The Moose Hole - Review of Kill Bill (Volume I)
Released October 10th, 2003
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Michael Madsen, Sonny Chiba, Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, Lucy Liu, LaTanya Richardson, Michael Jai White, Woo-ping Yuen, Samuel L. Jackson (cameo)
Premise: The first film in the two-part "Kill Bill" series, the second being Kill Bill (Volume II). Uma Thurman is going to "Kill Bill," in Quentin Tarantino's latest film about a former assassin betrayed by her boss, Bill (Carradine). Four years after surviving a bullet in the head, the bride (Thurman) emerges from a coma and swears revenge on her former master and his deadly squad of international assassins, played by Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox and Michael Madsen.
“Revenge is a dish best served cold.”
Quentin Tarantino’s fourth film and the first one since 1997’s Jackie Brown takes the theme of revenge like Hamlet on steroids. It has not been an easy road for this generation’s “It” director. Tarantino once worked at a video rental store before writing the script for Reservoir Dogs that he later directed. It was his directorial effort in 1994’s Pulp Fiction that catapulted Tarantino, as well as the independent film company Miramax, into the Hollywood mainstream. Unfortunately his next film, Jackie Brown, which, by the way, was not written by him, was not widely accepted and then Quentin Tarantino dropped off the scene for nearly six years ....
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Overkill and Oversimplified
While the massive gore and violence in this movie is supposed to be mediated by its obvious spoof of other Japanese samurai movies, it was just too much, too unncessary overkill. When one of the audience members started laughing at the grotesque and gruesome slaughter, I felt shivers about whole insensitive our society may be becoming towards all this violence. At the same time, the ability of Uma Thurman to continue to survive from these skilled assassins by luck instead of ability really detracted from the entertainment value of this movie. The last fighting scene was a letdown of huge proportions for the build up to something of an anticlimatic sword combat scene that lacked the real skill and talent ability that all the prior footage was leading up to this climax. Overall, I enjoyed this movie but it seems overrated just because of who directed it and the expectation that it needs to be good.
Re: Overkill and Oversimplified
Quote:
Originally posted by tabuno
While the massive gore and violence in this movie is supposed to be mediated by its obvious spoof of other Japanese samurai movies, it was just too much, too unncessary overkill. When one of the audience members started laughing at the grotesque and gruesome slaughter, I felt shivers about whole insensitive our society may be becoming towards all this violence.
That may be, but it was meant to be and is funny. You might as well say that the Black Knight scene in Monty Python and the Holy Grail was the turning point of cultural apathy toward violence. The violence in Kill Bill is that level of absurdity. If there was any attempt to portray any of the film's violence realistically, I would say the critics of the film have a legitimate case. But Tarantino shouldn't be criticized for the reductio ad absurdum violence in his film; actual, real world violence is exploited by our sensationalistic news media on a daily basis. In this context, any energy spent on chastising the clearly ridiculous and ridiculously clear choice Tarantino has made is utterly wasted.
Ebert said in his review of the film: "If you think I have given away plot details, you think there can be doubt about whether the heroine survives the first half of a two-part action movie, and should seek help." I would say the same applies to those who think the violence in the movie has any basis in reality.
Crossing Over The Line of Violence
Somehow in watching this orgy of violent, graphic images, I went into this movie hearing how "funny" this movie was supposed to be. Yet as I watched the slaughter and the emphasis on body parts and blood gushing, I couldn't really see the humor and the overt attempt to really diminish this massive hemorrhage of death through a brilliant directorial effort - apparently the director wasn't up to it for my taste. "Brazil" might be the better example of light-fantasy-bizarre semi-serious drama. The cute Japanese girl in school uniform, Uma Thurman's eaggerated expressions were efforts at lightening up an otherwise bloodfest, but the actual martial arts fighting did not consistently portray the same attitude of cuteness - it bordered more on the horror tradition. I almost am interested in seeing "Scary Movie 3" than another helping of Kill Bill, just for the obvious parody. I am hopeful that Kill Bill Vol. 2 will lighten up as the trailer with the older martial artist sword playing with Uma Thurman suggests.
Re: Crossing Over The Line of Violence
Quote:
Originally posted by tabuno
Yet as I watched the slaughter and the emphasis on body parts and blood gushing, I couldn't really see the humor and the overt attempt to really diminish this massive hemorrhage of death through a brilliant directorial effort - apparently the director wasn't up to it for my taste.
Then are you of the perspective that the style of violence was realistic? If so, then that's where our difference of opinion lies, and unless I can convince you that the fruit-punch colored blood and its excessive fountain-like outpouring from the wounded was nonrealistic or you can convince me that it represented reality, common ground between our opinions on the issue will be impossible to find.
The Disarmed Woman Survives
Mark Dujsik -
There is Lucy Lui's female assistant whose arm is cut off and somehow mirculously survives and is used for comic humor when she isn't allowed to leave the restaurant which supports your premise. Unfortunately, I'm not around a lot of mangled and torn bodies enough to know real from parody.
Kill Bill over Scary Movie 3
I have seen professional counselors in my life!
I have seen Scary Movie 3. While funny in places, strangely enough its overall tendency reflects that same increase in suggestive graphic violence at Kill Bill which to me says something about our society and that perhaps we're running out of creative and innovative ideas. I prefer the blending of comedy and drama as you find in Angel, Buffy, and Charmed. Comedy is perhaps one of the most difficult art forms and to successfully blend it with drama is brilliance.
I did enjoy Kill Bill (Vol. 1) more than Scary Movie and it did have a more deliberate, carefully cheoreographed production. Admittedly I am not an avid martial art film fan (I think Matrix is too over the top to be credible). I would hope that Kill Bill wouldn't require an black belt in martial arts to appreciate its more finer points.
