Neither masterpiece nor trash, but great pop-art-entertainment.

Rating: 7/10 (17 December 2011)

Kill Bill. I just watched it again, maybe with not enough time having passed by since my last viewing, because i could not enjoy it as much as i thought. But i was well entertained and remembered why i liked the film in the first place. So i went on to have a look at the ratings and reviews on IMDb and i was confused. There almost seem to be only two very different opinions to Kill Bill Vol.1. Whether People praise it as a masterpiece and a rating of 10/10 or they hate it and describe it as an awful movie. Neither one nor the other i can fully comprehend.
I think that Kill Bill, as a whole, is not exactly Tarantinos best film. In terms of putting together details, homages etc. Pulp Fiction may be better, and if it comes to good filmmaking i would always say Jackie Brown is his best film. In my opinion one major mistake was to split the film into two parts. That is probably the reason why so many people complain about Vol.1 lacking a real "plot". To me the two parts only make sense as one film. And i can imagine that it even would have been way better edited if it had been released as one. It could have been a great TV-series of 5 to 10 episodes, too, though. However the more serious and "epic" feel of the second part is a great compensation for the endless crazy-88-choreography, that really bored me to death this time.
Watched back to back this is still a pure Tarantino-explosion, with a great comic-book-like story. Despite all the obvious italo-western and kung-fu influences it feels like Tarantino making a graphic-novel adaption of a graphic-novel written by himself. And that's great - because it seems that this is exactly what it wants to be. And this is by far better than most of the real comic-book-movies, especially the "gritty" ones. I do not really understand people who claim to be fans of Tarantinos earlier work and totally dismiss this one, because it's pure Tarantino. It is pulp and it is fiction. The only difference is it is not about gangsters and idiots, it is about a straight-forward-revenge. So there is less dialog and more blood. But therefore it is bigger and splashier and you can see, that the director did not do that because he is not capable of good writing, he did it because he had great fun with it.
The two different kinds of reviews on Kill Bill Vol.1 reflect the two main views on Quentin Tarantino himself displayed in the comments on this site. While many people praise him to be a genius, others accuse him of having stolen all his ideas from other work and being uncreative. I grew up with his movies. Pulp Fiction was my introduction to more serious, adult and "independet" films. So, i loved it when i was 13. And i still loved it when i was 18 - for different reasons. And when i was 23..you get the idea. So i saw all his films, and the ones he is related to a couple of times. I can say, that i "know" him as a filmmaker. I know what to expect. I know that he's not a genius or a wunderkind. He's not as well educated in terms of filmmaking like a Polanski for example. He never went to a film school, so i think he "steals" from other movies, just like other directors "steal" from their teachers. He makes only the movies he wants to make, and when he has a vision he realizes it in the way he learned it. I do not see him as the visionary-super-clever-genius who is the only one who can deliver great homages to genre-cinema and film-history, but i also can not see how someone can call him uncreative or unoriginal. He is obviously a passionate, highly-creative, uncompromising filmmaker, with great technical and stylistic skills ( By the way, if you think a certain Mr. Avary was more important than Tarantino for Pulp Fiction, just look at the mess that is "Killing Zoe" ) and Kill Bill is another proof for that.
Kill Bill is not as decent and smooth floating as Jackie Brown. And it is not the reinvention of its genre and new found template for hundreds of imitations like Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs. But it is a great fantasy-tale about a woman, who wants nothing more than revenge until she finds out that there is something else she needs to have. And it is so great, so big, so well-made, that it is much more than just a genre-homage. That is what all the other zombie- and gore-filmmakers do. Here you have more than that. And a certain amount of quality and style. You do not have to be a die-hard-Tarantino-fan to like it, you do not have to praise him at all. You only have to like what he likes and let him have fun, so you can have fun, too. Then Kill Bill, recommended by me as a whole film, will be a great ride.