Passion for Movies United Slain Friends : Tragedy: Students killed in carjacking lived and breathed films. A shrine rises in the parking lot where they died.

To Ralphs assistant manager Ric Gibbs, the two were simply “the film guys.”

Takuma Ito and Go Matsuura constantly talked movies when they stopped at the San Pedro supermarket late at night to buy soda or toothpaste.

Then the two 19-year-old Marymount College students were gunned down Friday night outside Ralphs and were transformed into international martyrs of violent crime in Los Angeles. Now their stunned friends are filing through the supermarket to buy candles for the impromptu memorial garden of daisy bouquets, Easter lilies and potted chrysanthemums that has sprung up on the pavement outside.

“They bought almost all the candles we had,” said Gibbs, who gave one of the friends $10 to buy more candles for the parking lot shrine.

Speakers remembered the two students in English and Japanese at a private memorial service Tuesday in the Marymount chapel that drew between 200 and 250 people, including the young men’s families, students, faculty and staff, a college official said.

As the students’ photos flash on television screens around the world, those who knew Ito and Matsuura say they are struggling with the loss of two young men that they describe--not as international figures--but as good-humored, talented young men.

“These are two students who were unusually directed,” said their faculty adviser, Pat Kelley. “When the (film) class ended, they wanted to take the videotape home and watch it again.”

The two frequented a Blockbuster video store near Ralphs and combed Los Angeles in search of new films. For a recent class assignment, Ito wrote an essay explaining that he needed a girlfriend because he wanted someone to watch movies with.

Their writing teacher, assistant professor Sandra Ross, recalled how the two, who both favored baseball caps, would stop by her office to report on films they had seen that weekend.

Their favorite actresses were Jodie Foster and Geena Davis, but their biggest hero was director Steven Spielberg, and they applauded the accolades heaped on “Schindler’s List” at the recent Academy Awards.

Friends and teachers say the two loved being in the United States. When Ito’s grandfather died several weeks ago, Ito traveled back to Japan and recorded his impressions of the transpacific journey in an essay that Kelley read from this week.

After arriving in Japan, he wrote: “When I had Japanese soup, my body absorbs it like dry sands. I found that I am really Japanese at that time.”

Ito also described wanting to eat hamburgers “like American people.” He added: “Though my home country is Japan, I wanted to go back to the U.S.A. like a refugee.”

Now, in Japan, his death is the subject of newspaper editorials.

One remarked: “Among the world’s advanced nations, there is no country except the United States in which it is so easy to obtain firearms. Viewed from the outside, America’s gun society can be seen only as abnormal. We want Americans to more seriously face that fact.”

At the flower shrine outside Ralphs, someone has added a simple, handwritten sign: “We must have gun control. Who is next? Your child?”