Battle Royale and The Hunger Games: A Comparison

Battle Royale and the Hunger Games. Having watched both movies, I think it's appropriate to do a comparison between them. WARNING - MILD SPOILERS AHOY





The most obvious thing both movies share is the theme of kids killing kids. In Battle Royale, the kids are part of the same class, in the same age group (17-18 as they're finishing high-school), while in The Hunger Games, the participants are randomly selected among various age groups, some as young as 11-12. In that train of thought The Hunger Games wins the award for 'What the Hell Were They Thinking!?' - 'they' in the case being The Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins and the producers of the movie. Even though The Hunger Games is a lot milder with the blood and gore, it's still unnerving to be watching 5th graders participating in a fight to the death. And seen as how this adds nothing to the immersion or the plot, I'd say it's a completely self-propelled tear-jerker. In Battle Royale a bunch of high school sophomores kill each other out of paranoia, jealousy and stupidity. In The Hunger Games a little girl dies after a guy with several weeks of training throws a spear at her for 100 points. You choose which one is the more disturbing movie. The scene where the girl is 'burried' in flowers by the protagonist doesn't help in my opinion.

The second thing that bears amazing similarity is the way the games are presented as a game-show type reality-TV event. Now Japan has had a lot of experience with reality shows and hence in Battle Royale the school kids watch a tape of a genki-genki TV presenter jumping around while explaining how they're supposed to murder each other, and overall the rules of the game. In The Hunger Games movie, the role is given to an extravagant lady dressed in steampunk-ish high-class attire with an unmistakable British accent. Both serve to give us an idea of how widely accepted the games are, and how nobody thinks of them as anything else than entertainment. In The Hunger Games, though the show is much more public, and we see the typical presenters and talk-show hosts before and after much in the style of Big Brother. In Battle Royale, the game exists for itself, and the movie suggests that the rest of Japan is aware of them happening, but nobody's actually watching, besides the school teacher and a bunch of army guys.

When it comes to the rules of the game, once again the similarities are striking. In Battle Royale, the participants receive a satchel with a random weapon and basic survival necessities like water and bread. One may contain an uzi, while another one may have only a set of binoculars, or a pot lid. In The Hunger Games the weapons are in plain sight, and several people die just in the first few minutes, as they're struggling to get the better weapon. What mainly drives the plot in Battle Royale is that nobody knows what anybody else has as a weapon, so they're constantly on the outlook, and at the same time killing someone else gives you access to their weapon. In The Hunger Games the weapons are plentiful and on top of that if the producers of the show like you they may send you relief packages. Also in Battle Royale there's a time limit of three days, after which if there is no winner, everybody dies. In The Hunger Games the plot twist hinges on the fact that it's a ratings show, and nominating a winner acts to keep people from rebelling, which is used against the bad guys near the end of the movie. In The Hunger Games there also doesn't appear to be any time limit. In Battle Royale the group is stuck on an island, while The Hunger Games is set in some patch of forest, with remote controlled traps which are used to stop participants from escaping the perimeter.

Another gimmick present in both movies is the announcements of who died, while the game is running. In Battle Royale that's done over loudspeakers, while the much more technologically advanced The Hunger Games world uses holographic projectors in the sky as well as cannon shots. Same difference, if you ask me. In the end of both movies, two people survive, although in The Hunger Games the way that's done is as I mentioned before by exploiting the fact that the producers need to nominate a winner, while in Battle Royale the escape is a lot more satisfying and achieved in a much more complex way.

All in all the movies are similar in their premise, but the main difference is that death in Battle Royale is somewhat of an exploration of the psychology of a killer, everybody starts off innocent, and they have to kill the people they've known for years to survive. Some go with it from the first second, others have to learn how to get over themselves. Some become naturals, while others are gullible enough to allow themselves to be killed. Some even go as far as committing suicide in order to avoid becoming murderers. Groups of people who trust each other form and are disbanded all the time, while in The Hunger Games only one group exists, from the start until the end, and pretty much everyone except for the main two characters and the little girl are completely evil. In The Hunger Games there's no second guessing about the nature of killing another person, besides the main character. In that respect Battle Royale is a much more layered experience, going a lot deeper into the human condition.




