GET A LIFE

Since I've been overseas, I've read a lot of biographies. Right now I'm reading one on former Russian leader Khruschev. In the last few years I've read books about Michael Jordan, Jackie Robinson, Albert Einstein, Francois Truffaut, Condoleeza Rice, Alexander the Great, Fidel Castro, Pierre Trudeu, Paul Martin, Muhammad Ali, John "A Beautiful Mind" Nash, Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan and probably somebody else that I've forgot about, which means that their life wasn't meaningful.

Doesn't it? A good biography will make you believe that somebody's life, hell, anybody's life, did, in fact, have meaning, a shape and a purpose that can only be made clear by analyzing it in exhausting detail.

At their best, biographies allow you a glimpse into the totality of a person's life. Perhaps noone's life is ever meant to be examined in such exhausting detail, and there is, of course, the danger that the biographer has a particular axe to grind -- or, even worse, idolizes their subject so much that even obvious faults are rationalized to the nth degree. Even so, I think biographies are a perfect way to glimpse a significant person in their particular historical context. In other words, you learn the era through the man (or woman) being profiled. You see the tides of history recede or advance based on one person's actions. Character defines events, and events then define character.

At their worst, biographies can be, well, boring. There's a part in Stephen King's book ON WRITING where he's focusing on the primary, paramount importance of the story when writing, um, stories. Some people think it's all about character, King says (and I'm paraphrasing), but if you want character, go and read a biography. You'll get all the character you need.

I think I know what he means. Many biographies, after the first few hundreds pages or so, turn into a variation of: "And then he did this. And then he did that. And then he did this. Oh, and then he did that, can you believe it?"

What's missing? A narrative. The best biographers try to shape some kind of story into their profiles' lives, if only because the reader, to some degree, expects it. We live our lives through narrative, I think, creating one's for ourselves and expecting it in the examples of others. There's a fundamental need for continuity and structure in our existence; good biographies will look for those nooks and crannies in their subjects lives that indicate WHERE and WHY things took place. They will look for a framework. If necessary, they will make one up.

All written words are attempts at meaning. Attempts at biography are efforts focused on one life in one particular period of time. There may not be a logical story; there may not be an identifiable narrative. The author (and the reader) may search in vein for any kind of structure at all. Some people's lives are so chaotic and messy and, well, human that narratives elude not only their chroniclers but themselves, too. But by examining these lives and crafting an arc (as arbitrary and nonexistant as it may be), biographers allow us to revel in the sways and shifts of another's person time on earth. We can gain advice and seek solace in the actions of others. We can compare who we are and where we came from with the giants that once walked this earth. We can identify and empathize with the best and worst in ourselves.

IMAGINE THIS

Imagine this:

You're a thirteen year old Cambodian girl who has been sold into the sex trade by your parents. You live in a brothel, sleeping with God knows how many men a day. You are fed when the kindly pimp in charge of the place feels like feeding you. You look out the window at night and picture the day when you will see the moon that shines down on your home village. Is this moon the same as the one back home? Sometimes you wonder.

Luckily, you are rescued. (I say 'luckily', even though many 'rescued' prostitutes return to the sex trade, for reasons that are multiple and sad -- being scorned by their family, feeling an emotional attachment to their pimps, a sense of shame that has no limits or end.) An NGO specializing in the trafficking of women and children swoops down and takes you and over forty others to someplace safe, warm, protected.

But this is Cambodia. You are rarely protected in Cambodia.

And so, as reported by The Cambodia Daily the last few days, what happens?

An armed group of over thirty men and women stormed into the women's shelter and abducted more than eighty sex workers who had been rescued only the day before. They were forced into 'several luxury sports vehicles'. The two guards in charge of the place were too afraid to get involved. Eight police officers from the government's elite fighting force mysteriously left their posts soon after arriving, shortly before all hell broke loose.

I read something like this and I wonder, not what what kind of country I'm in, but what type of planet I'm on.

Women and children being trafficked for sex. Rescued by aid workers. Kidnapped by their old pimps, in 'luxury sports vehicles'. Guards being paid off to be conveniently absent at the appointed time of abduction.

