Kill Bill volume 1
Okay, first of all… this is not “the fourth movie by Quentin Tarantino,” dammit. It’s the third and a half. The cynical half of my mind thinks QT and Miramax split this movie to double their profits, but the part of my mind that has ADD is glad that they did. I’m not sure I would have had such a positive experience with a 4-hour movie rather than two 2-hour movies.
The weird thing is, I hate kung fu movies. I avoided Kill Bill for a long time pretty much on that basis alone. But I’m here to tell you what none of this movie’s cheerleaders were able to tell me: this is much less a kung fu movie than it is a Quentin Tarantino movie. And not the Tarantino of Jackie Brown, either — this is full-cylinders, completely over-the-top Pulp Fiction Tarantino. It’s been 10 years since I’ve seen that guy… I almost forgot what he was like.
Kill Bill does have kung fu movie elements, but it also owes a great deal to the classic revenge-driven spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. I guess you could say it’s about Uma Thurman’s character seeking vengeance from the people who fucked up her life, but I only say that in the interest of encapsulating the plot in a sentence. The actual telling is an insane mix of styles, genres and presentation (one flashback is even told in the form of an anime sequence). There’s lots of humor, lots of blood (seems like any wound, from slight nick to beheading, warrants a fountain of 80 gallons of red stuff) and very little taken genuinely serious. Not to say that you don’t care about the character (and Uma is the perfect choice, incidentally), just that a Tarantino flick is usually more about style than substance. He’s one of the rare directors who can wear that badge with pride, because his is a style worth watching.
I did have a few minor gripes. The dialogue was a little awkward in bits, though much of it was typical QT (”my name is Buck and I’m here to fuck”). The DVD apparently will not automatically subtitle the 25% or so of the movie that’s in Japanese — you have to know enough to turn the subtitles on before you start watching. And the violence, though not especially disturbing, started to wear a little thin by the end. Still, these are minor annoyances. I was captivated for the full two hours, even during the 30-minute kung fu action sequence at the end. And that’s saying a lot. I’ll definitely be seeing volume 2 as soon as I can.