Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #37: Battle Royale (2000).

In the close future, Japan has become a disaster zone. Unemployment is soaring, and a generation of teens are totally out of control. Thus, the government has legalised the Millennium Education Reform Act, aka the Battle Royale program, as a last desperate attempt at disciplining them. Each year, a school class chosen at random are transported to a deserted island where they must square off in a brutal survival game over three days. Each player starts with food, water and a random weapon (some far more effective than others), and they're all under the eye of a strict former teacher (Japanese cult movie king Takeshi Kitano). There is apparently no escape, and if multiple players survive, everybody dies thanks to the IED neck braces they've been made to wear.

Quentin Tarantino has called 2000's Battle Royale his favourite film since 1992. It's unmistakably obvious why, and while I don't love it quite that much, it still rocks my socks immensely. Besides the clear action/science fiction quotient (which is indeed relentless), it provides rich characters and character dynamics through flashbacks that teeter on soap opera-style sentiment without being jarring or cloying. It also has a very funny satirical angle about media exploitation (the game is shown on live Japanese TV) and how the press and politicians, in trying to curb juvenile delinquency, usually take the wrong action through being oblivious to its causes.

Despite Battle Royale's being an adaptation of Koushun Takami's manga and novel, director Kinji Fukasaku drew his inspiration for it from his own adolescence. Born in 1930, at age 15 Fukasaku and his class were forced to work in a munitions factory. When it was hit with artillery fire they were trapped inside and had to use each other for shelter. The survivors were then tasked with disposing of their friends' corpses (this was at the end of World War II, after all). This harrowing ordeal gave him a deep-seated hatred and distrust of adults, a sentiment which courses through the whole movie (particularly in the journey of the lead male, Shuya Nanahara (Tatsuya Fujiwara)). It was also his last before he died of prostate cancer in 2002, but what a swansong for him. Let's just hope no real government has to ever enact a Battle Royale program. 

40 YEARS OF STAR WARS!

A screen, black except for stars. Then, in baby blue, ten words: "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away..." Then BAM!



40 years ago today, that huge yellow Star Wars logo, with John Williams' beyond-iconic accompanying theme, first exploded onto a cinema screen, followed by the opening crawl of Episode IV and then the Tantive IV fleeing the almost-endless Imperial Star Destroyer. But as we all know now, that thankfully was only just the beginning.

Star Wars, later Star Wars: Episode IV - A New Hope, quickly became the highest-grossing movie in history to that point, won seven Academy Awards and still ranks among the best-loved and most lucrative films ever made. The lasting appeal is a piece of cake to explain. The action scenes are consistently exciting and so well-staged that it's just nearly impossible for them not to absorb young and old. But way beyond that, the Saga's themes and tropes have and will always resonate universally. Slavery, hatred, corruption, coming of age, redemption, identity; the tragic heroine, her exploited, indoctrinated husband, their children having to face that legacy et cetera. These are all very deeply grounded in the reality of life in our own galaxy.

George Lucas had to move Heaven and Earth to bring his immortal tale of intergalactic conflict to us, and the rewards he reaped from it were rightfully way beyond what he expected from it. But from 25 May 1977, to now and beyond, WE are the ones who have been truly the most rewarded. This was his labour of love. This was his paean to the young and young-at-heart, and to all the artists and storytellers before him who fired his imagination. Even seeing it in 1997 for the Special Editions, when I was nearly 9, blew my mind six ways to Sunday. You just cannot ever put a price on anything like that. So, happy 40th birthday, Star Wars, and bravo and thank you forever, Master Lucas. The Force will be with you both. Always. 

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace voice review.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B5m7gJVMGAToRVFBcTNkQ0xKa2pYN1A4cDU0Qzh4emhnOXcw

Post what you like, but will they like what you post?

Social media has now become a global, instant grapevine. One that can also trace somebody's personal and professional trajectory. What we publicise on it is, thankfully, our call, though how it's received never is. And I think it's understandable if someone posts about a memorable or emotional experience they've just had, only for that post to be ignored, and they subsequently feel frustrated.


But isn't it remarkably intriguing how you never quite know how your online activity will be received: what will get a fuckload of likes and/or comments and what'll get lost in the depths of the Net? Of course, if you're a celebrity you post a photo of your breakfast and it'd spread like wildfire, but for us commoners, at least those like me who crave attention most of the time, that's very unlikely. But more to the point, I for one struggle to anticipate who'll enjoy each thing I post on Facebook (the only social media website I use, as I'm a Net junkie already), or even on here, quite honestly. But come to think of it, maybe that's part of the appeal. Or just a very cunning IT business touch.


In fact, as I sit here racking my brain over this entry, it's just dawned on me how that unpredictability online can mirror the sort we encounter with real-life interactions, even with people we've known for fucking years. For example, if you felt compelled to ask them a personal question or give brutal honesty. Depending on the severity and location they could react very surprisingly. I have a friend with very strong views whose expression of them on Facebook has made some of his own friends, whom he'd known for over 30 years, delete him on there. It can be a very capricious environment.


