quick and dirty australian history
link
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thanks to fark, stuff below excerpted from
here
Yujin Kitagawa's dulcet tones warbling away as
part of the superstar folk duo Yuzu have moistened the
panties of prepubescent pupils for the past few years.
Shukan Bunshun (3/21) notes that he appeared in a 1995
XXX-rated movie graphically recreating one of Japan's most
heinous crimes -- the 1989 murder of a schoolgirl held captive
and repeatedly raped for 40 days by four schoolboys who
finally tired of their "game" and fatally bashed the girl
before cutting her body up and encasing the parts in concrete
poured into oil drums.
video king Taiji Sato
Kitagawa
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below excerpted from
IMDB
by Koji Wakamatsu
this film paved the way for other Wakamatsu masterpieces
like Violated Angels (1967) and Go,Go, Second Time Virgin (1969).
The comments below are about the movie
Aoi haru(2001)
which was directed by Toshiaki Toyoda. The review is
by Simon Booth, and I found it very intriguing. It can be
read on IMDB
here.
The closing night movie for the SF Indie Fest is
a vaguely coming of age type drama, set entirely within
the grounds of a Japanese boy's school. Here, the kids
all run around in gangs, sleep in lectures and fight at
break times. Every wall in the place is covered in graffiti.
Ryuhei Matsuda (the effeminate guy from GOHATTO) stars as
Kuja, a senior who becomes the school's official gang leader
by winning at "The Clapping Game". This game involves the kids
hanging from a railing on the edge of the school roof,
letting go and seeing how many times they can clap their
hands before their nerve fails and they grab back on.
From here we follow the progress of his friends and
enemies throughout a part of the school year, the challenges
to his leadership and the pressure of the school system
felt by everyone. There's a hell of a lot of violence goes
on in the school, and we get the impression that life as
a Japanese school boy is a difficult dangerous business.
It's a pretty bleak and cheerless vision -
between this and BATTLE ROYALE you'd be forgiven for
thinking that the Japanese school system was on the
point of explosion or collapse, with the youth as disaffected
as they come. How close this is to reality I don't know,
but the friend I saw it with tells me that the classroom
scenes are pretty close to how it actually is.
The cast all perform well - Ryuhei Matsuda has such a striking
appearance that he doesn't really need to do anything to create
an impression, and indeed he spends most of the movie being
aloof and impenetrable. This contrasts with the energies and
frustrations evident in the other characters, particulary his
best friend Aoki.
I enjoyed the movie a lot... good characters, and well filmed/scored,
with interesting developments. It's based on a collection of
autobiographical short stories from a manga artist, which
shows a little bit in the episodic nature of the plot, but
it's all weaved (sic) together well for the movie. Worth
looking out for if you don't mind your high school movies
nihilistic, violent and bleak.
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Thanks to
snopesfor this
article snippet
So popular was Dragnet in its day that satirist Stan Freberg
spoofed it on a 1953 record titled "St. George and the Dragonet."
This record and its flip side, "Little Blue Riding Hood"
(also a Dragnet spoof) were extraordinarily popular as well,
hitting the #1 spot on Billboard's pop chart and selling over
two million copies; the record's success prompted Ed Sullivan
to invite Freberg to perform both sides of the single live on
his Talk of the Town variety show.
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notes for psych class
On a side note, has anyone ever participated in any psychological studies?