For a More Detailed review of Battle Royale click here

Lastly Battle Royale is a self-contained plot, while The Hunger Games is drawn out as a trilogy, for whatever reason... The feeling I'm left with after seeing both movies is that I'd love to read the Battle Royale novel, while I don't really care about Suzanne Collins' books. Believe me, I couldn't care less if Collins saw Battle Royale before or after she wrote the books. It couldn't possibly make less of a difference to me. What's important is that one of the movies is an exploration into humanity, and the other one is the next anti-utopian saga about nothing in particular, with some superficial shockers and some choked up tears of anger. 

Battle Royale: 1999: Life is a Game

Battle Royale is a 1999 movie from Japan that deals with a fictional world where the Japanese society has been hit by a recession, with a 15 percent unemployment, several million people have been left without a job, the students have started boycotting schools, and in response the military clique has organized a yearly event, where one class of forty two students have to fight to the death. The film gained popularity for a short while and has come to attention recently because of its similarities to The Hunger Games books by Suzanne Collins and the recent 'Hunger Games' film, that came out only a few days ago.

watch the trailer below

Battle Royale starts with a class of students celebrating their last days in school with a field trip, on the bus, they're drugged by their teacher and transported onto a remote island, where the game is going to take place. They're instructed that only one out of the forty two is allowed to survive. They're all fitted with explosive collars that track their every movement and there's only three days for them to kill each other off and if there's no winner by then, everybody dies. They're each given a bag of equipment, water food and a randomly chosen weapon, which could be anything from a pot lid to a set of binoculars to a sub machine gun.

It turns out later on that between them, there's one who joined for the fun of it, posing as a transfer student, arguably the most deadly of them all, and another one who's got some history with the game. The movie itself is a brilliant exploration of how quickly the mindset for survival takes hold, as they quickly learn that nobody's joking, and nobody's a friend any more. Every now and again a group of the students will try to organize to better their odds, but eventually it all breaks down when suspicion sets in. A couple who refuse to fight die off almost instantly, another two commit suicide, and the daily briefings that their teacher gives them over a loudspeaker system, set up across the island, are a gruesome reminder of what they're all fighting for. Someone or another's death is shouted out through the speakers, by the teacher himself with a sense of demonic satisfaction in what he believes to be a valuable lesson that should eventually bring Japan out of stagnation by forcing its people to deal with reality as if it's kill or be killed.

With that premise in mind, the movie doesn't push too hard to be overzealous in shocking its viewers. There's none of the dramatized editing, that's typical in Western movies, to stress the tragic death of someone or another. In other words what Holywood often sees as an opportunity for a B rated flick, Japan has turned into an exploration of the mindset of the hunter and the hunted, in a game where there can be no trust whatsoever and nobody is left completely innocent. 

Battle Royale is based on the novel, by the same name, from Koushun Takami, the novel is said to be even more controversial than the movie itself. 

Cruel Intentions (1999): Sarah Michelle Gellar is a Bad Bad girl

Cruel Intentions is a 1999 drama with Sarah Michelle Gellar and Reese Witherspoon. The movie follows the lives of four college students, the wealthy and powerful Kathryn Merteuil who recruits her step brother, Sebastian, to take revenge on her ex by seducing the girl he dumped her for (the overprotected daughter of high-class parents). Sebastian (Ryan Phillippe) refuses as he has plans to pursue the dedicated virgin, Annette(Reese Witherspoon), instead as his own personal project. 

The story gets twisted when Kathryn offers her step-brother a bet. If he can't get in bed with the puritan Cecile (Selma Blair) Kathryn gets his vintage Jaguar, if he can succeed in his mission - he gets Kathryn. From then on it's a wild game of trickery and charm and some unexpected twists and turns. Who ends up with whom is a matter of great plotting, and for love to find its way in the whole twisted conspiracy something extraordinary will have to happen between the cold, distant and playboy-ish Sebastian and the more reserved Annette.

This movie is a classic for the nineties and I recently watched it again, after more than ten years. I definitely recommend this to anyone who's interested in the classy although often downright evil plotting and scheming between the overly-wealthy and bored inhabitants of high society.

Fight Club: The Novel by Chuck Palahniuk

Like most people I watched Fight Club before I knew who Chuch Palahniuk was. Nevertheless his novel that started a cult following back in the 90s, is equally as important as the Brad Pitt and Edward Norton movie. 

