August marks our first ever video introduction for the film Once Upon a Time in the West, directed by Sergio Leone.

We hope you enjoy our month long celebration of one of the greatest Westerns of all time!

Battle Royale is the kind of film that will mean something different to the people of any nation, place or time. It’s themes are so universal that I’d venture to say you could take the film back even hundreds of years and the film would hold up.

Bear with us as we attempt our very first video commentary entry, this one being a deconstruction of the style of Battle Royale. Unfortunately my throat was a bit froggy whilst we were prepping this. All apologies.

The trick of Black Rose Mansion is that the film operates quite honestly in spite of featuring a drag queen in a prominent role. Akihiro is afforded the same idolization as any femme fatale from genre films. Ryuko is portrayed as the haunting beauty, infecting men through her very being. She walks into the room and men find themselves slack-jawed.

As Kitano excelled as a painter, his zeal for the aesthetic would soon spill into another of his passions, filmmaking. His eventual return to directing in 1996 with his semi-autobiographical boxing drama, Kids Return and again in 1997 with Fireworks (Hana-Bi) bore the benefit of Kitano’s time spent as an artist in recovery. His paintings appear throughout Fireworks, while the film itself features a lush palette of colors and dynamic camera movement not previously seen in Kitano’s work. The film, widely considered amongst the best of his directorial efforts, netted the director his first Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival.

As a first time director, Kenta’s efforts work out about as well as David S. Goyer’s when he switched from writing Batman films to directing Blade III (read: not well). It’s easy to blame the grief Kenta must have been enduring on set or his relative inexperience behind the camera, but at the end of the day all we have is the film itself… which just isn’t very good.

What makes Message from Space a standout in the Fukasaku catalogue is simply the sheer joy to be had watching it. While Space is not an impressive technical achievement on the level that Lucas’ film was, the film has the “whiz-bang” aspect down pat. As strange as it sounds, Fukasaku wisely replaced the “suspension of disbelief” (aka big budget) aspect of Star Wars, with something a bit more showy and fun.

In Battle Royale we see a group of adolescents make an aggressive attempt to delay their adulthood – to indirectly postpone their death. In response, the older generation forces them to confront their mortality. When given their mission, Kitano challenges, “ Life is a game of fight for survival, so find out if you’re worth it.”

In many ways, without those intense opening scenes of Battle Royale the film simply wouldn’t work. We needed an intense and complex character to bring us and the characters into the world of the film, a world where anything can and will happen. For Kinji Fukasaku, prolific director of four decades of films, there was only one person to turn to – his friend, Takeshi Kitano.

To world audiences, Chigusa (Girl #13) is easily the most recognizable amongst the cast of students involved in the melee in Battle Royale. She is after all, Quentin Tarantino’s own “Go-Go Yubari” from his great and successful film, Kill Bill Volume 1. Plucked from relative obscurity for the role, Tarantino saw something he liked and cast the unknown actress based solely on her performance in BR. The fact that the film ranks amongst Tarantino’s favorites may have had something to do with it, regardless the film and her brief appearance in it struck a chord with audiences the world over.

At a glance, Battle Royale seems like any other entry in the myriad of splatstick Japanese horror films to appear in the post-millennial age. That is until you realize that BR was part of that very first wave. A trend-setter that ignited a fever of interest over Japanese genre films in general and inspired an entirely new crop of wacky genre exports. Some of which seem to have been produced solely for export on the international market just so gaijin could shake their heads and muse, “Those wacky Japanese.”