By Tara Judah, who is a Director at 20th Century Flicks video shop, a Curator and Online Editor for Cinema Rediscovered, Co-host of a film podcast called Cinema Blindspot and a freelance broadcaster and writer. She’s also Cinema Producer at Watershed. She’s awesome.
Happy tenth birthday Battle Royale With Cheese!
Thinking about the films your website’s title references takes me back to when I was just discovering the cinematic joys of heavily stylised violence and gore. A long-time fan of Japanese cinema now – and especially fond of Hirokazu Kore-eda’s films, I am dying in wait for Shoplifters (2018) – it’s strange to think that Battle Royale (2000) was probably one of the first Japanese films I’d seen. With little in the way of social, historical or even genre context, Battle Royale hit me like a bloody hammer, and made the kind of lasting impression that would grow into a wider love of East Asian cinema, kicking off in the early 2000s with the Infernal Affairs trilogy, a series that I am keen to revisit.
The second film your name references is one I loved on release (or shortly thereafter on home entertainment as I was technically still under eighteen when it hit cinemas) but find tiresome now. Though I still think the film is very good – accomplished, enjoyable, well-written and with stellar performances from its leads – there’s something about it that just doesn’t stand the test of time. Perhaps it is due the fatigue with which I regard its maker, Quentin Tarantino. Though talented, his bullying behaviour and ingrained cine-racism and misogyny just don’t do it for me. But Uma Thurman, with her crisp white shirt and jet-black hair, dancing with determination and ordering a five-dollar shake will always be iconic.
What it makes me wonder, then, is about my both my own changing appetite for stylised violence and the wider context through which I now understand the medium of film. Undoubtedly, a younger me was simply more impressed with the aesthetics of excess and gore. But there is too ideology and industry at play.
What I look forward to reflecting on in another ten years is how the next wave of films, from my twenties and thirties, perhaps, stand up – or don’t. Currently making my way through The Purge films, with context aplenty, I am still enjoying the blockbuster cinema of excess and its polemic fare.
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