Fargo?

Fargo: A film based on a true story that I regret watching. Yup, I’m pretty sure that sums up my opinion of the movie quite nicely. Aside from it being one of the more depressing films I’ve suffered through; quality wise it felt as if it was a Sunday morning feature film on a public television channel like WB11 or even worse PAX. Seeing as the movie was based on a series of true events I have to give credit to the way the movie was done, it is quite hard to have a hilarious sex scene and a man being killed with an axe then disposed via a wood chipper all in movie let alone have it done tastefully. Though tasteful isn’t saying much to be honest, I think the movie was only received as well as it was because of the big name producer and director behind it. The Coen Brothers I believe are most akin to being the Kanye West of the Film scene, they start out by having something that entertains people and provides a fresh element to something otherwise becoming stale. Though that success reaches a point in their ego inflated brains and they realize “hey, why try harder” I prefer to start my shit storm of an actual review with the end of the movie, as that was my second favorite part aside from the kidnapped women running around with a black sack on her head and constantly tripping and falling. Now what irked me the most was that Margie seemed to be giving the arrested murder in the back of her car some sort of a morality check. She sure isn’t Oprah and I doubt this guy is actually going to internalize anything she said. So it was almost like the end of the movie was set up to further denounce the evils, horrors and atrocities that took place in the movie. Most of the movie was sequestered by introduction of an odd variety of characters that each seemed to have a more unbearable accent than the last, this of course is only made tolerable because the characters seem to mysteriously disappear as soon as they introduced. By far the most bizarre occurrence in the movie is the inclusion of all the awkward scenes in which there is just silence and one camera angle for an extended period of time. Personally I don’t believe in that much symbolism in such a short period of time. I prefer movies that have my childhood fantasies and heroes displayed on the big screen, almost as if they are flung out of my imagination. I find joy not in who directed the movie or who starred in it, but rather in how much the movie resonated with me and what feelings it evoked. Movies like X Men brought my childhood to life, though Fargo did all it could to put the nail in that coffin.

Battle Royale

Sometimes a movie is so controversial that the American government decides to just totally ban it's presence in the United States. Battle Royale a film by Kinji Fukasaku as interpreted from the original novel Koshun Takami. The original premise of the film centers around a corrupt Japanese government that runs a military training and survival program which focuses around a lord of flies esque group of children that are forced to fight to the death by their captors. The movie begins with a tale of a father’s suicide and how the main character Shuya Nanahara came to be an orphan and how he made his way into the high school class he was in. Skipping about 5 minutes into the movie the children are slowly waking up in a deserted classroom with military personal all around and the basis for the BR program being conducted to them. The program coordinator explains how the youth is completely out of line these days and deserves to be put into their proper place in society. Hence the creation of the BR military program as a means of fear mongering and anti social subversion through the means of excessive force that is purely an internal self conflict between what is right and wrong. Within the first ten minutes the head coordinator throws a knife through the head of one of the students. I feel this represents just how fickle and unimportant a single life is when viewed by the government. The students are explained the situation by a unnecessarily cheery video and are distributed their supply bags, in which each contains a random weapon and certain survival supplies and foods. The movie instantly flows into the fight scenes in which death is as common as the numbers that track each of the children. Instantly the movies is reduced to a slaughter and gore fest in which the original meaning of the book was thrown away for the cheap thrills and mind blowing gore effects. The original novel came to symbolize what competition does in the most extreme circumstances and how social Darwinism is sometimes thrust forward upon the unwilling. Rather than keep all of the interesting philosophical aspects, the movie interpretation became something of an extreme representation of the game of life.
The movie slowly goes through the death of almost each student, some of the situations are much more interesting than others. For example a female character, Mitsuko; fools a young man by offering him sexual favors and then right before the boy “makes his move” she cuts his neck and face open with a straight razor. Another rather interesting situation is the moral conflict scene that the protagonist Shuya faces when he “accidentally” kills one of his classmates after trying to escape from his rampage of murder. In this scene Shuya openly questions whether this makes him a killer and is utterly repulsed by his actions to the point of vomiting and tears. I would hate to do a plot summary of the movie, as I feel it would detract from a lot of the intrigue that would cause one to see it for themselves, and would ultimately ruin too much of the experience of watching the movie. However, I would like to delve into the fact that essentially forty one human beings were killed by the end of the program and each of the deaths was by the government; considered an honor. An honor that in no way was rewarded but simply recorded only as a statistic. It makes one question whether a democratic government really does have “the will of people” in mind or is their will whatever the government says it is?