If you was a moron, you could almost admire it.

Rating: 8/10 (2 November 2003)

_"If you was a moron, you could almost admire it."_
The fact that what I have seen so far is only half a movie by default makes what I'm going to say subject to change as soon as the second volume of Tarantino's latest hits the screens next February. I can safely say now however, that until I see the second half it will be quite impossible for me to say whether Kill Bill is an absolutely brilliant masterpiece or a piece of substance-deprived trash-referencing spectacle cinema.
First of all I will say this much; I believe that it was a big mistake to cut the movie in half. The overtly simple concept just isn't strong enough to carry the weight of 3 hours and I find it highly doubtful that it will be able to draw any but the more hardcore Tarantino and movie fans back into the cinema come February, due to the simple fact that nothing in particular is happening. To the untrained eye (if you will allow me) the movie isn't much else than blood, limbs and finely choreographed kung-fu. And there's nothing wrong with that as such, but if you've seen one scene you've seen them all.
I'll be the first to celebrate the blood-geysers and limb-removing sword play of Kill Bill. The work of martial arts choreographer extraordinaire Yuen Woo-Ping, whom you're sure to know in particular from The Matrix Trilogy and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (As well as other movies that have made it to the west, such as Black Mask, Double Dragon and Fist of Legend), is just phenomenal and lives up to everything we have come to expect from modern day kung-fu action on the big screen.

Before I move on to talk about the movie itself, I would like to just take out a few lines to sum up my view of Tarantino, since I think it vitally important that one considers the artist when viewing the art. And of the modern day auteurs Tarantino in particular is worth a second glance before his movies are delved into.
With Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction in particular, but also to some extend Jackie Brown, huge critical successes and to great lengths also economic successes, Quentin Tarantino was pretty much set for life. Though Reservoir Dogs made a splash when it was first released, it was not until Pulp Fiction debuted at Cannes that Tarantino made his mark. Critics went berserk, the audience frenzied and the money rolled into Miramax, making Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein a happy man who has said "Miramax, is the house that Quentin Tarantino built."
And that is the very reason that Tarantino, or indeed _anyone_ has been allowed to not only spend some $55 million and 3 hours of screen time on what is essentially a tribute to trash cinema, exploitation movies and oriental kung-fu TV series from the 70's. However it's not just the screen time that seems to last a lot longer than it should, as Kill Bill was being shot, new scenes were being written in daily and what should have been a 2 month stay in China soon doubled. And the list of production oddities goes on and on.
Were I to make a guess, I would say that the 'Weinstein influence' has affected more than just the bloated production and release, making it possible for Kill Bill to receive its R-rating. Something which even to an incarnate rating-opponent such as myself, seems absolutely preposterous. Though it makes for a good case against the MPAA ratings board.

Tarantino, like other successful modern film makers, is at heart a massive movie-geek, which Kill Bill shows in no small way. While it wouldn't have been thought possible, Kill Bill is in fact more stuffed with absolutely obscure movie references than any of his previous outings, making it a study in the fine line between 'tipping the hat' to a blatant rip-off. Luckily for Tarantino, his reputation as a lover of what is I think commonly thought of as 'trash cinema' steps in and saves him from falling into the rip-off category. And that probably makes Kill Bill the biggest tribute movie ever released, recognizing among a plethora of others, such talent as Sergio Leone, Kurosawa, Zhang Yimou, Ang Lee and John Ford
This also makes me want to visit Tarantino's home which has to be the biggest collection of obscure movies ever seen in the history of geekdom. And that is kind of cool.
Now I'm not going to pronounce myself a lover of grindhouse cinema, 70's revenge movies or samurai tales of mostly any kind, even though a quick perusal of the various message boards will reveal that there apparently are a great deal of geeks that do pronounce themselves as such). I have however seen, in my youth, a quite wealthy display of ninja movies. That was back when ninjas were the coolest thing around and I wanted to see them kick some ass. Add to that the various grindhouse-gone-commercial movies of the mid-70's that I am sure most of us have at some point digested (how they survived the intervening years at my local VHS-pusher I don't know, but I was a bored kid in a lazy town so I ate it up) and the inevitable Russ Meyer flick.
