Whoa

Rating: 10/10 (19 October 2003)

The Oscars can say whatever they want, but Kill Bill is the best movie of 2003. It's a total movie; a work of art that could never be realized in any other medium. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction would have worked as novels (though no prizes for guessing which kind), and Jackie Brown was adapted from one. There's an immediacy to it rarely matched elsewhere -- one brilliant conceived set-piece rapidly follows another after another. Quentin Tarantino knows how brilliant he is, and is not afraid to show it, making narrative leaps other directors would retract into the fetal position just contemplating.
Case in point: the samurai swords. I can't imagine anybody in Japan uses samurai swords as practical weapons anymore, to say nothing of their being the weapon of choice for the Yakuza. Tarantino overcomes this logistical roadblock by totally ignoring it. And after the climactic fight scene, lasting probably twenty minutes and with more thrills and intense choreography than The Matrix Reloaded could ever dream of, we're more than happy to let it go.
I've always felt there is an art to the integration of pop music into a movie by skillful editing, but its been grievously weakened by its poorly-conceived overuse in recent years. The credo seems to be that faster and more chaotic is better, and the tone of the piece isn't as important. Tarantino knows better, exercising the same brilliance in picking tunes and editing the movie around them that helped Pulp Fiction be as great as it was.
Even the smallest touches are masterful -- Coppola's oranges have nothing on Tarantino's breakfast cereal. Uma Thurman, for her part, dominates the screen in a performance that's far more difficult that it looks. And speaking of difficult -- don't even get me started on waiting for Volume Two.