Like putting a gold frame around a piece of graffiti.

Rating: 7/10 (27 June 2004)

When I came home after seeing KB, I said to myself, as if i'd only just realized, that its storytelling had been kind of incredible. And it is: its great slowness, the title cards, the way they fade in slow, fade out slow. The way it has chapters, like a great piece of literature, the epic fight scenes, the epic explanations of prior events (that really is Hatori Hanzo steel...). It does everything "big."
But as soon as I sat down in my home, I couldn't look at my Pulp Fiction screenplay, which i'd been the night before to get autographed by QT (as he signs, so he can sign as many as possible), and felt kind of sick in the stomach. I wasn't going to admit it yet, but I was like a son who idolises his father, only to realize one day that his father wasn't such top s**t after all.
I was quite attached to QT, i'd loved Pulp for many years... but it took a second viewing of Volume 1 for me to face the facts. Kill Bill was just plain uninteresting. It was probably the worst film to stand a second viewing since Batman and Robin. I was having flashbacks to Batman and Robin, actually, during the film... I guess its a sign of how bored I was. Kill Bill reaped absolutely nothing from a second viewing. First viewing, you've seen absolutely all there is to see: because he hands it to you so slowly! So much is wrung out of the most insignificant little moments (the ten minute sushi scene, the twenty minute sword-making scene, the half-hour anime scene, the ten minute hospital scene) that its over-wrought almost to breaking point!
What Tarantino has done in Kill Bill is like putting a bow-tie on a turd. Its like putting frills and pretty lace on a pair of work shorts. Its like putting a gold frame around a piece of graffiti, giving an Oscar to Uma Thurman, comparing your own movie to the great films of all time when its empty genre-rehashing bubble-gum trash. He takes something which is so vacuous (a simple revenge story), and pretends its a great roman epic. The result for some has been exhilaration. If you could stand a second viewing, i don't want to cry at your party. Don't keep reading. For me, it was one of great frustration.
QT loves crappy asian martial arts movies. That's fine. But what he doesn't realize is that those movies are so lovable because they AREN'T presumptious. They don't pretend they're Citizen Kane, or War & Peace. KB is the very definition of pretentious. It dons fancy disguises, pretty colours, sound effects, camera angles, good music, animation, slow fade-ins and outs, it gives chapter names to half-hour long (unnecessary) sequences! - all to pretend it is epic cinema. But what substance is there? A few action scenes, exploitation violence and a thin-as-a-tampon revenge story.
QT talks (boy does he talk) about "f**king with the audience" - his words, not mine, IMDb - but he can talk his way into a coma and it won't distract me from the fact that never in my life have i heard cornier dialogue and hammier acting, and never in my life have i seen a more self-serving movie. The audience might as well not even be here - Tarantino only cares about amusing himself anyway. You should have heard him laughing at his own movie at the premiere...