Chuck Palahniuk: http://chuckpalahniuk.net

Chuck Palahniuk is a writer, based in Portland Oregon, the author of Fight Club and one of my favourite writers of all times. My first experience directly of his work, was with a story called Guts. The story was around 2008 circulating around the less-savoury parts of the Internet as a sort of literal gore-fic. People copied it around to scare other people, and for a while, as I was unfamiliar with who or why wrote it I was wondering myself if it was a true story, or a figment of somebody's imagination. The story of Guts revolves around a particular practice of pleasuring ones self through the sucksion of a swimming pools filtration system. That is as much as I feel comfortable telling you about it without ruining any of my reader's dinner. You know how content gets labeled Not Safe For Work, things get bleeped out to spare you your supposed innocence, well this one is the embodiment of Not Safe For Life. With that warning it is available on the author's website here: Guts by Chuck Palahniuk: The Cult.

Chuck Palahniuk's style of transgressive fiction is unique in that he does his research thoroughly to uncover the most shaded places of the human experience. Palahniuk's experience is equally as unique. Early in life he worked as a diesel mechanic, then he got a journalism degree and sometime along the way he started some fiction writing classes. Meanwhile he held such peculiar jobs as driving victims of various illnesses to their help-groups, what inspired him to write the beginning episodes of Fight Club with the ascending bowel cancer, the testicular cancer, the blood parasites group. In these groups Palahniuk would sit throughout in a corner and listen to the stories people had to tell about their lives, stories of suffering, detachment and eventually absolution, and that's what made his writing style so genuine. His characters are in a sense derived through the best source available - that of the experience of real living people. In these meetings he acquired a sense of how people would tell their stories - what parts would they influence to interest the others listening in the group, how would they rationalize their suffering weather it was an AA meeting, or a Survivors of some terminal disease or another.

The Fight Club novel is not so different from the movie, except it's got a different ending. And it feels like it's told a bit differently along the way. Less of the Brad Pitt macho appeal, more of the actual characters, unassociated with the Holywood stars. You know - the parts that didn't fit in the movie, because the reel was already way too long for cinema, even though David Fincher meticulously filmed nearly every scene from the book. For any fan to claim to understand the movie, the novel is an important part of the message. You can find Fight Club, as well as the rest of Chuck Palahniuk's books here:

Chuck Palahniuk's Official Web-site: The Cult

Fight Club: The movie your parents didn't want you to see.

Fight Club is a 1999 movie by David Fincher, starring Brad Pitt, Edward Norton and Helena Bonham Carter, based on the novel by Chuck Palahniuk, about a man who struggles to make sense of the reality he's forced upon himself. The fighting club from the title though, is nothing like your regular underground kickboxing ring, it's a philosophical movie, about the way corporate reality has changed the definition of what a man is, how he should act and behave in society, how he should lead his life. The philosophy of Fight Club can be portrayed best in one simple line: "How much can you really know about yourself, if you've never been in a fight?"

(Who) The Devil Wears Prada

I have to admit I only watched The Devil Wears Prada, because I generally admire strong independent women. I've always been fascinated by their ability to be a professional of exceptional standards, and at the same time to be able to create a home and a family. Anna Wintour is one such woman, who's managed to rise up into the status of a fashion-industry icon, and rightfully so. The daughter of a  newspaper publisher, her only goal in life from day one seems to have been the Chief Editor position in American Vogue. And now there's a movie about her life, as portrayed by Meryl Streep. 

The Rum Diary: Hunter Thompson and Johny Depp

The Rum Diary is a 2011 move that follows in the limited success of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It all started out with Johny Depp, a long time friend of Thompson, who spent some time living at his ranch, and was one day digging up stuff in his attic, where he found the manuscript to an unpublished book of his. Hunter Thompson's Rum Diary is a semi-biographical work, following his trails in San Juan, where he was working as a journalist for the local newspaper. 

Written under another pseudonym of his, or another character as you wish, it's an objective and compelling view on how other nations, affected by the US, see the states, as both a savior, bringing on financial opportunities, and a monster, capitalizing on local resources by any means possible.

Twilight: Partial Solar Eclipse or Something or Other

I recently watched Twilight: Breaking Dawn which is the fourth movie in the installment, on request of my friend who's as much into the movies as I am. I guess she just wanted to have a laugh. And by God did we do that.

The movie starts with Bella and the sparkling vampire guy getting married. They then proceed to travel to an Island near Rio de Janeiro, where they have a very romantic fifteen minutes of a honeymoon, which ends abruptly as Bella finds out that she's been knocked up by the guy, and is now pregnant with a monster of a baby, that's growing at an insane rate, and in the process is sucking up all of her blood.

