Had never heard of Battle Royale until our Japanoexperts brought it up. Isn’t that story pretty similar to the upcoming box-office hit Hunger Games?
I spy…a school for young witches and wizards, in which the top few must do battle with champions from the vampire school, werewolf school, etc etc. Naturally love and romance endlessly complicates things: love triangles, hexagons, whatever.
If you want something more mature than a young adult story (which is financially unwise), just pick the right types of mysticism.
World's Only Rational Man 
BR novel: 1999
BR movie: 2001
If anything Hunger Games is a toned down, Aryanized version of Battle Royale (I call it a pussified, literally white-washed -as in racial- rip-off; just compare: fascist Japan -a real, pure evil system that brought suffering and death to millions- holding East Asia for decades vs weird former US pseudo-fascist wannabe, 50 classes per year -roughly 150 kids- vs 24 kids per year. Hunger Games is for sissies.) I’m even tempted to say it’s an almost 100% rip-off. The setting is almost the same, the plot as well, even the ending. Two of the kids in Hunger Games survive the “game”, just like in Battle Royale. Sure, the author says she didn’t even know about BR, which I find hard to believe especially after Tarantino basically screamed about Battle Royale on every occasion during the entire Kill Bill affair (still saying it was Kuriyama’s weakest performance ever, mainly because she wasn’t given much to work with since the character Go Go Yubari was as well developed as a tree.) So no, I really don’t believe her. Similarities can happen, sure, literature if full of them. But there are far too many of them in this case to be a coincidence. The only differences are some minor details. The rest is absolutely identical.
Basically, imagine the tale of Wilhelm Tell. Now somebody goes ahead, puts Willy into Canada, turns his son into a daughter and gives him a rifle. And then makes money off this claiming its his original idea and he never heard of Tell, while gathering a crowd of fans who really have no clue about Tell and may actually believe Tell is the rip-off. That’s basically what happened. And I’m unimpressed!
By the way, the Hunger Games movie has been rated as PG13. The movie, at least for UK release, is heavily censored. BR is rated 18 in the UK (15 in Japan.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-17285325
They’ve even removed the blood splashes for crying out loud! This is ridiculous! I’m actually expecting this movie to bomb. The ridiculous censorship will kill whatever spark there was (not that the spark was amazing to begin with.)
If you compare the original trailers, the Hunger Games trailer is utterly laughable in its cheesy whineyness (which is typical for Hollyweird these days.) The original Battle Royale trailer, on the other hand, explodes with epic music (the “Dies Irae” from Verdi’s Requiem) and features far superior actors (Shibasaki, Kuriyama, Maeda, Fujiwara) with amazing performances (Kou as Mitsuko. Oh. My. God.) And Beat Takeshi. He is a chauvinist, sexist pig, alright, but he’s Beat Takeshi.
Yeah, I tend to come out swinging when it comes down to Battle Royale vs Hunger Games, cause Battle Royale is superior in every aspect. Or maybe because I’m a… what was I called the other day… oh yes “race traitor” (I kid you not.) This is basically the dreaded US Battle Royale remake. Almost 10 years ago there was a rumor about something like that.
I will not watch it. For once because of it being a sad, weak rip-off. Secondly I’ve been boycotting Hollywood for a while now because of all the crap they produce. And thirdly, I have enough J and C cinema to watch (China has some amazing gems that completely annihilate anything Hollywood produces these days and I’m not talking about wuxia movies), not to mention the huge load of J-doramas.
As for the school for wizards and witches, have you seen what JKR has done with her Pottermore? She finally made a Japanese school and called it, literally, “Magic Place”. I’ve been raging so hard about it and called it “outright sh*t” numerous times. Way to go JKR, showing total ignorance to even the most basic concepts of a language. She’s now dead for me as an author. Few years ago I went ahead and did the same, but my Japanese “Hogwarts” is a bazillion times better than her utterly lame pile of chicken droppings. My Shirasagi beats her lame “Magic Place” any time. JKR is just milking the cashcow today. Whatever originality she once had has been gone for a while (already visible in the final book.)
JKR can suck it. Give me LJR any day. That’s Laura Joh Rowland. Sano > Harry Potter. Sure, the Sano series has plenty of errors, primarily names and addresses, but in general, at least to me, it reads much more fluently than Potter, brings late 17th, early 18th century Edo to live in a pretty decent way and some of the characters are just epic.
Totalbiscuit said it best not long ago: ‘Harry Potter was a fantastic export. And it’s like “we’re gonna write a really, really terrible book, and then we’ll export it to the Americans and we’ll mostly giggle and drink tea as we rake in money”‘
Kamikaze Girls is back up on Youtube! Hurry and catch it while you can.
Someday I gotta get my permanent copy of this thing.
I have to say it this way: “DUDE! WTF?! You don’t have it?!”
This, together with Yatterman, are the only two movies with FukaKyon where I got the special edition. It’s just too good to pass.
There has never been much of a movie collecting culture in my household, and since the collapse of the VHS era I almost always either catch them broadcast tv, rent them, borrow them, or watch them on Youtube.
(Also, those aren’t the official subtitles for KG in the Youtube clips. Some brave volunteer did it all by his/her self! It is interesting to see his/her take on some of the dialogue. I don’t agree with some of the translations, but overall it’s a great job for a volunteer. And yes, I’ll confess, I’d be totally lost in that biker girl gang slang without subtitles.)
Edo, I think you checked out the Learn Japanese blog before. Now they’ve added visual/audio clips of the essays, which is an excellent new feature:
http://joi-japonin.blogspot.com/
College Humor has some good ones lately:
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File under Spiritual Readings for the Day.
Google is my portal into Worme World. I just start to type “World’s Only Rational Man” and it takes me right there. But it was interesting what turned up on the Google search:
http://russellandduenes.wordpress.com/2012/02/14/the-only-rational-man/
““I count only two men rational: the man who loves God with all his heart because he has found Him, and the man who seeks God with all his heart because he has as yet found Him not.” – Blaise Pascal