There are so many factors at work here, all of them brutal, all of them horrifically sad, many of them focusing on the concepts of 'rights'.

I've become more conscious of this after working for awhile at the NGO (non-governmental organization) where I work now.

Many countries in Asia are, how shall we say, unfamiliar with the concept of people having 'rights'. If you are a child, or a woman, you obey those in control -- meaning, parents and husbands. If you are poor, you obey the rich. If you are a citizen, you obey the government, or they will beat you, torture you, kill you.

Simple.

It's a simple concept and at the same time mysteriously difficult to wrap your head around -- the fact that people don't know that it's actually not okay to sell your child into the sex trade, even if you need money, even if there are few other options. This is what we are taught at a young age (if we are lucky). Don't hit your brother. Say sorry to your sister. You can't take his toy truck because he's not done playing with it. Because it's not right.

This is not to say that these concepts don't exist here; of course they do. Humans are humans, pain is pain, and right is right.

But when you add in poverty, coupled with people in power linked to government, armed with wealth (and AK-47's), you create a system that acknowledges the rights of only one group: those who have the means to kick your frigging ass from here to next Wednesday. And then bury you while you scream.

Rights are violated all the time back home. The people who commit the offensive acts should be prosecuted, jailed, punished. We are right to complain about our rights in a democracy that represents the world at it's finest and demands respect.

It's just...

The next time you're on the street, and someone's bumped into you without saying a word, arrogant prick, or you're at work, and someone's screwed you over, and said something about you behind your back, and not paid you back the twenty bucks you lent them, like, three months ago, hello, I know he didn't, like, forget, because I see him every day, the next time that happens, just pause, okay? Just breathe. Think about a warm room, and eighty terrified Cambodian country-hick women shaking and crying and scared, really scared, upset and relieved and hoping, hoping, that they can maybe, if they're lucky, make it back to their home village. And then imagine the door to the room opening, thirty masked men and women armed with machine guns bolting in, screaming at them, striking them, taking them back to a life of servitude and rape and one more customer, just one, do as I say, and close the door. You stink.

Just think about it.

That's all I'm saying.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO GET HIT

Have you ever seen a boxing match?

I mean live, in person, close to the ropes, near enough to smell the sweat and taste the fear.

I haven't, but I'd like to. It's a savage, brutal, animalistic sport that has very few redeeming qualities, leading its practitioners to a middle-age filled with nothing but headaches, blurry vision and a faulty memory.

And those are the good points.

Kickboxing is popular here in Cambodia, (and Thailand, too) but I can't get into that form of the sport. Something about adding kicking to boxing seems to take away the, I don't know, basicness of it. For me, boxing is about punching somebody in the face.

"You every get hit in the head sixty, seventy times a night?" Stallone asks Talia Shire in the original (and best, although the first sequel comes close) Rocky. "It starts to hurt after awhile."

Yes, getting whacked that many times one evening does hurt (I'm assuming), and it shouldn't be, well, fun to wathc somebody go through that, but it is. (For some.) Yet it's more than amusement -- it's elemental. It's archaic. Like the hundred-metre dash, boxing is sport and humanity at its purest.

Some people are scoffing or puking right now, but there's an undeniable grace and balance to the sport that can't be denied. (If you know where to look.) It's why two of the literary world's most esteemed writers, Norman Mailer and Joyce Carol Oates, have written reams on the sport's spectacles. (Read Mailer's The Fight for a philosophical, thrilling exploration into the 'Rumble in The Jungle' fight against George Foreman that was featured in the documentary When We Were Kings.)

Defending his sport against the naysayers, one of Ali's old trainers said: "What people don't understand about boxing is, you don't have to get hit."

Ah, and there's the rub. That single line -- you don't have to get hit -- encapsulates what many people ignore about boxing: its artistry. Its precision. Its strategy. Its dimensions. That's what attracts the inflated egos of the literati and the drunk guy at the end of the bar at Joe's Pub, the one who always falls off the stool.

I'm thinking about boxing 'cause I picked up a biography of Muhammed Ali, probably the most significant American of the twentieth century (after Martin Luther King and the guy who created The Fall Guy. You ever see that? With Lee Majors, the unknown stuntman, who made Eastwood look so fine, as the song said? That was a good show. So the creator of it deserves my props, is what all I'm saying.) No other sport could have allowed or enabled Ali to transcend the sport and become the icon he became.