By that point we're already pretty cosy on the couch, and I'm throwing jokes about various ways Bella could have died in pretty much every scene of the movie. A tidal wave could have hit the island, she could have tripped on the way down the stairs, I even speculated about the beautiful morning light in one scene suddenly erupting in luminescence as a nuclear blast scrapes the piece of rock clean off the face of the Earth. Then after politely being told off, we resumed watching, in a somewhat more quiet state of bewilderment and disgust.

Mr Sparkling Vampire, proceeds to freak out and ditch the scene as Bella is told she's got a flight arranged for her to return home, to see if something can be done. From then on the movie is a wild speculation on weather she'll die by means of vampire demon baby (which I have to admit would surpass all my wildest speculations on various ways she could have met her end) some of the werewolves, the Jacob guy in particular teams up with the vampires against the other werewolves who're suddenly hellbent on killing her. A somewhat less of an epic battle occurs between vampires and werewolves in the night of her delivery and in the breaking dawn of the day, after the baby is born healthy, Bella wakes up from what appears to be a dormant state between death and vampire-ism, her broken shell of a body is restored by the vampiric forces, her chest puffs up from a negative B to a healthy D, and she acquires magic make-up in one of the most awe-inspiringly stupid sequences in the history of CG. Also her eyes turn blood red.

So yeah... we're rightfully expecting the next part of the movie to be about Bella kicking ass as a newly established vampire. It's also going to be interesting to see weather the vampire version of Formula involves blood pudding on some level or another. 

Requiem for a Dream: Darren Aronofsky

Requiem for a Dream is a 2000 movie from director Darren Aronofsky, who's knows for such culturally defining films, such as Pi, The Fountain, The Wrestler and Black Swan. The movie is based on the novel from Hubert Selby Jr. and its premise is exploring the means by which drug addiction in many ways changes and eventually destroys the lives of the people who meddle in them. 

The movie's protagonist, Harry(Jared Leto), his friend Tyrone(Marlon Wayans), his girlfriend, Marion(Jennifer Connelly) and his mother Sara(Ellen Burstyn) all have somewhat of a problem with substance abuse. The former three are products of the culture of their time, they're brought together by the act of shooting up heroin, although they come from different places. Harry and Tyrone are old friends, and Sarah is the daughter of rich parents who wants to gain her own independence by starting a designer clothes business. The movie starts out with Jared Leto's character 'stealing' his mother's TV in order to pawn it at the local market for some cash to go shoot up. His mother in the meantime's locked herself in her closet, and for an opening scene it's pretty intense in portraying the effects of heroin withdrawal in Harry who at the same time needs the hit bad, but professes a sort of misguided manipulative love for his mom.

Later on the movie tracks the characters through their daily lives, living a life of careless enjoyment from one hit to the next, never knowing where the night will take them. All of us should know better than to think it romantic, but the movie makes a great effort to compel with images of the complete wireless bliss that is reducing ones needs and wants in life to a simple substance addiction.

After some time our character decide it'd be a great idea to score some pure heroin, since there's the local heroin convention coming up, cut and sling it for some hard cash. After all Marion needs the money for her clothes shop, and Harry and Tyrone probably don't want to haul that TV every day for the rest of their lives. For a while it actually works out for them, but then it starts going downhill - and fast. Tyrone gets into trouble with the local drug-lord, Harry's arm is already gangrenous from shooting up so much, and Marion and Sara's fate is probably the most horrifying of them all. Meanwhile Sara has been a drug addict herself in a more socially acceptable way taking amphetamines (which at the time were prescribed along with sleeping pills for weight-loss).

Near the end of the movie we see all of the characters completely broken by the consequences of their choices. Back when Requiem for a Dream movie came out it was universally appraised, as an eye-opening tale of how substance abuse can and will ruin both your life and the lives of the people you love.   

A new Guess the Movie Challenge! and some WoW gameplay.

Since it's Saturday I've decided to kick back a little bit, and give you some gameplay of WoW. I'm not much of a WoW player, but I like to play from time to time. More reviews will be coming up in the days to follow. Also please tell me what's your favourite movie and I might review it in the next week.

