Watched Battle Royale on a monday night.

Firstly, i almost never watched a 9pm movie on a monday night.
Secondly, it wasn't as violent as i had anticipated.

The movie was interesting, not so much the violence and gore, in fact some parts were actually quite funny. On the surface, it is really your run-of-the-mill stereotypical melodrama jap flick, with tons of fake blood, frozen shots of dead corpses and rather standard jap diabolical expressions just before someone kills. And kitano is kitano. What can i say? He was a calm among the riot except he is really the crazy guy amidst all. A little unnerving but nothing more than what you would expect from kitano. Seems like he did this movie as a personal favour for the director. Wonder how much of that is true.

Actually, what is really interesting to me about this almost standard just-shock-em' slasher flick wasn't the fact that it was depicting violence in all manner possible (in fact i thought audition was much more gory and needless in the depiction of violence with all the long drawn out tortures), or that it pitted high school students against each other in the manner of "Lord of the fly". For me, it was much more interesting to think about what kind of mentality would possess the japanese to make such movies in the first place? A social commentary on the society in japan these days? Well, i don't believe incidents of juvenile violence is unique to the japanese culture. I wonder if it is really how the older generation of japanese perceive the direction which their society is heading.

Consider the japanese movies such as the postman, kitano's yakuza flicks, even some of the romance stories like the love letter, afterlife which has a underlying morbid, pessimistic feel to it. The normal guy on the street, the anti hero, the good guy almost inevitably die at the end of the show, sometimes almost incidentally. Life goes on. The movies, at times, were hardly meant to make one feel sorry for the characters or to glorify these characters. Leaving one a little disturb at the end without knowing really why. And consider the nation's adult male population preoccupation for pornography which depicts nubile teenagers in school uniform. I wonder if this trend of movies where the innocence being corrupted is in part a social reflection of the mentality of the society post-WWII. Someone suggested that perhaps they just wanted to juxtapose innocence and evil but yet i felt in such movies, it is usually a process of innocence morphing into something diabolical, something not subjected to choice usually, rather than putting innocence and evil side by side. It is not so much as a reflection or retrospection of things past in the japanese history (i.e. "evil" being unleased in the wake of the H-bombs during wwII). I think the older generation have moved on and it is really INtrospection of the current mentality of society which the movies are depicting. A sense of innocence still in the process of being corrupted even after 50 years. A sense of watchfulness of where things will lead to next.

I wonder if i am just thinking too much. After all, i don't really watch movies on a monday night.