Messages

 :o

Am... Am I to believe... Am I to believe that you don't want people "hatin" on this???

Un-frigging-believable.

There's no way I would have downloaded and played this thing, but I had to see the original so I could enjoy Vince's parody. I've just hurled my own little pile of acidical vomit all over myself, and I'm sending you my cleaning bill.

So, based on the fact that

Spoiler

"jiggling the niggled rope"

[close]

gives a nice little closing message, you posted this absolute crapfest to get back at the moderators who locked a thread that broke several rules? Nice. By the way, you do know that "nigga" is not a shortened form of "niggar," right... since, you know, niggar is not a word and all...

@ MillsJ & PMBoy: I understand that point. My pal told me about a Fullmetal Alchemist hoodie he saw at a really cheap price, and I aksed him where he got it. When he said "Hot Topic," my response was, "Oh, I can't go in there. I like a lot of their merchandise, but I feel uncomfortable going into a place full of hardcore goths dressed like Bill Gates."

I only remember because when I was younger, I had Lotus Suite, one of the programs in which was one of those programs you use to make animated tutorials (ie. you do things on your computer and speak into a microphone, and the program records it all and then makes a movie out of it so you can show other people how to do things... BTW: if anyone knows of a freeware program like this I'd be grateful). I used to make crappy animations in MSPaint by drawing guys and then cutting them out and moving them around the screen, and they were often violent, so I would employ that spraypaint effect to splash blood all over the place. A couple years back I tried to recreate one of my more popular animations, in which two men, one of which has a giant afro, are fighting, and the afro wakes up and eats the guy it's attached to and then goes after his assailant. When the afro started eating the guy, I pulled out the spraycan and started splorting it around, and, hey howdy, instead of bloodspray I got red glitter.

Yeah (he answered, very late), 3.1 had more of a "spray" effect, which wasn't but borderlined on antialiased. After that, it just  was a couple little square dots splattered around. The original could make some cool blood and fire, but alas, no more.

And I've just got to say: I can't use MSPaint, and everything I do in it sucks, but that's not to say it can't be used to some great effect. Go find some of Helm's work and you'll know what I'm talking about.

Weren't we talking about movies that were bad but still good? If so, my vote goes to "The Last Broadcast," the film that inspired the Blair Witch Project. It was poorly acted, poorly directed, poorly written, and had one of the absolute WORST ENDINGS I've ever seen in my life... But all this added to the fact that it was a mockumentary actually made it believable (real people, I'm not sure if you've noticed, tend to become bad actors when a camera is put in front of their face, even if they aren't supposed to be acting). As such, they had me going the whole movie. "Is this real?" I thought. "It's way too far fetched. What the hell is going on here???" Off the record, a good mockumentary that is actually good is "Mail Order Wife."

If we are talking about bad movies that are just plain bad... I have to go with (as a given) anything by Uwe Boll, or Boogeyman... Or Darkness Falls (how the hell are you supposed to kill a ghost by lighting your hand on fire and punching it, even if it IS "allergic" to light???).

I'll actually have to concede to that. I mean, I certainly wouldn't show it to my kids, until at least they were MUCH older, and then only if I was sure they would enjoy it, not as some kind of tool. But, nevertheless, I know if I had seen this movie when I was younger, it would have taken the place of "Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind" as my influence to be a pacifist. However, now that I have seen it, I wonder... could the scene that moved me so much in Nausicaa, where Lord Yupa stops Nausicaa from avenging her father with his own blood, really have mattered to me if I were put in the same situation as these students? Battle Royale made me reconsider exactly what it is I'm capable of.

I've always thought that I'm incapable of cheating on my spouse, and I've always been very faithful even to the girlfriends I had in junior high school. But what happens if I'm put in the position, like in Indecent Proposal, where I'm offered a million dollars to do just that? Or if I'm threatened with my life? Battle Royale made me realize just how frail human beings are in several ways, not the least of which is our perception of who we really are.

Well, now that this thread is up, I guess it's free reign to ask a question that's been bothering me for quite some time.

Why did they change the airbrush? Honestly, the one that came packaged with Windows 3.1 was considerably better than the random assortment of hard-edged square dots that joker makes now.

  Still don't get it.

And am I to believe that these guys are nothing more than little chubby weiners? The one where he first sees Radarette weems to indicate this. Although on my first readthrough, as I said a moment ago, it was from right to left, so he actually got shrinkage from seeing her.

I don't understand the sex one... And I'm almost twice your age (Fluke, not Nik). Could you kindly enlighten me?

PS: Been reading the Battle Royale manga, and just realized when I was checking out your latest comics I was reading them right-to-left. I still don't get the sex one...