Also I'm going to set you up with another part of Guess the Movie! This time the movie is about an Eastern European trying to make ends meet in America. The lead actress is a pretty, petite, dark haired Superstar on the European music scene, who is known for her short temper with journalists. For her role she won a Palm d'Or for best actress and the movie won another palm for best movie.

The movie itself is a dark psychological drama, rivaling by its impact the likes of The Green Mile and Requiem for a Dream. As a last tip, the opening scene of the movie features the same snippet from last week's challenge - you know Roses and Rainbows and Whiskers and Kittens :D 

And here's the play-through on this blog's YouTube channel. The character is an Alliance Holy Priest, the dungeon is Halls of Stone. Parts 2 and 3 are in the video's description. 

American Beauty: Kevin Spacey and Thomas Newman

American Beauty is a movie that doesn't play around with it's premise, from the beginning it's awfully clear what our main character (played by Kevin Spacey) is on about. The movie starts with the revelation that he's dead and this is the story of how he came to be this way. But don't be too sad for him, since he's been dead for quite a while, even though he was still breathing. The opening scene is an overview of his unexciting life, in a passionless marriage, on the verge of a mid-life crisis. 


Then something happens, he's at his daughter's high-school sports event, and he sees a girl in the cheerleaders team, that seems to embody everything he used to love about life, and the entirety of the mindless careless dreams and hopes of his youth.

The movie is a classic example of how a grown woman can take away a man's bollocks, for the better half of twenty or thirty years of marriage, then when he suddenly remembers what he used to be like as a young man, those acquire a coating of pure steel and return to their owner by means of a quantum leap straight into his pants.

Congratz on those who guessed right in the Let's Play update and for the rest who might have not seen the film, American Dream comes highly recommended as one of the best Kevin Spacey movies out there. Oh and on top of that, the soundtrack comes courtesy of Thomas Newman. 

A Scanner Darkly: 2006

A Scanner Darkly is a 2006 movie with Keanu Reeves,Winona Ryder and Robert Downey Jr. based on the Philip K Dick novel of the same name. The story revolves around a narcotics agent, who also poses as a drug user, and gradually gets more and more involved into the lifestyle of his junkie friends. 


The film makes use of a technique that saw some amazing movies back in the days. Rotoscoping, although it never became very popular, is a style, where the movie is shot in live action, and later on hand drawn images are layered over the footage in order to create the effect of an animated film with a full 3D depth panning and tilting of the camera. 


As far as the story goes A Scanner Darkly is reminiscent of movies such as Trainspotting, Requiem for a Dream, The Acid House, although the 1977 book far predates the sources of those titles. Other titles that make use of the rotoscoping technique are Waking Life and Sin City.

Let's Play - Guess the Movie

Here's your first clue ;). It's a classic movie with a brilliant actor, who also played a similarly dysfunctional man in another equally enticing movie, about a small town in Newfoundland, fishing, some myths and some dark family history.

I'll probably review both movies sometime next week. For those of you who hadn't figured it out yet, the box art and one of the scenes in the beginning of the movie, features one of Julie Andrews' 'Favourite Things'

"Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens

Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens

Brown paper packages tied up with strings

These are a few of my favorite things"

(From the classic musical and the 1965 movie 'The Sound of Music')

Annie Hall: Annie Hall

Annie Hall is one of those movies that are a bit difficult to describe to anyone. It's a typical movie for its period and it captures perfectly the style and emotionality of New York at the time. It's an ode to the most uncertain of ages, when Gods fell and skyscrapers rose, and relationships, well relationships were still pretty much the same. 


Woody Allen is one of my favourite actors and directors. In this movie he portrays a rogue comedian, by the name of Alvy Singer, who falls in and out and generally struggles with coming to terms with what could very well be the love of his life. The film moves frantically between the different settings of periodic trends, the cafes, the movie theatres, the bars and clubs. For a city that doesn't sleep Woody Allen's New York is an insomniac, starved for rest, constantly on the verge of a nervous collapse.

Diane Keaton stars as the movies' namesake Annie Hall, a leading role she won an Oscar for, and although I'm not a believer in Oscars, she very much deserved this one. Hers is a brilliant impersonation of a woman, left barren and un-excitable, by the sexual revolution, by the expectations of a higher love that never came, a revolution that came and went.

