IT'S A RIGHT-HANDED WORLD...(FOR NOW)

So you're seven years old, at the blackboard, answering a math equation. Maybe it's 2+2 = 4. Maybe it's 8-3=5. Doesn't matter. The point is, you're writing, and there's another student beside you writing, and you notice something. The side of their hand, the one this kid is writing with. It's clean. And then you look at your hand, at the soft layer of white dust blanketing the side of your hand stretching from your pinky finger to your wrist. (This section of the hand probably has a medical name, but I don't know what it is. I was absent that day in medical school. Actually, come to think of it, I was absent from medical school itself, wasn't I...) As you scribble your equation, your hand gently glides across what you wrote, smudging both the board and your flesh. Why doesn't it happen to the other kid? What's going on, here?

What's going on is left-handedness, and the curse of being a lefty in a righty's world.

(My brother Ted knows all about this. I'm writing this on his behalf, because he's too introverted to attempt a declaration as detailed as this one.)

There's an article in the current issue of that world-affairs-magazine-for-like-smart-people called The Economist, essentially making the argument that left-handedness may be more prominent in violent societies, because it is advantageous, in a fist-fight situation, to be a lefty; nobody knows how to fight a lefty. (It worked for Rocky against Apollo Creed, but then in Rocky II he switched from being a southpaw fighter to a right-handed fighter to confuse Apollo Creed even further, which was a pretty cool strategy, I admit, but I felt then, and feel now, that it betrayed Rocky's essential left-handed nature, but in some ways that was a moot point because by that point in the picture I was already confused, okay, because earlier in the movie Rocky signs an autograph from his hospital bed with his right hand, which made me think, wait a minute, is this guy an authentic lefty, meaning, does he write left or only fight left, or maybe it was an oversight on Stallone's part, a lapse in judgement and realism on the day of shooting, an embarassing insult to lefties the world over and a mistake that the director should have caught, but the director of Rocky II was Stallone himself, so I guess he's got a lot to answer for, is all I'm saying.) The better a fighter you are, the more impressive you are to chicks, so it's in a species favor to be a strongman.

Or something like that. Couldn't quite get the gist of the article, but the point is: Lefties can fight.

We have to. We learn early on that the world is not for us.

First of all, water fountains at school. Where is the switch-nozzle-thingee? On the right.

Next comes left-handed scissors. I always felt like I was mentally disabled in school having to ask the teacher if they had any left-handed scissors, you know, the ones with the green handle. 'Cause they always had scissors available (one or two, anyways), but they were usually for the corrupt, oppressive, right-handed majority. We got 'special' ones with green handles. Ooooooooh. (Actually, I shouldn't complain, because I learned in Japan that they don't have left-handed scissors at all there, so Japanese lefties are screwed, plain and simple, and Japan, like many Asian countries, still, I think, forces small kids to write with their right hand.)

Even gear shifts in cars are designed for righties. (In those countries that drive on the right, anyways.)

Point is, lefties learn early, yo, that it's not our world -- we're just visiting it. So I always notice, in films and on television, who's a lefty. Who writes with their left hand. Who wields a gun, uzi or otherwise, with their left. Who bats left and throws left. (Full disclosure -- I'm ashamed to admit that I was taught to bat like a righty. And golf like a righty. But I don't play either sport now --baseball or golf -- and I always, always throw left. And I bowl left, too. Proudly.)

I had a book as a kid full of famous lefties. A partial list:

Jack the Ripper. George Bush (senior). Marilyn Monroe. James Cameron. Amadeus. Eminem. Thomas Jefferson. Colin Powell. Glenn Gould. Hans Christian Anderson. James Baldwin. Richard Simmons. Jim Henson. Peter Jennings. Bob Dylan. David Letterman and Jay Leno. Franz Kafka. Beethoven. Ringo Starr. Fidel Castro. Jimi Hendrix. H.G.Wells. Phil Collins. James A.Michener. Helen Keller. Paul Simon. Celine Dion. (Uh, okay -- disregard that last one. Maybe we shouldn't be so proud of her, despite her Canadian heritage. My apologies.) John F.Kennedy. Ross Perot. Ronald Reagan. Bill Clinton. Spike Lee. Bruce Willis. John Irving. Julia Roberts (I think).

(Okay, maybe Jack the Ripper isn't the best role model for a lefty, but still -- you see what being a lefty can drive otherwise sane men to do?)

I mean, come one -- J.F.K. himself was a lefty. And is it a coincidence that three presidents in a row (Reagan, Bush, Clinton) were lefties? Not to mention the two dominant late-night television hosts (David Letterman and Jay Leno)? Lefties seek lofty heights. Lefties have battled adversity to triumph against all natural known (and unnatural) odds.

Despite the fame and respect lavished upon the above individuals, lefties are still seen as somewhat freakish. Left-handed hitters and pitchers and baseball are a pain in the ass. As are left-handed boxers. They're problems to be conquered, these people are, genetic abnormalities that are perceived, not as people, but as dilemmas.

