And you thought that the Hunger Games or Lords of the Flies are a good depiction of what motivated and gifted kids can do? Wait to watch Battle Royale directed by Kinji Fukasaku (バトル・ロワイアル,2000). The story is humble (spoiler alert): put together on a remote island 42 abducted 9th graders. Equip each one of them with an explosive neckless and give them various weapons. The rules of the game are easy to get: three days to kill each other, and the last standing kid is the winner! Many stars are enlightening the flick: Takeshi Kitano, Takashi Tsukamoto, Aki Maeda or Chiaki Kuriyama to quote only a few. But BR is yet another movie starring Beat with an unexpected role played by computers & source code. This time, Takashi Tsukamoto (Shinji Mimura), is leading the Nerds Squad (Yutaka Shimada – Yûtaka Seto, Eri Ishikawa – Yukie Utsumi), and is spending a whole night to re-write his Third Man hacker program. In the meantime, his mignons are gathering fertilizers, sulfur, and other goodies to make a bomb. Mimura ’s plan is simple: hacks the army’s command and control center, disable their tracking systems, and blow them up. Elegant and refreshing compared to the overabundance of death by crossbow, machine gun, katana, poison, etc. While the army setup is a joke, Mimura ’s gig is convincing: a VAIO laptop and some C code of an FTP-like software. The source code is dense, but remains realistic, with some funny comments, because /* you never know */. Not too bad for an 18-year-old last man standing movie. And damn those biscuits taste good!

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