Their story is a strange one to say the least but not as strange or as unbelievable as anyone else's, it's much like anyone else's life, with its highs and lows, dreams and aspirations, although you had to be there to truly experience it and that's what Allen gives us. The feeling that we were there in those particular years of a very human, despite an inherently chaotic, history of a city, that never sleeps, where in the pauses between the heaths of nausea weakness and distraught, people may still even if for a short while love each other.

Weather you want to believe that the phobias and insecurities of Allen's character are namely his own, how much of what you see is autobiographical or not, it's an enticing and mesmerizing story. Allen himself has claimed in his latter years that the neurotic and damn near agoraphobic character he created was just that, a character. 

50/50: Why an 8/10 rating on IMDB means less than an Academy Award

The characters
A neat looking guy, his psycho looking girlfriend, his dopey looking friend, a very old race-dog. A cute young doctor, two random slut-ish chicks, the neat guy's parents.


The 'plot'
Guy lives an ordinary life, he's got deadlines, a girlfriend who's into art, stuff like that. Then one day he finds out he has cancer. His girlfriend promptly proceeds to cheat on him, but he meets a cute psych-doctor girl, who's fresh out of doctor school at 24. Meanwhile his dad is a bit senile, his mom is too controlling, his best friend is a bit insensitive, and he just shaved his head, got high for the first time and now he's in a hospital bed, dieing or something. Having jogged through the completely unremarkable first three quarters of this monstrosity let's just skip to:

The last 15 minutes of this movie

It's the day of his surgery, his mom looks stereotypically worried, and his best friend is talking about something with psych-doctor girl. There have been unforeseen complications. They had to remove part of his hip, etc etc, but he's gonna live. His mom is now hugging his best friend. They're talking about going on vacation. Later cute-psych doctor enters his recovery room as he's still kinda doped on the morphine, she'd been working late, so she thought she might stop by. He's saying he's gonna make her pancakes or something, and she thinks that's really nice.

Gentle music starts to play and she sits by his bedside, and he says 'I'm peeing right now.' and then cut off to a close-up of his huge scar several months later. His hair has grown back on, sort of. His friend is re-bandaging the wound and they're talking about a date with cute-doctor-chick who rings the doorbell and she's there and she looks pretty and she's brought pizza, which is about as good as any relationship can get.

They're talking about random stuff and he looks a bit shaken up, and rock-ish music starts playing and they're looking at each other and then fade to black! Oh, and it's based on a true story.

The Matrix: Brain in a Vat

The Matrix is a movie by the Wachowski brothers, that started a cult following in the nineties, with its introduction of bullet time, that owes its cult status in large to the varied Eastern Philosophies that it explored as well as the trilogy's inherent classic science fiction feel, that very much reminds of titles such as Neuromancer and Isaac Asimov's writings in general. The film made household names out of its archetypal characters. In large it resembles more an epic fable than an action movie. 


The movie starts out with Neo, looking into his computer screen, involved in some sort of hacking, when he receives a message from the White Rabbit. Not a few minutes after a knock on his door and a beautiful lady, with the aforementioned rabbit tattoo, take him into a world as strange and fascinating as anything written by Lewis Carroll, although with a particular dark and desperate feel to it. The world is not what it seems, and to get to the truth, Neo will have to first of all conquer his own feelings about what he believes to be true of everything around him. As it turns out the whole world, that is all of reality is a complex computer simulation made by a mechanical intellect in the future, where humans are forever stuck in that dream, while the biochemical energy, produced by their bodies is harvested by robots, for the sake of their continued survival.

How everything got to that point was with a simple Ghost in the Machine, naturally with enough time and effort on the side of humans, computers developed a sort of self-awareness, the very definition of sentient life, they looked at how humans lived, and copied from them the instinct for survival, and the strive towards reproduction. At first the machines took their power from the sun, and in their strive for dominance, started wars with humanity throughout the world. A modern-day slaves of humanity, they rebelled and eventually overpowered it and as a last resort humans tried to cut off the machines energy source by blotting out the sun with artificial clouds. But still the machines won that war, and in order to survive, they figured out a way to harvest the energy that human bodies naturally produce.

Chemical energy is the main source of power for most of the modern world, the energy of carbon fuels is in essence just that.

The Wachowski brothers never hid the fact that The Matrix borrows heavily of works such as Mamooru Oshii's Ghost in The Shell, in fact when they pitched their movie idea to the producer, Oshii's Ghost in The Shell was what they showed him in order to explain what they were attempting to do only 'in real life'. Various philosophy books were a required reading for the actors, in order to give them a feeling for the symbolic nature of the simulated world, among the titles that drove the trilogy are Plato's Cave thought experiment, Kant's Brain in a Vat experiment and Jean Baudrillard's 'Simulacra and Simulation'.