Don't do it on Blogspot.

www.smackjeeves.com

It's designed for webcomics, and if you at least look at one other person's strip and post a comment once a week or so you'll have a ton of people visiting your site. Just make sure you're actually ready to do so.

Kind of reminds me of Grim Fandango...

  ...with a really long Johnson.

Besides my initial reaction, it looks like it might be pretty cool. Especially since it looks like GF...

  ...with a... nevermind

The competition might take a few minutes or a few months... and there's really no sense of competition.

From the back cover of my copy of the movie:

"At the dawn of the new millenium, Japan is in a state of near-collapse. Unemployment is at an all-time high, and violence amongst the nation's youth is spiralling out of control. With school children boycotting their lessons and physically abusing their teachers, a beleaguered and near-defeated government decides to introduce a radical new measure: The Millenium Educational Reform Act. Overseen by their former teacher, Kitano, and requiring that a randomly-chosen class be taken to a deserted island and forced to fight each other to the death, the Act dictates that only one pupil be allowed to survive. He or she will return, not as a victor, but as the ultimate proof of the lengths to which the government is prepared to go to quell the tide of juvenile delinquency."

Honestly, I'm not going to tell you your opinion is wrong, because no one's opinion is wrong. However, your facts are wrong... Battle Royale is not a pointless bloodbath. As I've said already, several times in fact, it shows violence for what it really is... a very terrible thing. The idea of putting the kids on the island forced to fight to the death simply puts the idea "violence is bad" on the table and then improves on it infinitely by showing the absolute worst conditions. If American school kids could watch this movie at an early age, before any of our stupid American movies get first chance to put the preconceived notion in their head that killing is somehow cool and glorified, they would never, ever touch a weapon in their lives. Note that Japan has an incredibly low crime rate.

I can understand that maybe you didn't like it, but don't sit there and try to tell me it's a pointless bloodbath. I know pointless bloodbath, because it's the only thing Hollywood has been throwing at me since I was a kid. Don't try to tell me that a movie has no redeeming value when it made a grown man who didn't even shed a tear when his own father passed away cry like a baby the whole time through. I feel sorry that you have the idea that just because a movie is violent means its pointless. It's kinda like those people who say nudity is bad and then turn around and say we're all made in God's image...

EDIT: By the way... I can hardly accept your opinion if you're going to say "it's a disposable bloodbath" and then turn around and say "I laughed when the fat kid got speared in the gut." You hypocrite. So, what you're essentially saying is that the fat kid was just as "disposable" as the movie? That's Yoshio, whom I mentioned in an earlier post. He was fat, and unpopular, and when he was told what was happening knew that everyone would gun straight for him, being the easiest target. He snapped when the time came to make the decision to continue being a pacifist and be hunted down and murdered or to take the one little bit of luck that his life had ever thrown his way... a good weapon... and survive. And, as Limping Fish mentioned, the "poisoned spaghetti" was one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the film, albeit a little overstylized.

Battle Royale achieves something similar in the scene in which two lovestruck students decide that rather than to be forced to kill their classmates, and utimately each other, they will simply plummet over a cliff, hand in hand, to their doom. The lighthouse massacre, a simple case of mistaken identity, which ends with the instigator screaming her apologies through tears as she is forced to gun down those around her, holds equal power.

Damn movie. Reading that turned me all emo...

I definitely have. I had a dream that I told Peter Jackson to get off his ass and go make the Hobbit so I could direct the American remake (properly read: bastardization) of Battle Royale that they are going to start working on in 2008. Too many projects going on at once, though.

And as for the survivability factor... adrenaline does weird things to you... and sometimes taking license with how the human body works is an essential part of storytelling

@ Progz: 

The Ring, I thought, was just a good movie, not a very scary one. The idea was scary, and that's what I liked about it. Being a writer myself, I love stories (which, by the way, I know I've been going on, and on, and on, and on about Battle Royale ((that was the original point of this thread after all)), but another thing that Battle Royale influenced me in is to make sure that my characters, even the very minor ones, are deep, complex, and multi-leveled, and that even the villain is someone the character understands, just like poor, lonely Kitano). The idea was, in fact, frightening. I left the theater thinking "That was a really good movie!" and then went out with some friends to the ice cream parlor. That night, though, and for a series of nights afterward, I had a hard time sleeping. Ringu is actually a bit more creepy, with more disturbing images and sounds (the towel-headed man kept appearing in my mind for weeks afterward). I was watching it with two female friends, and they couldn't watch the whole thing... one decided she was going to throw up and left my house crying. It didn't bother me at all... Neither did Ringu 2... Neither did Ringu 0. Neither did Rasen. No movie has ever scared me (when I was 8 I think I jumped at a Freddy movie... since then I hate all jump-horror, not because it scares me, but because it's cheap). But Ringu and its sisters... and it's cousins... are all very creepy and atmospheric. And like I've said countless times about horror... it's not calesthenics (ie. jumping out of your seat through the whole film) that makes a good horror movie... it's being trained slightly to look in the back seat of your car before you get in... to unconsciously slip your blankets over your head before you go to sleep... to walk back from the bathroom in the middle of the night a little faster than you normally would... to not hang your feet over the side of the bed...

