotypes aren't always true.

Upon watching the film, I had an idea. I'd like to hold my own battle royale, as a way of dispatching of my various nemesises...nemesisi...nemesisae....enemies. So we'd have an island, and onto it I'd put people who pronounce the word harrassment as harrisment, the Canadian Alliance party, that kid from down the hall who's always looking at me funny, David Goldstein, The Artist Formerly Known as Lil' Bow-Wow, and that kid from the Mazda Zoom Zoom commercial (What if an SUV was raised by a family of sports cars? What if it ran over that annoying kid and his accompanying band of quasi-African tribal music? Renzo would be happy, that's what).

Of course, the only problem would be that one of my mortal enemies would ultimately be left alive. Thus I would rig the contest by including a "ringer", so to speak, that would be sure to come out on top. If you've been following me, I'm sure you've already guessed who it is:

The Shredder

That's right, it's Mr. Oroku Saki himself, the ass-kickingest guy to come out of a Japanese cartoon about mutant turtles under the age of 20. Against this guy, my unfortunate victims wouldn't stand a chance. Not even if they were equipped with a trash compactor, which might well be one of the weapons handed out. I'm just not sure how we'll fit it into a canvas backpack. So anyway, there's my nefarious scheme. Let's hope it pans out.

In conclusion, go watch Battle Royale. Now. Or you'll end up on my island of death.


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