Soccer, maybe. Because both soccer and boxing are for poor people. You don't need money for either. Which is why you can find variations of both pasttimes in practically every country in the world. (Maybe even in Antarctica, but I'm not sure. )

Boxing, though, appeals to our instincts to protect and defend and defeat. One person against another. Will against will. Each drawing out the other's energy to draw out, in turn, the best of themselves. Each needing the other they're determined to decimate.

Oooh, good stuff, boxing is. Yes, it is ridiculous. Yes, it is inhumane. But if sport serves as a microcosm for life (and I think it does) then boxing explores that microcosm better than any other. It is an intense, unforgiving bolt of life, in all its bloody, ragged glory. Three or ten or twelve or fifteen rounds of sweat and tears. In the end, a winner and a loser. All of it futile. A spectacle of barbarism.

Donald Sutherland, portraying legendary running coach Bill Bowerman, states in the great movie Without Limits: "Some consider running an absurd pasttime on which to waste our energies. But if you can find meaning in the kind of running you need to be on this team, then maybe you can find meaning in another absurd pasttime -- life."

And if you can find (or are willing) to find meaning in something as pathetic and pointless as boxing, maybe you can find meaning in that other absurd pasttime, too.

"YOU HAVE TO LEAVE IT TO THEM"

"We don't make these societies. We have to deal with them as they are. They live their own realities. They have their own way of taking decisions and preparing their people for them. You have to leave it to them to find their own way of doing it. You have to leave it to them."

-- UN head honcho Kofi Annan, on negotiating with
Libya's Gaddafi (or 'wacky Gaddafi' according to those old Garbage Pail Kids bubble-gum
cards from the mid-eighties)

The above quote is taken from a book I'm reading right now called Deliver Us From Evil, by Wiliam Shawcross. It's basically a collection of his reportings from around the world in the nineties, from Somalia to Libya to Cambodia to Serbia (amongst others). The subscript to the book is 'Peacekeepers, Warlords, and a World of Endless Conflict.'

Living in Cambodia has cemented for me the fact that the world is, indeed, a place of 'endless conflict.' A lot of this book is concerned with Cambodia, especially in the 'UNTAC' years, which is when the United Nations came in and basically ran the country for a period of time before they held their first 'free' elections.

Oh, and what a time it was. Cambodia has changed a lot in ten years (or so I'm told), but it's still, how shall I put it, not exactly 'free'. Not quite a democracy. Not exactly diplomatic and equitable in the way that wealth is spread. There's a great line in the book where Shawcross quotes somebody saying: "Cambodia has become a nation of two hundred very rich families and nine million poor people."

Seems to ring true for me. I was thinking about all the nice cars I see in Phnom Penh, Mercedes Benzes and the like. If you're a rich family here (or anywhere, probably) you will have a car for yourself, one for the wife, maybe one for the kids. So let's three cars per rich family. You multiply that by two hundred families, you get six hundred cars. Which might account for pretty much all of the cars booting around Phnom Penh. (Or maybe not. Maybe there's many more rich people than that. Hard to say here. If you're a head honcho in the government, you're rich -- and Cambodia has one of the biggest cabinets in the whole freakin' world, so that makes for a lotta rich people buying a lotta nice cars and doing a lotta driving.)

Recently there have been a lot of reports here from donor agencies, all of them reiterating the basic common points -- billions have been pumped into this land, and, um, guys and gals, uh, what is there to show for it? A lot of Mercedes Benzes, that's what.

Maybe I was naive about the world before. Maybe I didn't get it. I still don't, not really, but I'm learning. I'm learning that the people in power in poor countries like Cambodia are not all that concerned about the people not in power. They are more concerned with wielding power than distributing it.

Basic, common knowledge, I suppose, but I'm a slow learner.

And, with all of that aid money that keeps pouring on in, I think about the quote at the top of this post. About how countries work according to their own rules and regulations and customs and traditions, whether the outside world cares or not. The mysterious alchemy that makes up a people, a nation, a lanuage, a culture, is just that -- a mixture, a concoction, a potion that can be viewed from the outside, but can't be replicated. It is what it is.

