Battle Royale II: Requiem (2003)

The claims of importance and cultural relevance made for Battle Royale (2000) perhaps does not apply to Battle Royale II: Requiem. It is a 2003 sequel, directed by Kenta Fukasaku, who wrote the screenplay to the original film for his father. Kinji Fukasaku actually started shooting this sequel himself, filming a brief sequence with Takeshi Kitano before he lost his battle with cancer. Kenta took over and brought the film to completion. As a capstone to his father’s works it is oddly appropriate. Kenji’s career was based almost entirely in violent pulp cinema, and violent pulp cinema is pretty much what Requiem provides.

The film begins provocatively, as a sunset-filled vista of downtown Tokyo collapses in a massive terrorist-instigated explosion. Requiem was released in a different world to Battle Royale – the 9/11 attacks came in between the two movies – and Kenta makes damn certain we realise this. It’s bold, but it’s also an empty provocation – it feels like a film attempting to shock rather than a film with something to actually say.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: "The Emissary"

The Enterprise is sent on an emergency mission to intercept a 75 year-old Klingon sleeper ship whose crew will not know that the war with the Federation is long over. To negotiate with the Klingons, Starfleet sends a special emissary: the half-human, half-Klingon woman K'Ehleyr (Suzie Plakson), who has a troubled romantic past with Lieutenant Worf.

"The Emissary" is a bit of an odd episode, and I think it demonstrates a lot of the problems that episodes have had this season. It has a reasonably engaging premise with the Klingon sleeper ship, and it centres on a charismatic and likeable guest star with Suzie Plakson, but for some reason in the final product these elements simply don't gel together very well. A lot of time is spent on K'Ehleyr and Worf's romantic and sexual attraction, but it never really feels like time well spent, and the actual sleeper ship plot is given a cursory and simplistic treatment as a result. A rewrite or two could have easily fixed this problem, but I get the impression that the production team simply didn't have the time.

PSX20 #13: Castlevania: Symphony of the Night

PSX20 celebrates the 20th anniversary of Sony's Playstation videogames console by counting down my 20 favourite videogames for that platform. These aren't necessarily the best PSX games ever made, but they are the ones I liked and played the most.

When the PlayStation was released 20 years ago, it was pushed very aggressively on the back of its 3D graphics: not sprites and left to right gameplay, as was the norm for the SNES and Megadrive, but rather polygon-generated graphics and three-dimensional movement. In that respect then Castlevania: Symphony of the Night is a bit of an outlier: it's a 2D platformer that, some graphical and musical flourishes aside, would have comfortably squeezed onto the last generation of games console.

While the 2D platforming nature of Symphony of the Night might lead you to think it's just like it's NES and SNES predecessors, it's actually a sort of soft adventure-come-RPG. It cribs liberally from Nintendo's excellent Super Metroid to create an immerse environment rather than a linear string of levels. You might pass an area you can't reach, develop a new skill later on, and then return to access that previously unavailable area. It's a technique that works wonderfully to create a sense of space: you're not jumping and slashing your way through level after level, but actually exploring a massive labyrinthe castle.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Manhunt"

Deanna's mother Lwaxana Troi returns to the starship Enterprise. Part of me really wants to end the review right there, since that's pretty much all you need to know: Majel Barrett is in this episode, mugging to the camera for all that she's worth in a 42-minute string of gags about sexual harrassment. Picard looks rather appalled, and to be honest I know how I feels. I felt harrassed just watching the damn thing.

The Enterprise has been tasked with escorting a pair of fish alien diplomats to Pacifica for negotiations for their species to join the United Federation of Planets. En route they also pick up the ambassador for the planet Betazed, who turns out to be Lwaxana Troi. Lwaxana is undergoing the Betazoid menopause, which for her species means a massive increase in sexual appetite and an unstoppable rampage through the ship to find a romantic partner.

