bansama: About Battle Royale, the only real reason it was so popular was because people started to vocally complain about its subject matter. Which naturally, made more people go read the book and watch the film. The second one does really badly partly because the director died part way during filming and his son took over. His son, wasn't very good at directing. That, and the script was utter rubbish. The only memorable thing about BR2 was the board game sold at some cinemas...
Well, there are worse ways to get people's attention, besides, kids killing other kids is the same way Hunger Games got any attention, right? Although I do think BR is better, since having the kids all know each other makes the deaths actually have a bit of weight.
As for the other movie, I don't know, I really hated 5cm/s, how does it compare to that?
I recently watched Shane Black's The Nice Guys. It's a buddy cop action comedy in the 70's, about two asshole private detectives who end up helping people and uncovering a corporate conspiracy, partly out of a desire of being better people, and partly just by accident really.
It's a pretty fun entertaining movie, but I'll be honest, I didn't find it particularly
funny. Then again american comedy rarely works on me, so take that with a grain of salt.