So maybe Cambodia will always be poor. Maybe Cambodia's leaders will always be corrupt. When all is said and done, it is, after all, their country, the Khmer people's, to govern and develop. Perhaps the money from abroad and from here will never trickle through the rice fields of this beautiful land and find a place in the hands of the poor, desperate people that need it the most. Perhaps Cambodia is, in the end, doomed to decades of blunt, unremitting poverty.

The thing is, though, a few weeks ago I visited the ancient temples of Angkor Wat, 'Cambodia's Pyramids', for lack of a better term, and they are massive, and they are many, and they were pieced together with painstaking patience and precision thousands and thousands of years ago, when Cambodia was, in fact, the jewel of Southeast Asia, an advanced civilization second to none.

I think of those temples, and the intricacy and care that went into crafting them. The nobility and ambition of those descendants of my young, good-natured former students, inheriting a country fundamentally wrecked by their own government and others. I think of the basic goodness and openness of the Cambodian people, still there in spite of the horr. I think of what poverty and war and despotism can do to a race.

And I haven't given up hope. Not yet.

Time and history are long; a century is just handful of years, really. The temples of Angkor have sat through century after century, civilization after civilization, war after. They're testaments to what the Khmer people could do and still can do.

And there's still time left to turn things (a little bit) around, still hope, and the final chapter in the history of Cambodia, the one that will first chart and then judge the progress that was made in the hundred years after the Pol Pot decimation, has yet to be conceived, let alone written.

Because if you give up hope, what else is left?

BATTLE ROYAL II: GORY, BIZARRE, PLODDING, ADOLESCENT -- AND A LITTLE BIT GENIUS, TOO

It's rare to find a sequel that's actually any good. In fact, the very words 'a good sequel' would strike many people as an oxymoron. (That was always a strange phrase to me -- an 'oxymoron.' OXY was that pimple-cream stuff, wasn't it? And a moron is an idiot, right? So I always imagined an 'oxymoron' as a nerdy-type dude staring at himself in front of the mirror with zit potion smeared all over his face. But I digress...)

The thing is, not including all of those old serial flicks from the thirties and forties, sequels really didn't get going as an economic and artistic (?) force until the seventies. In the Sixties, you had THE RETURN OF THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, true, but other than that, I can't think of another one. (Unless you count the sequel to Paul Newman's THE HUSTLER titled THE COLOR OF MONEY, but that didn't come out until the late eighties.) In the Seventies, sequels began to be made, but they were almost always follow-ups to respected, praiseworthy films. (With the exception of SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT II.) Three Best Picture winners -- THE GODFATHER, THE FRENCH CONNECTION and ROCKY all had sequels made within the Seventies. (Yes, ROCKY won Best Picture. Look it up. Honest.)

Once the eighties hit, all hell broke loose, with sequels to any movie that made even a little bit of money. (CANNONBALL RUN II, which I, um, kind of liked. REVENGE OF THE NERDS II. PORKY'S II: THE NEXT DAY. SHORT CIRCUIT II. POLICE ACADEMY II through, what, VII? Need I go on?) Nowadays, it's almost preordained that if a film rakes in the cash, there WILL be a continuation of the series, like it or not. (You just KNOW that people were CLAMORING for sequels to BRIDGET JONES DIARY, OCEAN'S ELEVEN, THE PRINCESS DIARIES, etc.)

Japan, too, makes its fair share of sequels, and BATTLE ROYAL II is one of them.

It continues the story begun in BATTLE ROYAL, which I wrote about a few days ago. (If you're interested, scroll down. If you're not interested, um, there's some pretty good stuff over at www.cnn.com. News and the like.) That particular film envisioned a near-future Japan where delinquent kids were shipped off to an isolated island to hunt, maim and kill one another, the winner being the only one left standing. (Then again, aren't all islands, by their very nature, 'isolated'? Anyway...) It was a savage, brutal, piercing and funny indictment of the Japanese educational system. In the end, two kids managed to survive, heading back into an uncertain world. There was a grim honesty here that was fresh and bracing.

