Blue Spring (2001, Japan)

Released only a year apart, Blue Spring is nearly the perfect companion piece to Battle Royale - if high-schoolers are this fucked up, why not ship them to an island and let them duke it out to the finish? Blue Spring takes place in the final days of the school year, as a group of senior boys try to figure out what they'll do after (or, more likely, if) they graduate. The constant question - work or college? - is played out as a joke, as none of them has much of a chance at either. Quite predictably, they react to their impending crisis in various violent and sudden ways, while the growing conflict between two of them, Kujo and Aoki, takes center place. Even this narrative, however, is sketchy at best - based on a manga of short stories, Blue Spring doesn't have any sort of real plot to push it forward, just a succession of more or less related sequences framed by the crisis of growing up. There's some good stuff here, but in general the whole thing feels rather slight, missing the dark sense of humor that made Battle Royale's treatment of the same subject matter work so well. (And it never hurts to have Beat Takeshi as a ringer.)