So while I'm unable to pronounce myself the know-it-all guru of 60's and 70's underground movie making, I certainly feel that I know where this movie is coming from, and even more so where Tarantino is coming from. And I think most other people like myself do as well (unless you failed to waste your youth on bad movies, in which case the 'finer' points of Kill Bill might go over your head, which in itself isn't necessarily a bad thing).
And that, the purity of the love that Tarantino has for this stuff, goes a long way to save both himself and Kill Bill.
If you saw any other director do a movie like Kill Bill and not have their heart and life buried in the same kind of movie-mythology that Tarantino wears like a badge wherever he goes; it would die a horrible death at the hands of the fans and critics (though it can be argued that Kill Bill has already suffered death at the hands of the critics).
Even so, Rikke and I both agreed that while we can respect the self-indulgence and obvious ego-tripping of Tarantino, the final result suffers from being much too long; at least for commercial purposes and in terms of average costumer satisfaction. It is obvious that if you are like Tarantino, and Kill Bill feels like a movie that Tarantino tailor-made just for you, then there is absolutely nothing wrong with the length of it. And I can certainly sympathize with that attitude, seeing as that is how I feel about The Matrix and The Lord of the Rings; some people bitch and whine about their length; I just wish they were longer yet.
And that I think is a good basis of comparison. The Matrix Trilogy. Both 'series' have been made by über-geeks who have thrown absolutely everything, including the kitchen sink, into these works of pure adulterated passion. They both tribute the movies and cultures that the directors grew up with (and they both use Yuen Woo-Ping as their fight choreographer :)). And finally, and most importantly, they have both been created for great sums of money and released as 'commercial' cinema, when they in fact only cater to a relatively small audience of people 'in the know'.
But if I were to rate this, the first chapter of Kill Bill, based on these merits alone I would probably end up somewhere around 6.5 out of 10. Seen from my perspective, it is an entertaining movie with a great use of color, some cool cinematography, fantastic but ultimately non-revolutionary fighting. It is too long, too self-indulgent, utterly lacking in story and with a main character that I quite frankly find it hard to emphasize with.
With the exception of the suburban house-raze and the wedding massacre I found most of the scenes to run way over the time that they could support. Those two scenes however are worth taking a closer look at.
The fight in a suburban living room was by far the best scene in the movie if you ask me. Not only did it at the time warm up to what seemed like classic Tarantino meets kung-fu - though it never got there - it also had a ferocity that the rest of the fighting lacked. In this scene we have two primal animals just having a go at each other with everything they've got. It leaves scares and it smashes inventory. It almost manages to culminate when the bride kills the mother in front of her baby (R-rating anyone?), but then just sort of fizzles out from there.
As for the wedding, which is interspersed throughout the fragmented timeline that is so characteristic of Tarantino, it certainly pulls all the dramatic weight in the movie, granting the bride with any and all audience-sympathy (with the exception of the hospital scene). I thought it was unfortunate that there wasn't more of the movie that had been given the same dark, bleak treatment of that scene. Unfortunately it seems to pull most of the grit in an otherwise glossy movie.
But then again, since Kill Bill is a tribute to trash films, it can allow itself to be trash without anyone really being able to point fingers at it. And that is in itself somewhat brilliant when you think about it.
Another thing that Tarantino up until now has been brilliant at is writing. I personally enjoy him much more as a script writer than as a movie maker and story even goes that he became a director so that he could star in his own movies, since no one would let him star in theirs. And even if you haven't seen any of the movies that he himself directed, you might still have come across his work in such contemporary classics as True Romance and Natural Born Killers, both personal favorites of mine and both written before Pulp Fiction (and then of course half of From Dusk Till Dawn).
The funny thing is that of all the movies that Tarantino has been involved with writing, I like the ones that he himself hasn't directed. Natural Born Killers being by far my favorite of the bunch. Which is kind of ironic since Tarantino was so against what Oliver Stone did to 'his movie' that he had himself removed from script credit (though he still received story credit).
