Grossly underrated. Provides the angle for digging Kill Bill.

Rating: Null/10 (11 October 2004)

I don't quite recall the story. At the time (not that long ago - saw it fairly recently, around the time KB1 came out) I thought it was fairly run-of-the-mill. Still the movie stuck. I'd seen and liked Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. Used to like the memory of the first one more, but after several re-viewings, and considering the point I'm going to try to make, I doubt whether Pulp isn't the better one. Anyway.
I may be slow, but it took Jackie Brown for me to realize what it is that QT does so well. He actually takes caricatures, puts them in a fancy comic book story/place and tells the story around them. But here appears the skill (some call it genius) : in doing so, he manages to get the emotions across. Real emotions with caricaturised characters - how? Where he was still a bit to much obsessed with the formal experiment in Pulp and especially Dogs, this eagerness to toy with the story falls by the wayside in Jackie. Maybe that's why it's so underrated - because many think "this time he didn't pull it off". But in all my vanity I'm pretty sure that he didn't want to, at least not like in Pulp or Dogs.
In Jackie the camera sticks like glue to the main characters, to a degree that they were all the images I had in my head afterwards. Of course, the devine goddess Pam Grier IS camera glue. Put the point is : he takes this basic cliché character (though Grier's has some 'depth'), and focuses on it, and lets the full drama and being of the actor playing that character define the drama of the character. It's the return of the classic Hollywood Star Quality*. Forget creating a deep character and having it played by an actor whose face/name you can't recall because he becomes te character (like for example the invariably brilliant Timothy Spall - so good you hardly notice it's the same actor in all those roles); instead, make the character a vehicle to exploit the star quality. And there we are : one of the meanings of "exploitation cinema" (though that exploitation covers more than that ). "What would Sasori be if she wasn't played by Meiko Kaji?" becomes "What would Sasori be if she wasn't Meiko Kaji?"
And that's why it's a key to Kill Bill, or at least a bridge between the kaleidescopic formal frenzy of Pulp and the more stylized spareness of Bill. Kill Bill 1 got you on the wrong leg (probably deliberately), superficially recalling the frenzy of Pulp, and then it seems to fall short, too. But KB has much more to do with Jackie Brown, meaning that the essence is the characters that become emblematic through the presence of the actors portraying them, a hint you could also get from KB 2 (it pays to re-watch Vol.1 AFTER Vol.2!). But all this is not the end in itself. The end is to, by the 'trick' just described, bring an emotion across, so that a story obviously implausible to the rational mind becomes plausible to the emotional sense, becomes plausible BECAUSE we recognise the unnuanced basic emotions brought to nuanced life by the beaming presence of the actors. And Q has the visual and directorial (is that English?) flair to capture that beam on pellicule. And that's what makes it great film. This, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill Vols. 1 AND 2.
Numerous exploitation directors (Jackie Brown) or the likes of Sergio Leone (Kill Bill) might have done the exact same thing before him, but he brings it all to such implausible, often utterly 'incongruent' heights, that the awe before the fact that he still can pull the emotional arc thing on you makes your jaw fall into your lap. Dang.
*note: This is, though superficially alike, a completely different ballgame than what e.g. David Lynch does (whom I like even more). He also has caricatures play in often grotesque implausible stories. The difference is that with DL the characters are puppets in a play or figures in a painting, and it is the painting as a whole, and not just the actors, that has to get the emotion across and make you forget the actual content of the story, in order to dissolve into the er... message of Love. Only in A Straight Story can one see a resemblance with what QT does - still only that, because the thing as a whole remains important in order to make the superb acting in the end bring the message across.