Another thing: You ever try writing with a pen on a lined sheet of paper with your left hand? Once you write a sentence, that part of your hand between the pinky and the wrist will, inevitably, unavoidably, pass over what you have just written. And if the ink of your pen is the least bit malleable, or wussy-like, it will smudge. So after twenty minutes you will look down at the paper to gaze upon your intellectual ponderings, and you will see smitterings and smatterings and splotches and glotches of blue ink. If you're lucky, a few words are legible. You righties are able to look upon what you have just written in real-time as you glide your pen across the page, marvelling at your exquiste penmanship, at the elegant grace of your thoughts. Us lefties, on the other hand, look only outwards as we write, towards the future, leaving the words and their impact and their resonance behind, a gift for the reader, whoever he (or she) may be. (It's only afterwards that we go back and look, to reflect and consider, and we see that it's all an illegible mess, but hey -- we're forward thinkers, is all...)

Anyway, for all your righties out there, don't think that lefties don't have their act together. We're waiting. We're watching. We're aware when our accomplishments are diminished or disregarded, and we remember these oversights. (After all, Helen Keller was blind, deaf, mute and left-handed -- the last part always being omitted in her biography, and look what she accomplished. I would like to argue that being left-handed was her biggest, most grievious handicap, but in these politically sensitive times, I can't further that argument publicly. I just can't. I'd be put away, or shot, or killed, or worse.)

Just think about it -- that utterly innocuous person you see walking down the street may, in fact, unbeknownest to you, be left-handed. You may notice them nervously glancing at your wrists, both the right and the left, trying to determine exactly which one has a watch attached to it. If it's on your right wrist, you're okay. You're safe. You're one of us.

If it's on your left...

Just remember: We don't always give back those bright and shiny lime-green left-handed scissors. Sometimes we keep them. In our pockets. As we walk the streets.

You've been warned.

IF YOU NOTICE

I've got a bit of a bulging right eye now, the result of who-knows-what, but according to the local Australian doctor who I visited the other day, a teeny tiny ant may have found the taste and texture of my skin too tempting to resist. (What a character, this doctor is. Mid-fifties Aussie lady, tall as a basketball player, married to a Cambodian, crude as a sailor. And on top of that, she knows her stuff.) The result is not quite as bad as what Robert DeNiro endured in Raging Bull, but it definitely looks like somebody clocked me a good one.

The remedy? A few pills, a few drops in the socket a few times a day, and there you go. Cured. Although it's been three days, and, while the swelling has been reduced a little bit, it still doesn't seem a heck of a lot better, medicine or no. I read the instructions that came with the eyedrops (yes, eyedrops do have instructions, funnily enough), and it mentioned that Cambodia is a dusty country, uh-huh, knew that one, and it stressed that this dust contains all kinds of nasty things that you don't necessarily want getting your eye. Or your nose. Or your mouth.

I knew that, too -- after a year and a half in this dusty place, how could you not -- but I'd never really thought about it before. Hadn't considered it much. What that dust could do, if it got inside me. What havoc it could wreak on my fragile body. Let alone my eye. (And it's my right eye, too, which is the one with the stigmatism, said stigmatism being the reason why the right lens of my glasses is so much bigger than the left one.) I briefly thought about what would happen if I happened to lose sight in my right eye. Scary, but I do have another one, another eye, and hey, I wonder what it would be like to read with only one eye all the time? (And now I've tempted fate, God, the controller of the universe, whatever deity is floating out there, and I'd like to declare that I will not tempt this force any longer: I like my right eye, alright? It's served me well. Please let me keep it. Amen.)

Point is, you get used to the dust. You get used to the little lizards called geckos crawling around your walls, croaking their rhythmic croak every morning around six. The smell of rancid water down by the river. The fog of dust that bobs and weaves its way through the crowded streets, guided by the mercy of the wind. You don't really think about what it does to you. What it can do to you.

Oh, the objects and forces malice that await us! The STOP sign the moto driver ignores. The brakes on the car that just, won't, brake.

Luckily, we have happy endings most of the time. We go to work, come home, sleep. We fail to notice, if we're lucky.

So, while I was sleeping and unnoticing, a peckish ant decided to give me a little peck and see what I had to offer. (I'm hoping it was an ant. The idea of, like, a giant cockcroach crawling across my chest, up my neck, over my cheeks and onto my eye is something I don't care to consider. Even though I just did.) Maybe it lingered on my face, staring at the closed lid of my eye. (Can ants stare? I guess they can, right?) Maybe it had to choose, this ant did, between a piece of my forehead and a piece of my eyelid. Maybe it deliberated, pondered, considered. Maybe it had a moment of mercy, when it was going to turn around and head back down the bed, angling for my knee or a few of my toes. Then it thought: Naw, screw it. And it dove right in.

I didn't know it was there; I was in dreamland. The clouds of dust and the piles of garbage and the stench of sewage are there when I'm awake. Not everywhere, no, but common enough, potent enough, to make me sometimes pause.

If I notice.

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.