Hunger Games with Cheese.
I saw Battle Royale as a subbed bootleg around 20 years ago. Fantastic B-movie, and I understand some of the young actors got some notable roles as they got older (Takeshi Kitano was there because he was Takeshi Kitano), but it’s still a B-movie. Good time though, even today.
As an aside on Takeshi, for those who want to go down a rabbit hole, dig into “Takeshi’s Challenge” on the Nintendo Famicom. That game is a trip.
“You know what they call the Hunger Games in France? Battle Royale with Cheese.”
Too many things going on, typed it in backwards!
Last year I was chatting with the 20 year old son of a friend, and he didn't know what Highlander was. I mean...
Well there was only the one movie.
https://genius.com/John-travolta-and-samuel-l-jackson-royale...
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/author-will-wight/anima...
It was "the third highest-grossing Japanese film of 2001". "At the 2001 Japanese Academy Awards, Battle Royale was nominated for nine awards, including Picture of the Year, and won three of them".
Hardly a b-movie, except in the sense "not a Hollywood blockbuster crapfest"
People focus on Kitano too much he was just a secondary character in that movie.
For anyone that misses that jewel of japanese game show, they have rebooted the franchise and the new series are available in Amazon prime.
Yeah, if it's not an American movie, it's some cheap shit! /s
My brother, it was nominated for nine Japanese Academy Awards, it was helmed by one of Japan's top directors, is an adaptation of a best-selling novel, is regarded by critics as one of the best films of the era, has high production values, stars arguably the most famous actor in Japan, was scored by a famous and prolific composer (you might have heard his music in another movie called Django Unchained), etc.
That's not even getting into the economics of film in Japan. A successful film in Japan nowadays earns around $10M on a budget of half a million. BR, produced nearly twenty years ago, had a budget nearly ten times that much and grossed triple.
Suffice it to say, Battle Royale is a high production cost movie, which forecloses the possibility of it being a B movie.
and because I'm just some guy,
https://variety.com/2018/film/asia/japan-ethics-of-making-ch...
The best films I’ve ever watched, that which had the biggest effect on me, were TV-plays and self-funded documentary-films.
That may be true for some but at the really high end, writers have the resources to so some fun things. Even many high-end marvel-style movies have hidden jokes and themes that 99% of viewer don't ever pick up on.