And also forget comedy and forget realism (another review)
The key to the treasure is the treasure
Forget plot; forget motivation, or what Kill Bill might be about. The fun and excitement result from the way the film takes us deep into movies and into the mind of Tarantino himself. It is his own writing again. There are references galore, to the Shaw Brothers, for example, and Bruce Lee, to Sergio Leone - but also quite notably to his own work, especially Pulp Fiction.
Kill Bill's star is Uma Thurman, who was the most delightful, fun person in Pulp Fiction. As Mia Wallace, the wife of scary crime boss Marsellus Wallace and John Travolta's dangerous dream date, Uma was the most coolly reckless female powerhouse in the Tarantino oeuvre. Tarantino knows how actors carry the parts they've played into other movies, and Uma brings the aura of Mia Wallace into Kill Bill. When Black Mamba is teased by a mosquito into awakening from her four-year coma to begin the chain of revenge Kill Bill chronicles, she gasps and pops up just the way Mia did when she got the hypodermic needle of adrenaline to the heart: it's a direct audio-visual echo.
Kill Bill pays homage to a different kind of pulp and lacks Pulp Fiction's amusing and outrageous dialogue. But similar thought processes are at work in the way Kill Bill is put together. Kill Bill's opening two-woman battle is a prologue that sets things up just as the diner holdup scene with Honey Bunny (Amanda Plummer) and Pumpkin (Tim Roth) sets up the action of Pulp Fiction.
The battle between Uma and her first enemy leads into the wedding murder scene - the place where Kill Bill actually begins - with its stylized Wild West imagery and Sergio Leone overtones. From then on Tarantino thinks in blocks of near-autonomous set pieces much like the main segments of Pulp Fiction. There's the hospital sequence where Uma comes to and takes charge of the "Pussy Wagon" she was using in the Prologue. Then the samurai Sword Sequence featuring Sonny Chiba and set in Okinawa, where Black Mamba gets her magic, invincible weapon. Then the Tokyo Sequence, which is in four parts, each a different shooting sequence:- the anime of the young O-ren Ishii/Cottonmouth being turned into a killer by having to fight off a pedophile grandparent; the adult O-ren beheading one of her Yakuza gang members for insubordination; Uma/Black Mamba's battle royal with O-ren's posse in the restaurant/nightclub; and finally her showdown with O-ren herself in the exterior snowy garden, where Vol. 1 comes to what may seem a surprisingly peaceful and beautiful end.
It's not only the higgledy-piggledy time scheme and the use of big autonomous segments that link Kill Bill: Vol. 1 with Pulp Fiction: there are more specific echoes.
I've already mentioned the "awakening" of Uma. In fact, the showdown in medias res (in the middle of the story) between Uma and Vernita Green/Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox) which serves as prologue has a family resemblance to the Kahuna Burger sequence with Travolta and Jackson: the exploded head in the car and The Wolf (Harvey Keitel) calmly supervising the tidying up of the bloody vehicle at the house in Toluca Lake. What the two sequences have in common is ultra-violence in a bland, suburban setting as professional killers take revenge, with interruptions for brief spurts of terse dialogue. We have the same affectless children too. The deadpan reaction of Copperhead's little daughter to her mom's extinction, reminds one of the small boy in Pulp Fiction: expressionless, as he learns of his grandfather's watch in a preposterous speech from Chris Walken. Kids in Tarantino-land are innocent victims and passive onlookers.
It's the hospital sequence that rhymes most clearly with Pulp Fiction. The way Uma's character brutally punishes the crude orderly who's been renting out her inert body and then escapes to the "Pussy Wagon" to rid her nether limbs of "entropy" by sheer power of thought, reminds us of Butch in the prizefight Zen/Maynard pawnshop sequence: retrieving his watch, escaping his tormentors, freeing Marcellus Wallace to revenge his sexual assault, and then returning to Fabienne on the commandeered "chopper" -- his "Pussy Wagon."
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is more stylized and pays more ritualized homage than Tarantino has ever done before. Commendably, the greater artistic freedom and higher budget has led him to restrict himself more. However, his treatment of race and gender continues to be provocative: the more so since the three opponents are women - Caucasian, Asian, and black. In the multiple languages, the translating, and the interracial battling, Tarantino is wrestling with the foreignness of his source material, as well as with gender and racial roles.
Larissa MacFarquhar's recent New Yorker magazine article "The Movie Lover" (October 20, 2003) provides insights into Tarantino's mindset. She emphasizes the filmmaker's incestuous familiarity with pulp movies, the endless quantity he knows by heart. He's still the video store geek, raised to the nth degree. Favorite movie sequences replay in his photographic memory. His plots all mesh - somehow - but it's the furiously engaging set pieces that stand out. For that's how his mind is stocked. He thinks in these autonomous blocks.
It's important to realize Tarantino is an unadulterated movie lover. There's no irony in his homages. "The problem with the irony charge" against Tarantino, MacFarquhar says, "is that pop culture and life are not separable for Tarantino." Any homage to pulp is homage to movies and homage to life. That granted, Kill Bill is as life affirming as it is art-affirming. "What is Kill Bill about?" is an irrelevant question. The key to the treasure is the treasure. Statements to the effect that Kill Bill is "smart, but thin" (Hoberman), "brilliant" but containing "no story" (Ebert), or worse yet "decadent" and "crap" (Denby) miss the movie's affirmative aspects and make it seem cold when it's bubbling with enthusiasm and joie de vivre. It's a celebration.
