Kill Bill vol. 1 — he said, she said — movie review — screener! — +japanese-cut dvd!
WHY CAN’T WE BE FRIENDS?
HE SAID: Kill Bill Vol. 1 is Quentin Tarantino’s loveletter to exploitation, grindhouse, and overall bad-taste cinema. He references absolutely everything he loves: De Palma, Switchblade Sisters, Shaw Brothers films (it actually opens with the shaw scope logo), Japanese samurai splatter, Italian Giallos, Master of the Flying Guillotine, etc, etc. The film has an amazing amount of gore and some pretty good fight choreography. Too bad it’s so drawn out and totally friggin’ boring. Prepare yourself for one disjointed review.
Kill Bill Vol. 1 is the story of the Blood Spattered Bride (Uma Thurman). She’s just known as the Bride or Black Mamba throughout the film. Her real name is always concealed by a test tone that pops up every time someone tries to speak it. The main story is The Bride was pregnant and getting hitched when the members of her old assassin squad place a hit on her. They kill her husband, her wedding party, the preacher, and Bill lodges a bullet in her head. She doesn’t die, of course, but lays in a coma for four years. Upon awakening she’s out to seek revenge. Climbing up the ranks, killing every former team member until she finally reaches Bill.
The film starts out with a bloody Uma Thurman being taunted by Bill and eventually being shot in the face. The credits roll and we finally end up outside the house of the #2 killer on her list, Vernita Green (she’s already taken care of #1), played by Vivica Fox . Of course she goes in and whups some ass, eliminating said team member in a matter of minutes. The scene is cool, funny, and fresh. This is where the problems start. The film is told in a chapter format, so every 15 minutes or so a new chapter header comes up. Chapters 2-5 then flash back at varying intervals to show you how she recovered from the attack, and how she took out the first killer on her list, O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), aka: Cottonmouth. There is actually a whole chapter for the backstory on Ishii’s character that’s done in a complete Anime style. It’s cool and fresh for a while, but gets drawn out much too long. It also sucks that Ishii’s name is never pronounced correctly. Or Samurai. Or Nippon. Or a host of other Japanese words. With an entire Japanese crew surrounding him, you’d think Quentin’d know that Ishii is pronounced nothing like Eazy-E.
Which leads me to another list of gripes. Why is Bill’s face never shown? You know it’s David Carradine. You’ve seen his face in the trailer. There is no reason for him to have some mysterious Dr. Claw aspect. Besides, I thought Uma was supposed to Kill Bill in 2003. Guess we’ll wait for 2004.
But there’s more. Quentin has Sonny Chiba to work with, but completely wastes his talent by casting him as a sushi-chef/swordsmith who speaks broken English. I can understand covering up Lucy Liu’s lack of acting talent by having her speak primarily bad Japanese, but to do that to Sonny Chiba, the Street Fighter? That’s way uncool. Sure he may be a bit paunchy now, but I’d still like to see him kick some ass.
Quentin also seems to think you can learn all you need to know about Japan from Shaw Brother’s films. Wrong country, buddy! He’s like a tourist who’s visited Japan once and decided to go native.
The end fight at the House of the Blue Leaves? The maximum coolness you saw in the trailer? There is absolutely no tension in this fight. You know Uma survives and kills Lucy Liu because you saw her name crossed off the list at the very beginning of the film! Then, halfway into the fight everything goes black and white. There’s no stylistic reason for this, other than the fact that the FRUC (Fascist Regime of Uber Censorship, aka the MPAA) happens to let bloody scenes pass uncut as long as the red stuff isn’t red. The trick worked in Evil Dead and it worked again here. At least the effects by KNB and the shot compositions are amazing.
There is absolutely no reason for this film to be divided in two. Both Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown clocked in at 154 minutes. If Quentin wasn’t so in love with his own footage he could cut the extraneous 25+ minutes from the film and just have one nice little package. As it is now, Quentin gets to sell you two movie tickets, two soundtracks, and two DVD special editions.
GAH! I haven’t been this disappointed with a film in quite some time. It’s done nothing but further prove to me Quentin is an arrogant braggart with an intense love for bad bad movies (He is the guy who claimed Days of Thunder was a work of genius). The dude receives much too much respect. If Quentin wasn’t so in love with himself he may be able to make a better film. Until that day, I’ll have to pass on his latest exercise in self-pleasure.
