Battle Royale
Action! If there’s one word associated with cinema, the tension of movie sets, and the focus of attention, it’s this one. Action is very often at the heart of popular cinema: Harold Lloyd hanging from the clock hands in Safety Last! (1923), Cary Grant threatened and strafed by a plane in North by Northwest (1959), Franka Potente gasping for air in Run Lola Run (1998)... Westerns, swashbuckler films, martial arts or adventure flicks, thrillers, all these genres rely on action—sometimes frenetic, sometimes meticulously measured.
From movies by Sergei Eisenstein to Gilles Carle, from John Ford to John Boorman and Werner Herzog, via Paul Verhoeven, Kathryn Bigelow, Park Chan-wook, Érik Canuel, and Nicolas Winding Refn, this series will take you through the full range of emotions, from laughter to thrills, from fear to satisfaction.
In a near future, a class of teenagers from Shiroiwa Middle School is taken by force to a remote island. Their former teacher, Kitano—played by the one and only Takeshi Kitano—suddenly appears. He tells them they have three days to kill each other, and that the last survivor will be allowed to go home. A landmark survival film, notorious for its extreme violence, Battle Royale led Quentin Tarantino to say that he wished he had directed it.
Kinji Fukasaku
Kinji Fukasaku was a Japanese actor, screenwriter, and director. He was confronted with violence at a very young age while working in a weapons factory during World War II. He began his career as an assistant director at Toei, a major Japanese studio, in 1953, before making his directional debut in 1961, featuring a young, up-and-coming Sonny Chiba. He then tackled a quintessential Japanese genre: the yakuza film. During the 1970s, he replaced the traditional image of the honor-bound yakuza with that of a gangster driven solely by greed in a series of highly violent films. He thus pioneered a new genre of realistic yakuza films, often anarchic in nature and focused on spectacular violence. His work has influenced numerous directors, including Takeshi Kitano, Takashi Miike, John Woo, and Quentin Tarantino. In 2000, he directed the highly influential Battle Royale.
