butchered

Rating: 7/10 (10 October 2003)

BILL is a surprisingly lame and mostly useless film that should have either been cut to about 88 minutes or left at 180. whoever thought of chopping it in half (harvey, i'm pretty sure) should be punished for two reasons: 1) this thing is probably ten times better when seen in one piece, and 2) charging us twice for one film is borderline immoral. it's bad enough that i get force fed advertisements and promos for tv shows now at every theater i go to, now the actual films are conning me?
it seems that in order to keep [the pompously titled] Vol. 1 at a decent running time, it has been generously padded. i assume that one day, after ripping off all the dorks with separate dvd sales for 1 & 2, QT will re-edit the thing into one tight little movie, which would be shorter than the combined run times of what we got in theaters. this would of course be known as the super-ultimate-golden-premier-special-deluxe edition that will hit stores about 10 months after sales of the split version taper off.
this is the version i will hold my breath for.
finally, i'd like to complain about one last thing. i hate pointless format changes in films - going to b&w when there is no reason, for instance. the best fight scene in this film goes b&w for a good 5 minutes. my guess is it was to obtain an r-rating, by turning the blood black (includes the opening shot of bloody uma -- none of the other wedding shots were in b&w).

so, here's to the house of blue leaves going back to color when this gets to home video (at least when the definitive KILL BILL comes out - i probably won't see it again until it does).
sadly, for now this film not only lags behind QT's other films, but it lags far behind TRUE ROMANCE as well.
bo svenson is great in his one scene!