Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by KPGv2 529 days ago
> battle royale was a B movie

Yeah, if it's not an American movie, it's some cheap shit! /s

My brother, it was nominated for nine Japanese Academy Awards, it was helmed by one of Japan's top directors, is an adaptation of a best-selling novel, is regarded by critics as one of the best films of the era, has high production values, stars arguably the most famous actor in Japan, was scored by a famous and prolific composer (you might have heard his music in another movie called Django Unchained), etc.

That's not even getting into the economics of film in Japan. A successful film in Japan nowadays earns around $10M on a budget of half a million. BR, produced nearly twenty years ago, had a budget nearly ten times that much and grossed triple.

Suffice it to say, Battle Royale is a high production cost movie, which forecloses the possibility of it being a B movie.

and because I'm just some guy,

https://variety.com/2018/film/asia/japan-ethics-of-making-ch...

1 comments

I’ll stick my neck out and assert that “cheap” films are better, anyway: movie budgets’ sizes are inversely proportional to the producers’ risk tolerance; therefore, big money films are devoid of originality and any message they carry is nought but masturbatory self-aggrandisement.

The best films I’ve ever watched, that which had the biggest effect on me, were TV-plays and self-funded documentary-films.

>> big money films are devoid of originality

That may be true for some but at the really high end, writers have the resources to so some fun things. Even many high-end marvel-style movies have hidden jokes and themes that 99% of viewer don't ever pick up on.

Example - Dune 2. Good looking junk.