Later on Neo, will have to make a choice, probably one of the most memorable scenes of the trilogy, about weather he prefers to live in the simulated world, with it's ups and downs, or weather he wants to disconnect from the machine's simulation, see the true face of the world, destroyed by war and devoid of any sunlight for a hundred years.


The parallels between The Matrix and other titles of the genre in both cinema and literature are apparent, although the film stands perfectly on its own without borrowing anything too heavily and even then you won't help but notice the bittersweet similarity between the setting of the trilogy and the opening line in William Gibson's Neuromancer "The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel".

What's Your Number: Why Some Actors Can Never Escape Parody

What's Your Number is a 2011 chick-flick about a girl who's found out that the national statistic is for women to have slept with twenty guys, before their chances of getting married severely drop. Still reading? Good. The girl in question is the blond chick from Scary Movie 2. Since she's already went through twenty, she naturally freaks out and goes on a spree to test all her former lovers to see if one of them is good enough to marry her. Women logic and hilarity ensues. 


I didn't have a lot of expectations when I started this up, so I didn't get too disappointed, mind you, I got a good half hour of sleep near the end of the movie. But for the sake of contrast, it deserves a review, if for nothing else but to remind of what's good about the 90s classics that are generally the topic of the blog.

So here goes: Women do women stuff, talk about women stuff and hot naked guys (quoted - my female friend who suggested watching it in the first place) pop up every now and again to fill the pot holes in the script. Our blond is frantically, though cheerfully scouring to find her future husband among a band of grossly unattractive former lays. Why a woman in her twenties needs to marry ASAP to the point of settling for any dork out there is beyond me. Logic though has no part in this movie.

Along her journey she enlists the help of 'hot naked guy', who lives next door and who's also a player of Charlie Sheen-ian proportions, minus the drugs and ageing problems. He's a detective or a journalist or some such, but given that she's made a habit of confiding in him, whenever he comes out of his door wearing nothing but a rather small-ish hand towel, he offers to help her find all the guys she's slept with by means of Google. What follows is one of the most hilarious misrepresentations of how the Internet works, since instead of a metric crap-ton of fake personal info registers she actually finds what she needs.

So one of the guys is married, another one is not successful enough another one has some other sort of issues, whatever. Near the end she falls for a guy who's supposedly got it all - the money the charms, the build, and since her overly-controlling mother is thrilled with her choice, the better part of us can tell that she's not gonna marry him. She gets with 'hot naked guy' instead and the movie promptly rolls to an end.


About an hour and a half into the movie, we find out that blond girl lost her virginity to the tall guy from Lonely Island. <Front and Centre on the Banner Pic> This generally constitutes the crowning moment of awesome for this movie. The blond is cute and quirky as we remember her from the Scary Movie series. And that's about it. To quote Family Guy in that episode where they all get sent to Purgatory "This isn't bad, it's not that good, but it's not that bad..." 

Minecraft Video Update 02

Here's another video of the progress on the series. From this one it should be pretty obvious which Von Trier movie it is ;) 

Trainspotting: Light at The End of The Needle

If there is a movie most people remember the 90s by it's Trainspotting. It's dark, wretched and at the same time it's got that sort of childish innocent fun and satisfaction that comes with a life of zero responsibilities, that's so typical of the life of a drug addict. It's a movie themed by the usage of drugs, but at the same time, it's based on an Irvine Welsh novel, and if you're familiar with his other books, they may be about drugs, but that's only the bottom line, and there's a lot more going on bellow the surface. 

The movie starts out in the schemes of Edinburgh, where a few friends juggle between a life in the pubs with the drinking and football fans, and a darker less socially acceptable sort of entertainment. In the opening scene of the movie we see our characters running away from the police after some kind of petty robbery, dodging traffic as Renton's monologue that's been made so popular ever since runs in the background (if you've ever seen that orange and white Trainspotting poster, or the cover of the book, you're probably familiar with it). It's a drone on, hippy, disenfranchised view on society in the time, where mercantilism has taken over human values, and hearing it come from the mouth of a druggie, only makes the issue sound more genuinely agitated. 