SHE SAID: I’m still unsure of why Tarantino is so revered. Yes, he has excellent shot composition and an excellent ability to share his “Hits of the ‘60s” CDs. But here we are again, watching recycled scenes and chopped up timelines. I realize that’s his “hook”, but in redundancy, its more of a nuisance. Also, it was cleaner and craftily edited in Pulp Fiction. In Kill Bill it looked like some college film student threw it together, typed up the chapter marks on an antiquated Toaster program and didn’t even bother to sync the fonts.
While I applaud Tarantino for actually using Japanese actors (for the most part) to portray Japanese characters, his foray into melding Chinese fight choreography and storylines seems sloppy and disrespectful. Compare the intensely rich self-sacrifice of Chushingura with a slap-happy Hong Kong revenge flick and any fool could tell the difference. I felt as though he just wanted things to “look cool” without doing his homework. Once again, there’s no moral, no fitting storyline. But kicking ass and hilarious shock gore is what he does best, and there are many mutilated limbs and decapitations (props to KNB EFX again!) to keep the easily queasy squirming and the hardcore junkies cheering.
There were great moments, though, with the addition of Chiaki Kuriyama (Battle Royale) as a heartless medieval-steel-ball swinging assassin/chief bodyguard of Ishii. This girl has the presence and the charisma of a true actress. Its too bad her skills (beyond her short school-girl uniform) aren’t fully utilized. She has one great line then splat!
In all fairness, I am not a Tarantino fan. And I _really tried. I do enjoy his enthusiasm and knowledge, but I seriously doubt his movies would work if not for the casting agents. That’s the real gem in his productions. The only reasons I saw Pulp were Uma Thurman and John Travolta. Uma and David Carradine for Kill Bill. My mother’s crock-pot lid was shattered on one of my youthful emulating runs of Carradine’s character in Kung Fu (where he carries a piping hot urn with his bare forearms). I’ll bet he’ll have that great wrinkly lookie; a villain with kind, droopy teddy-bear eyes. It will hopefully all be redeemed once Uma and Carradine are in frame together. Keeping my fingers crossed Tarantino didn’t choose to cheese it up too much.
Kill Bill vol 1 opens in theatres October 10th.
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Kill Bill, the Japanese Cut
A few months back I received a copy of the uncut Japanese version of Kill Bill Volume 1. I figured an update to the original review might be in order.
One difference noticed as soon as the Japanese cut of the film starts, is the dedication to Kinji Fukasaku, “the master”, in place of the Klingon proverb, bringing to mind the question, if Quentin respected the Fukasaku so much, why wouldn’t he include his dedication in the American version as well? But that’s a minor quibble. The majority of the film remains the same, except for O-Ren’s anime backstory, the colorized version of the house of blue leaves fight, and some extra arm choppin following. The extended animation itself seemed to be the most violent, and bordered on disturbing; this coming from one who has viewed Angel Cop, Fist of the North Star, and other Japanese exercises in animated ultra-violence. Contrastingly, The House of the Blue Leaves sequence is quite fun, with bright color and excessive gore unadulterated by American sensibilities, and proves to justify at leas a small bit of the hype surrounding it.
But that’s not to say the film is any more interesting. Bloated and self important, at best, this is one to watch with the remote firmly in hand. After viewing both halves of the film, I am even more convinced that this film could have been one, satisfying, 140 minute film if Quentin just managed to trim the fat a little bit.
But The main problem I have with the film is that the same academics that praise Quentin’s films would scoff at viewing genuine Grindhouse faire such as Cannibal Holocaust, I Drink Your Blood, and Lady Snowblood, the last film to which Quentin owes a serious debt, having ripped off both shot compositions and overall plot structure in order to create his Kill Bill. Due to this fact, even though Lady Snowblood, starring the amazing Meiko Kaji of the Scorpion women in prison films, is a far better film than Quentin’s, it will never be seen as much as his exercise in filmic recycling.
In addition, blinded by rabid fandom, this group also fails to see the exploitation of Uma throughout both of these films. Rather than “raising her to goddess status” as a dear friend of mine has claimed, Quentin rather uses her as an object for his own deviant fetishes. While not as blatant as Gallo’s mistreatment of Chloe Sevigny in The Brown Bunny, just count the number of close-up shots of Uma’s bare feet, as an example. If you go back to his earlier films and notice the trend started with Uma in Pulp Fiction, and has now become as much of a directorial signature as his camera-in-the-trunk shots.
Kill Bill does have it’s perks, but it never amounts to the sum of its parts.
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