BATTLE ROYAL II continues the story, as the male survivor of the first film creates his own terrorist organization centralized on a, you guessed it, isolated island; their cause is designed to further the destruction of all adults, not only the ones who forced him to kill and watch his friends being killed. The government sends their own band of teenagers as part of a 'Battle Royal II' game to kill the terrorist punks. Why not let the kids kill the kids?

This second story lacks the clever, visceral punch of the first film; it's almost a war film, with many battle scenes that are quite clearly modeled on SAVING PRIVATE RYAN. It's slower, and talkier, and may, well, bore more than a few viewers.

Having said that, I think this is, in many ways, a deeper film than the first one. The first film's tagline was: "Would you kill your best friend?" This one's may as well be: "Now that you've killed your best friend, how does that make you feel?"

Angry, this film answers, angry and ready to lash out at the world. Ready to condemn anyone and everyone over the age of eighteen.

The plot veers in a direction I never expected it to, concerning itself with terrorism both local and international. How are terrorists made? Why do they do what they do? Well, this film explores that concept as part of a larger investigation into how violence-as violence- messes people up, physically and psychologically. Most action flicks dispense deaths and violence like trick-or-treat candy. This one acknowledges that violence is painful and confusing and disruptive and chaotic. Characters from the first film have evolved from normal kids to savage terrorists; the government leader (and inept parent seen on the receiving end of an indifferent, disgusted phone call from his child) who killed himself at the end of the original has a teenage daughter that is trying to understand why her father was killed, and who did it, and why. The victims become terrorists, all in the name of world liberation. And they deal, emotionally and continuously, with the ramifications of their actions. They hurt and bleed and cry and wonder why. And plot to change the world.

It's kind of a kooky story, truth be told, and its politics and point of view is decidedly adoles --
cent -- and that's the point, and that's why it works. If I was fifteen years old, I would have been cheering the protagonists on. It's an adolescent revenge fantasy on the surface, filled with good kids who are striking back at their oppressors in the name of a larger goal, the liberation of mankind. A manga come to life. It is not a mature film because these kids are not mature; this is what violence has done to them, and now they are trying to use violence to achieve what they consider to be honorable, humanity-serving goals. It's messages and morality are somewhat simplistic, but hey -- if your audience is the younger generation, you can't make everything subtext. It doesn't hurt to be clear and obvious, sometimes.

Look, this is a violent, action-packed film, as the ads say. It's meant to titillate and entertain. But it does so with a reserved intelligence that is absent from most American films. It is very violent, yes, but the film doesn't shirk from that violence -- it pauses to examine the roots of that violence, its sources and its effects. It continues the spirit of the first film but it has a resonance and underlying morality that is an extension, not a retread, of the original.

Most sequels are the same story -- just bigger, longer, more. BATTLE ROYAL II fits that mold, but it's not afraid to be complex and contemplative. (In between the gunfire and spurting blood, of course. This is, after all, a 'Battle Royal' movie.) The filmmakers could easily have just trotted out a gory retread, but they have gone out on a limb and chosen a bold approach that acknowledges the central gimmick of the first film, incorporates it into this second chapter, and then tries to somehow merge within its narrative the seemingly disparate elements of present-day concerns regarding international terrorism with the universal teenage fears of growing-up and getting old.

A bizarre combination, yes, and not always successful -- but boy, both of the Battle Royal flicks use violence and satire in a combination unseen in western cinema. Stark and funny and scary and absurd, these films are. Kind of like adolescence.

UFOS, GHOSTS, CHRISTMAS, MISSING SOCKS AND THE TEMPORAL POSSIBILITIES OF THE UNIVERSE, CHRIS ROCK, THE VASTNESS AND SMALLNESS OF THINGS

Random thoughts on a Sunday morning...

The thing I don't understand about ghosts is, if there ARE ghosts, why don't they ever show themselves at nine o'clock on a Saturday night in the middle of Times Square? Why don't they reveal themselves in broad daylight during the seventh inning stretch of a Yankees game?

