Battle Royale and The Breakfast Club couldn’t be more different. One movie depicts a bleak dystopian future of Japan. The other features high school students in detention on a Saturday. One film shows a Japanese girl impaling her classmate with a sickle. The other has Emilio Estevez disrobing to sleeveless spandex and angrily punchdancing while high on reefer. These films occupy very different cinematic realms. But, they both share a common goal of challenging the status quo within their genres, or as Jay Z would say, change the game. LET’S GET FAMILIAR Directed by Kinji Fukusaku, and adapted from the novel by Koushen Takami, Battle Royale takes place in an alternate reality where Japan is verging on social anarchy. To control the population, the government enacts a protocol
BATTLE ROYALE THE BREAKFAST CLUB
SEAN HOFMAN (HIROSHIMA) In The Breakfast Club, directed by John Hughes, five students from different social circles of high school life find themselves stuck together in Saturday detention. The kids try to tolerate their differences while under the watch of their overbearing principal. As the day wears on, hijinks ensue while the students find they have much more in common than they originally thought. BRO MOVIES
Dancing, High on Reefer
where a random selection of students are chosen to fight to the death. Imagine The Hunger Games without the stupid names/costumes, and WAY more violent. 34
ARTS & CULTURE
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Japanese pictures and “high school” films are, historically, culprits of clichéd typecasting. During the 1900’s, Japan was culturally dominated by MEN and that reflection in cinema was clear. Influential samurai films (chanbara) such as Seven Samurai and Rashomon cemented
the centralized male on the big screen. The men were the main protagonists or antagonists and were granted dynamic demeanors, either heroic or wicked. The women, contrarily, were portrayed more uniformly as spiritually strong, yet reserved. Often filling the geisha role in films like Ugetsu, women were often at the mercy of men through violence, intimidation, and hierarchy. Cinema played the wingman for Japan’s “bro’d out” society. HELD BACK BY HOLLYWOOD HIGH American cinema is no exception to perpetuating stereotypes, especially in the “high school” genre. Since the 1950’s, Hollywood has made and remade films, over and over, on the plight