Archive for October, 2004
Film Review: Battle Royale
As far as inflammatory films go, the kind of films where, for example, a senior high school boy’s severed head is thrown through a window with a grenade in his mouth, few have managed to top Kinji Fukusaka’s kid-killing tour de force, Battle Royale (2000).
(Read the rest of this article)
Film Review: Tetsuo: The Iron Man
Stories of change and transformation, or setsuwa (apparently), are an old tradition in Japan: the crossing of boundaries between the human and the non-human; tales linking the animal and human worlds that overlap, on occasion, with Western mythology. It’s tempting to cite salary men morphing into slobbering, giggling, schoolgirl-hungry creatures from a netherworld twenty minutes after kampai as the most obvious example, but narratives often found in Japanese anime (animated movies) presenting fluid subjects (transforming robots, humans turning into demons, that sort of thing), whose very identities are unstable, paint a (slightly) more sinister vision.
(Read the rest of this article)