Star Trek: The Next Generation: "Up the Long Ladder"

Lt Worf collapses with a Klingon virus, leading to him and Dr Pulaski bonding over poisonous tea. The Enterprise tracks a distress signal and finds not one but two long-lost human colonies. The Enterprise gets filled with sheep. Riker scores with a woman while on duty within hours of meeting her. Riker and Pulaski murder themselves. Picard laughs out loud, and recommends that we all simply embrace the ridiculous.

What the hell is this episode?

I went into "Up the Long Ladder" anticipating something terrible, because I remember really hating it as a teenager. I've come out of the episode more confused than anything else. It is dreadful, let's not skirt the line with that, but it's an odd kind of dreadful where there seem to be about four different episodes struggling to get the audience's attention like a free-for-all professional wrestling match. It's the biggest indication yet that Season 2 of The Next Generation was creatively crippled by the 1988 writers strike; even the scripts they managed to film all feel half-baked and poorly thought-out.

The Lion King: 20 years on

On this day in 1994, Walt Disney Pictures pushed The Lion King into general release. It has been screening in a limited number of cinemas for a week, but this was its big widespread push onto American screens. It was at the time the biggest Disney hit in decades, and subsequent re-releases have helped push it to a global gross of US$987 million dollars.

What's interesting in retrospect is that The Lion King was not a popular project within Disney while it was being produced. It was beset with creative problems, and its story wasn't pulling together, and it was getting partly overlooked by studio management in favour of the more prestigious (and better funded) Pocahontas. Everybody wanted to work on Pocahontas, because it was studio head Jeffrey Katzenberg's big pitch at winning a Best Picture Oscar, and nobody wanted to get stuck animating a movie about lions on the African Savannah. As a result much of the film's crew were fairly new: indeed pretty much all of the lead animators were tasking with supervising individual characters for the first time.

13 Going on 30 (2004)

The age-changing comedy seems to be a perennial idea in Hollywood: a child, through wishing, magic, a dream or other shenanigans, wakes up the body of an adult, and gets to discover why they shouldn't want to grow old so fast while simultaneously charming an audience with their inappropriately childlike ways. One major example is Walt Disney Pictures' 1976 comedy Freaky Friday, based on the Mary Rodgers novel, although I'm sure there must be earlier examples. Penny Marshall's 1988 comedy Big was the film that made Tom Hanks a bona fide megastar, and emerged from a cluster of similar age-changing and body-swapping films: Like Father Like Son (1987), 18 Again (1988) and Italy's Da Grande (1987).

I think the earliest example I can find is the 1916 adaptation of the F. Anstey novel Vice Versa, a novel that was adapted several times over the decades. It's clearly a premise with enormous appeal for an audience: it combines nostalgia with wishful thinking, and a strong sense of "what if".

One contribution to this mini-genre was Gary Winick's 2004 comedy 13 Going on 30 - unless you lived in Australia, where it was titled Suddenly 30. I'm not sure why they chose to change the title here - whatever the reason it didn't really change the quality of the film.

New Lone Wolf and Cub Volume 1 (2014)

Lone Wolf and Cub is one of the most popular and influential manga of all time. It ran for seven years from 1970 to 1976, and told the story of disgraced samurai Ogami Itto who - after being betrayed and disgraced - travels Japan with his three year-old son Daigoro in lengthy and meticulously planned quest for revenge. It is an epic samurai drama that was collected into 28 volumes. The final sword fight alone runs for almost 180 pages. By the end Ogami lies dead, and it is his son who strikes the final blow against the antagonist Yagyu Retsudo. That's where the story ended, until writer Kazuo Koike returned in 2004 to write an unexpected follow-up. As the original artist Gozeki Kojima had died, this new series has been illustrated by Hideki Mori (Bokko).

I'm not sure why it's taken a decade for New Lone Wolf and Cub to be published in English. Certainly it took until 2000 for Dark Horse to properly release the original series, so I suppose we were pretty far behind to begin with. Late or not, I'm glad that Dark Horse are now publishing the new series, because it's incredibly good.