But again, it has its pleasures and uses. Just don't predict what posts of yours will or won't take off, for disappointment's sake. Leave that to me.

Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #36: Pulp Fiction (1994).

Two bumbling restaurant burglars, madly in love. An interracial hitman duo sauntering around LA doing their boss' dirty work. One then landing in a compromising position with his boss' free-spirited wife. And an underdog boxer who kills his opponent and subsequently acquires others outside the ring. As the tagline says: "Four stories... about one story."

Quentin Tarantino is undoubtedly the most iconoclastic filmmaker, certainly from America, to have emerged since the New Hollywood movement of the '60s and '70s. He hit the scene in 1992 with the superb Reservoir Dogs, but if that fired the starter gun for an indie filmmaking revolution, 1994's Pulp Fiction was surely the movie that blasted a huge hole in the mainstream-indie divide and changed the face of indie cinema forever. It grossed over $200 million, won the Palme D'Or at Cannes, won Tarantino and co-writer Roger Avary the Best Original Screenplay Oscar (alongside five other nominations including for Best Picture and Director), secured the careers of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, and returned John Travolta to superstardom.

Travolta and Jackson respectively play Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield, foot soldiers for LA mob kingpin Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames). They're an effective team despite being a study in contrasts: Vincent is white and Jules black; Vincent enjoys his job and Jules hates his; Jules is very religious, frequently citing Ezekiel 25:17, and Vincent is agnostic; and they also frequently have differences of opinion. They also get stuck as couriers of a suitcase which may or may not contain their boss' soul. When his wife Mia (Thurman) enters the fray, it becomes a night both she and Vincent hope Marsellus never learns about. Boxer Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis) lives with his fragile French girlfriend Fabienne and has to fight with more than his fists before he can get the fuck outta Dodge, and Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) are the would-be restaurant Bonnie and Clyde who could use a few tips from that duo.

When you unravel it all, Pulp Fiction means fuck all, but that is the precise point. It was the first Tarantino film I ever saw and while I love his whole filmography, he has and will never again scale the heights he achieved here. He directs scene after scene with ferocious panache and draws career-best performances from his whole cast, the standout unquestionably being Samuel L. Jackson. But QT's greatest talent for me has always been his writing, and I'm prepared to call this the greatest screenplay ever written. Check the 'Memorable Quotes' page on its IMDb entry; I swear it's like the whole fucking script is there! My favourite line in film history: "I'm prepared to scour the Earth for that motherfucker. If Butch goes to Indochina I want a n----- hidin' in a bowl of rice ready to pop a cap in his ass." And amidst all the clever running jokes (namely how every time Vincent uses the bathroom something bad happens) and obvious but fitting intertextual references, it's bursting at the seams with characters and situations that feel authentic and thoroughly understood.

Throw in some sharp editing (RIP Sally Menke) and a very refreshing and eclectic retro soundtrack, and Pulp Fiction is quite simply beyond praise. Certainly one of the best films ever, and THE best of all indies for me. Zed's dead, baby. Zed's dead.



Something Cult, Foreign-Language or Indie #35: Rushmore (1998).

15-year-old Max Fischer is simultaneously somehow every teacher's wet dream and worst nightmare. He is a scarily smart but recalcitrant pupil at the elite Rushmore Academy, where he edits the school newspaper and heads extracurricular clubs and societies devoted to basically anything legal. But due to this ubiquity on campus, Max's grades are going downhill like an avalanche and he is on the verge of expulsion.

During his latest campus activity, a big-scale play he's written to be performed in the school's auditorium, Max is shocked when he meets and then falls for widowed elementary teacher Rosemary Cross (Olivia Williams), so much so that he elects to install an aquarium on campus in her honour. Yet another spanner lands in the works, however, when Max becomes entangled in a love triangle with Miss Cross and his wealthy but deeply depressed friend, steel tycoon and father of two of Max's classmates Herman Blume (Bill Murray). Now Max must navigate this, his first romantic minefield, get back on top of his schoolwork, and start to secure his future.

Rushmore (1998) really is a bildungsroman like no other. Wes Anderson is certainly one of those filmmakers you either love or hate (although I actually find his work quite hit-and-miss), but with this he and co-writer Owen Wilson have hit on a beautifully funny, celebratory oddball tale and revel in spinning it for everybody. Their screenplay channels the academic environment and Max's teenage prodigy mentality to a convincing fever pitch, and Anderson's visualisation of it matches that throughout. Olivia Williams, perhaps obviously as a teacher, has the film's moral voice and she makes Miss Cross a realistically layered woman, and Bill Murray is equally memorable in a breakthrough dramatic role. But naturally, this is Schwartzman's show the whole way. Francis Ford Coppola's nephew (his mother is Francis' sister Talia Shire), his gawky but driven manner here helps us care for Max even though he is often consciously an obnoxious little shit. And, most important, his comic timing is superb in every scene.

Kids, don't be quite like Max Fischer. But, to all of you: do, well, rush out to see Rushmore.