Kill Bill Preview

Rating: Null/10 (12 April 2004)

For those of us who have spent little or no time on this planet without our existence coinciding with the birth and life of music television, Friday will host the release of the completion of Kill Bill, the fourth film directed by one of the most significant film makers of our time.
Starting with the music, comic-badass, schizo-progression combination found in Reservoir Dogs, QuentinTarantino marked in stone his place as an original within the film industry. Anyone who watched Reservoir Dogs more than once anticipated and, when released, in awe and elation absorbed Pulp Fiction: a self-proclaimed 3-D chess game of a movie.
Just as Pulp Fiction created a complete homage to film noir as a genre, the completion of Kill Bill, through exaggerated emulation, attempts to do the same with the cinematic world of Kung Fu. Director of Photography Robert Richardson (JFK, Natural Born Killers) contributes his talents in order to mesh several different film styles in order to convey Tarantino's crafted vision.
While Tarantino's other directorial efforts portray stories that more or less take place within a realistic world, Kill Bill, ".does not take place in the universe we live in. In this (Kill Bill) world, women are not the weaker sex. They have exactly the same predatory hunting instincts as men, the same drive to kill or be killed." In this world, The Bride (Uma Thurman) speaks in wicked macho tongue threatening her enemies with the big-ball certainty of Keanu Reeves' Jack Traven in Speed. Also, there exists an unrestrained tendency toward the portrayal of gratuitous violence and bleeding. Both, while engaging, put the picture way over the top and keep it from four-star Pulp Fiction perfection.
So it is agreed that Vol. I is a beautifully shot action-packed brilliantly casted non-stop postmodern Kung Fu flick.
Having been shot as one film and then constructed to exist as two, Kill Bill
Vol. II has no choice but to simply be more of the same. Not unlike a new Strokes album. The deaths of Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), Bud (Michael Madsen), and Bill (David Carradine) are certain, but it's not the question of who will die that will bring film-goers back many months later to see Vol. II. It is the question of how. To what extent can Tarantino trim the fluff and simultaneously offer 1) a tribute to the genre of 70's Kung Fu and
2) the completion of a relentlessly violent opus. Consequences aside, choreographed violence is fun to watch.
Writer/director Quentin Tarantino knows we know the story of revenge. He trusts us enough to skip through it so that he can visually take us from one prolonged fight sequence to the next using a signature music compilation and stunning visuals while hinting toward an original story: the perfect feast for our attention-deficient quick-edit generation to glut upon.