Regardless of what you may think of Natural Born Killers or whether or not you like Tarantino's particular style of writing to begin with I think that it can be said with some certainty that a good deal of the charm and wit that movies like Pulp Fiction gained from that writing lacks presence in Kill Bill. Where you have Jules and Vincent discussing the finer points of a European McDonald's, something which manages to tell us a great deal about their characters, Kill Bill has almost nothing of the same sort. And that is truly a shame.
You do get some of it when the bride goes to fetch her sword from Hattori Hanzo, when he starts bickering with his help. But ultimately that seems to lead nowhere and doesn't, at least on the surface, further the story or the characters in any way.
Without having seen volume two I would say that if the point of Kill Bill was to point out the low standards that popular culture has for art in modern western culture (and possible in eastern culture as well), then it certainly succeeded. A visit to the various Kill Bill message boards will show you lots of people shouting to the hills about the wonders of Kill Bill and how it is true art.
Somehow I don't think that was the point Tarantino had in mind however. But like so many things that Kill Bill contains, it is hard to say whether or not it is meant to have any depth and/or seriousness embedded in it. The mere fact that the movie and all its PR announces with much fanfare that Kill Bill is `The Fourth movie by Quentin Tarantino' is in itself a puzzle. Are we meant to take from that, that this movie is a wonder bestowed upon the world, or is it merely poking fun at the Tarantino image?
In the same way that the overt feminism of the movie can be looked on as nothing more than modern day equivalents of what Russ Meyer did back in the day it can also be interpreted as a feminist statement, or at least merely a feminine stone. On one hand we have Uma Thurman being shot from every conceivable angle and with close ups of every conceivable body part (including an extreme toe close-up). We have blood that makes blatantly sexual allusions and the Crazy 88 puffing and moaning after having been exposed to the furious virility of the bride. It's all over.
On the other hand we have a woman taking charge, avenging the murders of her husband and unborn child. She takes the absolutely one-minded revenge that is normally reserved for men and makes it her own instead. When the suburban fight is interrupted by Vivica Fox's child returning home from school there is an unspoken understanding that can only exist between to women.
Kill Bill is on the surface a 'simple' revenge movie with a good side and a bad side, but further examination reveals that there are in fact many layers to the 'good' and 'bad' sides of the story. Not only is our heroine a cold-blooded killer herself, gaining our sympathy only through of the brutalities bestowed on her by her former 'co-workers' - She kills a mother in front of her child, in cold blood (which leads us back to the opening Klingon proverb: `Revenge is a dish best served cold')
O-Ren Ishii gets her own complete anime sequence where she witnesses her family getting brutally murdered and indulging in pedophile sex to gain her vengeance. (making it two mothers killed in front of their own children - R-rating?)
But Kill Bill isn't your standard run-of-the-mill Hollywood summer action blockbuster, and it doesn't need to make any excuses for its characters. The bride doesn't have to spare her crippled opponents; in fact we don't give a s*** if she does. She just wants revenge at all costs, all other factors are irrelevant.
And that is probably both the reason why the movie works and the reason that it doesn't.
Because in the process of revenging, the bride looses any character she should've had. She is - as are her enemies - defined by the outfit she wears and the weapon she uses. And that could work just fine, if the movie wasn't 3 hours long.
Considering all of the more subtle nuances, at least the ones that I currently know of and understand, I would probably go as far as to grant the movie a resounding 8 out of 10. But as I said at the very beginning, Kill Bill can't really be fully appreciated before the entire thing can be watched from beginning till end. And while I have no doubt in my mind that the second half will be just as virtuoso in terms of its mastery of references, music, style and cool, it better be tighter than its predecessor.
But should that happen, then it could truly be a potential masterpiece. The effects of which will be felt in cinema for years to come.
And that is about all I have to say for now. There are so many things that I failed to cover, and it is to Tarantino's credit that an entire book could be written about the many subtle details, references and echo's of its 'source material'. I did find the movie to be too long, but for the self-indulgent movie it tries to be it is absolutely stunning in its execution.