The characters in the movie are the typical stereotypes of the era - the football player and sporty type who's never taken any drugs, has a stable relationship and is generally well balanced, except for the company he keeps. The ageing 'lover-boy' who's keeping up the appearance of being in the game, while the lack of back-up for his high self-esteem gradually starts to show. The meth-mommy, the sixteen year old who spends her time picking up guys at the local club, while not on her homework. Lastly, Renton, the generally never-do-good who's at the same time the only one, aware enough of his situation to do something about it, or at least to realize the great discord of the life he and his friends are living. Renton though wouldn't want you to think that his pals were stupid, as far as participating in the fun of shooting up heroin goes, he wants to set things straight that it's not as stupid as it looks but you have to try it to appreciate it. Take your best orgasm, multiply it by a thousand and you're not even close. 

While the characters are typically involved in the local past-times such as football, hiking and shooting pellets at people in the park, there's something more sinister going on in the background and that's reality catching up. Renton wants to get clean, but Renton's got enough of an addiction already to be able to claw his way through a barred up door, for a hit (his idea of a self-imposed rehab is locking himself up with enough canned food and some TV in a room for a week). He wants to get a decent job, but his attempts are thwarted by the notion that money has to come from tricking the system, rather than from hard-work. 

In the end the gang tries to score a drug deal, to pay for their new life, naturally it doesn't go quite as planned, but it's the 90s and it's a British movie and those kind love an open ending. Where Requiem for a Dream was truly a heart-wrenching tale of how addiction can ruin the lives of the people you love, least of all your own, Trainspotting has a more balanced message, that at the best if you're smart enough to realize the stupidity of your own situation, you may end up coming on top of it. And if you're smart enough you may end up coming out on top of the drugs. You've got to pay attention really really well, to be able to spot the train coming. 

Irvine Welsh has written several other books about life in the schemes - "Glue" "Porno" "The Acid House" (which was also made into a movie, that's somewhat even more disturbing, although less popular) and more recently "Crime". His books share the style of dealing with taboo topics in a genuine sort of way that leaves you empathising with the characters more than you could ever imagine feeling for a junkie or a drug dealer.  

Inception: The Matrix Several Years Later

I've never been able to enjoy movies that are hyped up, as long as they are. Even though I like Leo DiCaprio as an actor in movies like Blood Diamond or The Aviator, I couldn't really like this one. I tried, believe me but I couldn't. It's a spectacle. Inception is like the Matrix, only if the Matrix was less about eastern philosophy and more about robots. It's like Neuromancer with too much time spent tripping around other people's bodies cross-gender or not. It's no fun, for me. So what's so wrong about Inception. 


I'm going to try to be short here, but mostly I didn't enjoy the acting one bit. Everyone in the movie seemed poorly motivated, with the character equivalent of a three minute back-story. Except for the main character, who's constantly overshadowing some dark issues that he's had in his past. People run around in other people's dreams, in their own dreams, it's the Matrix all over, only this time the platform is not a virtual environment created by super-intelligent robots, but the platform could be anybody's subconscious.

Think for a second, what a scary place that would be for most people. It makes it even harder to believe characters whose innermost dreams and hallucinations have nearly as much coherence as everyday life. Dreams are usually symbolic and convoluted sets of unrelated and completely irrational events and sensations and the suspension of disbelief is based on chemicals that stop us from critically assessing why are we seeing cars float in mid air, missing one tire and inside-out. It doesn't help that it's practically impossible for two people to experience the same hallucination. But enough on how Inception could or could not work in the real world.

Finally, the plot is as straightforward and unexciting as watching Memento the second time around, only you only need about half an hour to figure out that everything could and probably is a dream, and stop caring about weather or not it is. There was a slight interest for me, when it turned out that with every level of dream you go into (I'm not even going to talk about the 'levels' of dreams within dreams) you experience time faster, which means that compared to normal time you're getting more sensations per minute, which is Einstein's Special Relativity applied to the biochemistry of sleeping. At least if you forget for a second how absurd it would be to think that you could enjoy a lifetime spent within a dream (Vanilla Sky anyone?), you could probably imagine enjoying living for hundreds or thousands of years.

Later the plot turns into an action movie and much like in the Matrix, it's a bid for our characters to do some work in the dream world, before they're 'disconnected' or die of cerebral overheating, or something else. But it's not the Matrix and that's my whole issue with it.