Trash with Flash

Rating: Null/10 (11 October 2003)

Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill" is definitely not a film for everyone, and certainly not for the squemish. The film is over-the-top with severe graphic violence: blood spurting in huge geysers, limbs being hacked off by swords, and axes landing in the middle of human heads. It is also a deeply transgressive film - Uma Thurman's character is beaten, shot and left for dead when pregnant; then spends four years in a coma with her inert body being pimped out by an orderly; while Lucy Liu's character is featured in an anime flashback in which a child watches the graphic murder of her parents, and then takes her revenge by using herself as bait for a pedophile yakuza boss. The film has obviously questionable morals, and equally questionable artistic value. The dialogue is sparse, much sparser then Tarantino's past films, and lacks much of the video-nerd goofball/mundane humor that made "Pulp Fiction" so memorable. The (barebones) plot, style, characterizations, and music are all highly derivative - explicitly borrowing and/or ripping off (per my observations) Sergio Leone Spaghetti Westerns, 70's Shaw Brother's kung-fu films, the 60's yakuza noir thrillers of Sejun Suzuki, blaxploitation movies, B-grade revenge films like "Walking Tall" or the X-rated "I Spit On Your Grave", the anime and manga "Crying Freeman", the "Green Hornet" TV show, Bruce Lee's "Game of Death", and 70s samurai potboilers like "Lone Wolf and Cub" and "Hanzo the Razor" (whew). In addition, Miramax's decision to slice the film in half leaves the viewer with an unfortunate feeling of incompleteness . . . AND I LOVED EVER SINGLE SICK MINUTE OF THE ENTIRE THING AND WILL PROBABLY WATCH IT TEN MORE TIMES IN THE THEATER!