I hated Suicide Club, but I loved this movie!!!

I feel the opposite way, I thought Suicide Club was awesome, but found this to be well....boring as hell to be blunt (I mean did it really need to be over 2 and a half hours long?)

back in 98 I did a titty comedy for Skinemax. Sex Camp, ya remember it?

Wow so you started at the bottom of the barrel, and are working your way up to his best movie!

how anyone can prefer this to suicide club is beyond me...the acting is as dull and flat as the story itself. lets see, the family renting service was a pointless subplot that did nothing but pad out the already overlong running time. Suicide club had me hooked straight from the start because of its emotional intensity and awesome charecters...NDT "was" the exact opposite. Sion sono did a great job of lowering my expectations for any of his other movies....

I did get the feeling from the first movie that I was missing something, its only so much that I can get from the movie. I thought the movie was giving us a explanation behind the Manual of Suicide also published in Japan a few years before the movie.

Lack of connectedness in life, turned into a feeling of connectedness in death and after death (with the stitched together skin). The point came across rather strongly towards the end if people hadn't caught on yet. The use of media (and internet to which was used as a way for a group to claim as being the ones behind it) allowed a scapegoat to take the blame for the suicide club, a group of glamour rock styled rapist/murders taking all the credit for it when they weren't smart enough to come up with a cult. Internet was only used as a means to end whether it be to actually bring together people in death or bring lies to the forefront because thats what everyone wants. Someone to blame.

When the true blame lies with parents who don't seem to take a interest in the lives of their children. A huge devide between parents, teachers, education board and teenagers, fostered by a rather strict and harsh Japanese culture that values independence & strict adherence with little to no creativity or room for rebellion. We sometimes have to rebel to come up with ideas on how to achieve our goals or improve a system that doesn't foster viable ways of getting the success we want. Sometimes its not even success but the social gratification we want for achievement. Facing a problem is always the more difficult option, its easy to see the problem after its to late to fix it.

The craziness we see from Japan is a rather small subset of the true japan. Over there, there are many topics that are seen as out of bounds for discussion. So we get a continuous ignoring of the problem until it goes away.
As a problem gets ignored it festers, and juvenile violence in the form of gangs is something of a modern phenomena & we can see this issue is growing.
When a system is designed to be from the ground up about the end goal and not the journey we all take to get there, young people get ignored & so they themselves try to ignore their own problems.
When they raise important questions they are treated like what they say doesn't matter, so the system favours itself. If that problem is much worse for adults, its because they get taught not to be invested in anything that isn't in the pursuit of career, self-discipline, perfect your role and never going out of line lest the punishment be severe. Until you decide whats important its all going to go to the ultimate end.. the suicide club in the films view.

Maybe this movie will help answer the questions I have, I didn't know there was a sequel of sorts. Who are behind the suicide club and what is their true purpose, what does it mean by are you connected with yourself, and how does suicide relate to this? What is our role in life? What is our connection between family and other people? I'm finding it more interesting to think about.