Why doesn't anyone have spears, guns, Uzis ?

Rating: 8/10 (5 June 2006)

What I liked about Kill Bill Vol. 1 was that it was really modern movie that paid homage to many of the great TV and movies of the past 4 decades. The color was fantastic and beautiful, and actors and their characters played out superbly. Yeah, I have to give it to Tarantino. No one can make a movie like this (good or bad) other than him. I'd say that good far out weighed the bad in this case, and I hope he'd make more movies like this one that defy Hollywood stereotypes. He's not narrow in the way many American film makers are in that they can only play up a drama in a cook book sort of a fashion. His taste in cinematography is also very different from other Hollywood directors. I would hazard to guess that if a student made a movie like this in art schools, they would be berated very badly. If I like Tarantino, it's for these reasons. The stuffs that's good and fun that are getting forgotten these days is abundant in his movie making taste.
Now for the ridiculous antics. First of all, you can never use a Japanese sword the way Uma Thurman did. Samurai's sword is made of steel core and iron blade. For this reason, the blade part chips very badly when it hits a hard object like human bones (this is the reason why the samurai always carries a shorter "spare" with the main katana). No way you can kill 100 people without devastating the sword way Uma did. Made by Hattori Hanzo or not. Secondly, Japanese Yakuzas carry guns these days. No one carries a samurai sword. So this is the purely fiction part of the movie. Uma would have been gunned down in five seconds in a real situation. Thirdly, there's no tea house like the House of Blue Leaves in Japan. The architecture simply isn't Japanese. It's clear that the set was in China.
That's my take on this movie. Don't get me wrong, I thought this was a great movie, and I wish more movies made were fun to watch as this one was.