...or, like me, show the Ring movie to everyone you can... just in case.

I don't listen to Korn, because they aren't my style of music. So, I won't discuss it, as my opinion would be uninformed. However, when I saw this, I was reminded of a humorous anecdote from my youth that was a bit too open-ended, high-brow and inside for it to probably be of any real comedic value here. I'll give it a go anyway.

When I was younger, I was forced into a Christian high school by my family. My best friend Juice came from similar circumstances. At said school, we were taught to be closed minded, pompous pricks (literally... I recall being justified by my teacher when I called a girl a slut for wearing quarter-length sleeves).

We were at youth camp once, and we saw a kid with a Korn T-shirt on. I pointed it out to Jui. He responded thusly, in the presence of our youth counselor...

"That stupid-ass mother fucking moron! What the fuck! They don't even fucking SPELL it right!!!!!"

It's certainly not extremely violent or gory, especially not as much as any American film of similar genre. As I said, the "shock value" in the case of Battle Royale is the age of the combatants, not what they do to each other. And, with the exception of Kiriyama, ALL the violence is portrayed as horrible, mind-numbing, terrifying, and sad. It's not cool to kill, it's something that drives the characters to anguish, despair, and insanity. Cool people in black trenchcoats aren't doing the killing, but rather frightened children with no hope or survival otherwise. When blood sprays, the characters don't bask in it, they cry. It's definitely not a movie designed to glorify senseless violence, but rather to warn against it. The only western movie I can liken it to is POSSIBLY Red Dawn, but Red Dawn isn't even a pale shadow of Battle Royale. I heartily recommend it, and the whole reason I started this thread in the first place is because I wanted people to see it and possibly share what I felt.

I just want to clarify, especially for Progzy, that generally I hate the type of movies you seem to think I'm talking about. I don't want you to think I'm some kind of sicko that gets off on kids killing each other. My reaction to the movie wasn't based on the whole "oh, it's horrible so it must have a good message" thing. My brother, whom I don't even speak to anymore because of just this reason, forced me to read a couple of books and when I told him I didn't like them, he got extremely angry. "You'll never have the skill in your pinky finger to write as they have!!!"  "Why?" I asked him. Turns out, it's because they were the first few prolific American writers to start using a lot of profanity in their novels. So, I'm certainly am not on board with the whole "it has to be harder and faster and badder than anything previous to be good" way of thinking.

Really, Battle Royale isn't all that bizarre or hard or freaky, and it certainly wasn't even nearly as bad as ANY American action or horror movie I've ever seen (by far), with the exception that the casualties are considerably younger. What struck me about Battle Royale as being so powerful is the way the students reacted. It was horrifically real, and terrifying, and beautiful. I recently read that the director made it because the book reminded him of when he was younger... he was drafted at the age of 15, and I read, although I can't find it again now, a specific recollection from him about loading artillery with mortar exploding all around him, and having to dive under a pile of the bodies of his fallen 9th-grade friends and classmates to survive. He didn't make the movie to make a statement, or for the sake of pushing the envelope, like Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino tend to do... He did it because the story meant something to him, and it was a deep and profoundly moving experience for him, and he wanted to share it with people like me. If anything, the stylized violence detracted from it, not made it more enticing as everyone else seems to be saying. However, it made it hit home more. When you see a character who you've come to care about ripped apart by gunfire, especially an innocent little girl who just wants to survive to see the boy she likes, it's very painful.

It may sound lame, but I'll always remember the students who died in Battle Royale, as though they were my friends. That's how very touching and personal an experience it was for me.  It may sound lame, but I wish I had been there to stop Kiriyama before he started his murder spree... I would have been a friend to Mitsuko and Yoshio so they didn't think killing was the only way to survive... I would have helped Shuya protect Noriko to the end... I would have tried to give hope to Yoji, Kazuhiko, Tomomi and Yoshimi before they commited to their suicide pacts... I would have mourned Kawada as he lay dying from his wounds. I know it may sound lame, but I've never had such a moving movie experience, and I doubt I ever will again.

It was Nausicaa? That's one of my favorite anime, but I would have never thought from your description that's what it was, except "girl" and "bug." Maybe you meant Warriors in the Wind, the bastardized version.

And Nik: I didn't know you liked anime. Then again, you did replace your avatar of your kids with an anime girl... baka