Maybe there are certain rules that ghosts follow. They might have their own system set up, and we -- the living -- are just unaware of what it's all about. They may have their own union or something, mandating when and how they can reveal themselves, and to whom.

That might explain why you never hear of the ghost of Japanese geisha showing up in Sarnia, Ontario. Just doesn't happen. You never see the lonely, desperate spirits of the poor people slaughtered by the Khmer Rouge wandering around a mall in Toronto. Why is that? It makes me think, should ghosts exist, which I'm on the fence about, that there ARE regulations. There IS a code. Maybe they have everything planned out. You can't just cross over between continents. You can't jump back and forth in time.

If they do, in fact, exist, they always decided to roam around abandoned buildings at two a.m., revealing themselves for only a moment or two to a selected few, which leads me to suspect that they have a plan. They have a plot. There's a system at work.

I have the same questions about U.F.O.'s. Why doesn't one just land in the heart of Tokyo? I'm tired of this we-saw-it-late-at-night-hovering-above-a-cornfield-in-Nebraska stuff. Just show up on the White House lawn, for once.

For God's sakes, simpy REVEAL yourselves!

Once and for all.

Is that too much to ask?

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It's the beginning of the month, a December month, 2004, and the sun is shining, the air is hot, the streets are dusty, the sky is blue. Somewhere in the world the Christmas season is taking hold, I'm sure of it, I REMEMBER it, but here, in Phnom Penh, aside from the odd Christmas tree put up in stores to humor and entice the foreigners to unleash their American and Cambodian cash, there's little reminder of Kris Kringle and his merry men. Somewhere, I'm sure of it, Kris and his elves are working feverishly in their workshop, working their asses off to meet that deadline that is only a few weeks away. I'm not knocking Santa, he works hard, does is best, and Christmas Eve is only one night and all, but I think he left Cambodia off his flight path. I think Santa should think about adding Southeast Asia to his list next year. The kids could use him.

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You know how you can never find your OTHER sock, the one that makes a pair? I'm convinced that there is some kind of a rip, maybe even a portal in the space-time continuum that has been programmed or designed simply to allow those socks to leave this particular dimension and enter another one parallel to our own.

Think about it. Everybody always loses the 'other' sock. Where do they go? They're rarely found. Maybe it has something to do with the idea of a 'pair' itself, and socks, no matter what material they're made of, represent something in the universe that is not meant to be PART of a pair. Yes, yes, we have two feet, requiring two socks, but maybe the universe is sending a kind of signal, via the missing socks, that two feet are one foot two many. That we're wasting one of those feet. That that extra foot is, in fact, a form of gross excess. So the universe, perhaps of its own free will, perhaps through the deliberate machinations of a higher being, allowed a portal to be created that was specifically intented to go after those socks. To nab them before we could find them. Maybe they're tossed into some elaborate junk drawer that exists on the border between this dimension and the next. All those socks, millions of them, waiting. A symbol of our waste. Marooned in the purple, starless vortex of the space-time continuum. Wondering what they did wrong (if socks have consciousness, of course.)

Sometimes the universe does send messages, you see, and the 'missing' socks may be one of them: Don't waste things. Use what you have. On one foot you can do a lot, is what these missing socks may be saying.

(I'm not crazy. I swear...)
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This is a Chris Rock line, and it's so funny in its simplicity and logic that if it doesn't make you laugh, then that implies that my written delivery is not nearly as funny as Rock's spoken delivery, which will offend me. Greatly.

"You know when a plane crashes, and the only thing that ever remains intact is the 'black box'? Why don't they just make THE WHOLE PLANE out of that box?"
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I was talking to an old Swiss gentleman at a restaurant the other day, a retired chap who had spent thirty years playing music in and around Asia, and he was on a visa run from Thailand, first time to Cambodia, only staying in Phnom for a few days, in fact, and he was asking me about the city, where to go, what to see, how much to pay the motodope drivers, and I was answering him as best as I could, not even thinking about my answers too much, and it only struck me later that I had once been a kid from St.Catharines who, only twelve, thirteen years ago, played hockey every Saturday or Sunday morning at Bill Burgoyne arena for seven, eight years (usually there, yes, but also at the Haig Bowl, the arena down by the General Motors plant, but not too often at that one) and now I was most definitely not a kid and I was nonchalantly throwing off my knowledge about Cambodia to a slightly grizzled and weathered but kindly foreign gent and, while my information was not necessarily INSIGHTFUL, no, it was, more or less, ACCURATE, and it made me think about how far we can go in life, literally and figuratively, how much we can learn, how confident we can become, how vast and how small our own little worlds really are.

BATTLE ROYAL

If you ever think American movies are a getting just a little bit TOO violent, I recommend that you check out a Japanese flick called BATTLE ROYAL.

This is a movie where the whole point is to watch teenagers slaughter each other for fun.

And you know what?

It actually DOES have a point, one that it expresses brilliantly.

In Japan, the education system is war. Students are competing against each other, literally, for the best spots in the best kindergarten. Seriously. If you get into a good kindergarten, see, it means you get into a good elementary school, which means that you can then go to a good junior high school, leading to a good senior high school, leading to a top-notch university, which inevitably gives way to a high-level company, which leads to a prosperous, successful life.

BATTLE ROYAL the movie is about a time in the near future when unemployment is high, and most kids have rebelled, refusing to go to school. The government decides to take some of these kids and group them together on an island. Once on the island, they are then given weapons and forced to kill each other. There's about fifty of them. The winner is the only one left alive. Go to it, kids. Have fun.

("Why are you doing this?" one of the kids asks. "Life is tough," is the answer. Which may be the most accurate encapsulation of educational philosophy there is. We're preparing you for life, and if it's too much, well, so is life. You endure or you die.)

A brutal, sadistic idea. What's particularly unsettling is not necessarily the violence itself, but the age of the perpetrators and victims. These are all teenage boys and girls, and, unlike in American movies, they LOOK like teenagers because they ARE teenagers. And they shoot one another and fire arrows into each other's necks and lob chopped-off-heads filled with hand grenades stuck in their mouths, all of it punctuated by the patented bloody gore best found in Japanese movies. This is a flick that could never be made in America, because a) kids killing kids would never make it past the ratings board and b) violence in American film rarely is used to accentuate a well-thought out theme; in Japanese movies, violence is usually the icing on the cake -- in American films, violence IS the cake.

But there IS a point, you see. I think the film works as a potent metaphor for the Japanese school system. Some kids give up right away, killing themselves. Others try and plot against the adults. The 'transfer' student is right away seen as a source of suspicion. There are only a few adults portrayed at all in the movie -- the leader of the 'Battle Royale', a lazy oaf who first appears menacing and fierce but later is seen lackadaisically munchng cookies and whose own daughter tells him on the phone to not bother coming home, him being such a loser and all. Another adult, a parent of one of the kids,is seen in flashback, hanging from the ceiling, killing himself but leaving a note draped around the rope essentially telling his kid: "You can do it!" The older generation cops and out kills themselves, but hey, you kids will do just fine! Do as I say, not as I do.

These are what these kids are facing. They distrust the adults in their lives and rightly so. A game is created by adults designed so the kids themselves can kill each other. And what's the reward? Life. Which means, inevitably, a life of failure and incompetence. Of job insecurity and emotional indifference from your own family and the younger generation. Of rote conformity and fear of youth.

The whole thing is a brilliant critique of the modern Japanese educational system, and, to a lesser extent, Japanese society as well. It's a bitter and piercing expose, and it's told through the means of a really warped, twisted, violent suspense tale.

You can get off on this movie on either level. It works as an action/suspense story, kind of a Japanese version of LORD OF THE FLIES meets THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME.

But there's another layer, a deeper, darker layer, one that becomes more disturbing the more you think about it and the more you know about Japan. This is a perfect example where violence on screen is not only justified, but essential. It's blunt and raw and a little bit ludicrous and always painful.

The film ends with a little bit of hope and words of advice, if not warning, to the younger generation -- "keep running."

I'd be inclined to see that as a positive note. A ray of sunshine, if you will. Sometimes things get better. Sometimes you CAN escape the game.

The thing is, like life, hope can die quick, and the game is rarely over when it seems to be.

There is, after all, a BATTLE ROYAL II.