Hi, everyone. "Moriarty" here with some Rumblings From The Lab...
No clever headline. And hopefully, very little hyperbole or excessive digression. I don’t actually have a lot to say about KILL BILL VOLUME I. I think it’s a pretty amazing piece of pop art, I think it’s sleek and sexy as shit, and I think Quentin really threw down the gauntlet to other action directors in the same way the Wachowskis did in ’99. He just whipped his dick out and dared every other action director working to step up and compare. It’s an arrogant movie, a swaggering movie, a love letter from Quentin Tarantino to Quentin Tarantino. It’s a personal laundry list of film fetishes, scribbled onto the back of a napkin and rubbed in our faces. It should be horrible, a train wreck, a testament to the dangers of excess. And, despite that, it works. There is a sort of inevitable cool that sets in early and permeates every bit of this film. Did I dig the living shit out of KILL BILL? Yep. Every minute of it. Is it an easy film to like, a film that will play for anybody? Nope. And that’s exactly the way I like it.
Here’s what I don’t want to do as I talk about my reaction to the film. I don’t want to list the “references” that Quentin has made to try and make myself look clever, or to prove I read the press notes. If you pick up on references to other movies as you watch the film, and you know where he got this or that or some piece of music or a camera move or whatever, that’s one level of enjoyment. But that’s not the only way the film can be enjoyed, and I think you sell it short when you just list things off. The point isn’t that he borrows or even steals outright. He’s stated this as a philosophical cornerstone of his work before, happily copping to the fact that he lifts from everything. The point is the way he stirs it all together and slaps it up on the screen. Quentin is a mad alchemist, the film equivalent of a music producer building insanely catchy dance tracks out of samples from old songs. Quentin just wants to prove he can get you to shake your ass. If anything’s changed about him over the years, it’s the level of control he has over the technical craft of filmmaking, and he proves himself here to be one of the most muscular visual stylists working.
If you want to criticize this film as being wafer thin, you wouldn’t be wrong. If you want to read it as a cartoon about larger than life comic book characters killing each other in outlandish ways, that’s perfectly valid. You can’t paint in broader strokes than Quentin uses. “The Bride.” “Bill.” Archetypical names. They’re arresting and memorable because they’re so incredibly bland. These are the two central figures in this epic landscape, and everyone else revolves around them. Keeping Bill’s face off-screen for this entire film is an unexpected bonus for Tarantino. If it was one movie, the reveal would have to be handled differently. Now, he’s made us desperate to see David Carradine make his entrance.
I literally can’t believe I just typed that sentence, either. “He’s made us desperate to see David Carradine.” When I first heard that Warren Beatty was bailing out of the film and Carradine was stepping in, I wasn’t just surprised... I was incensed. I hated the news. I thought he’d just hamstrung his own movie. I freely admit it now... I’m not going to pretend I was always on-board. I am now, though. I think Carradine’s presence is perfect, and it reminds me of the way Peter Fonda started suddenly doing really strong work again.
All the casting so far is right on the money. Uma is... well, she’s Uma. There’s no one else like her. My first impression of her was on the JOHNNY BE GOOD poster, where she was giving Anthony Michael Hall this look of awed affection, and thanks to the way they printed her and the way her cut-out was sized against his cut-out, she looked like a giant balloon-headed version of Munch’s THE SCREAM. I was sixteen. Forgive my superficial reaction to feeling she was “fugly.” I wrote her off. I changed my mind after DANGEROUS LIASONS and THE ADVENTURES OF BARON MUNCHAUSEN. She was not only wicked hot in both films, she also proved to have a real presence. There was something odd and fascinating about her. She gave decent performances in a few films, but it was PULP FICTION that finally seemed to figure her out, show her off completely. She seemed poised for stardom after that, but the roles and the films... they just weren’t there. She just didn’t go anywhere. And she started a family, and her priorities seemed to shift, and that’s cool... she sounds like she was happy... but she just wasn’t really on the radar anymore...
Sounds a lot like I’m describing Travolta’s career circa ’94, actually. Quentin’s like that. Carradine and Uma both in this film, as well as Sonny Chiba, Gordon Liu, and Daryl Hannah. All of them are strong screen presences who rarely get a chance to shine, and they’re all given plenty of opportunity here. I think people misunderstand the really smart thing that he does as a writer, his generosity. He tries to create memorable, defining moments for these people, quickly etched impressions that give them room to shine, and when the actors rise to the challenge, the results can absolutely transform an actor for us. By giving everybody such wonderful material to play, he makes his own job easier. He just has to get in there and shoot it. These actors are like hungry people suddenly given food. They seem invested, heart and soul. That’s why the cartoon surface is just one way to watch the film. If you really look into the eyes of The Bride, or Hattori Hanzo, or Vernita Green, or O-Ren Ishii, you see something deeper, something real. This is a cartoon the way THE GOOD, THE BAD, & THE UGLY was a cartoon... myth written in big splashes of color and character and violence and simple motivations with complicated outcomes.
I like the chronology of the film. I think it’s earned in the film’s final moment, when Hattori Hanzo warns, “Revenge is never a straight line. It is a forest. And you can get lost in it.” The Bride seems to have become unstuck in time, and like Terrance Stamp in THE LIMEY, she is meditating on what she has done, what she has become, and where she may be going. This whole first film is a set-up, a precursor to the big show. The last line of this movie is such a brutal, grim suckerpunch that I was shocked he went for it. That’s a cliffhanger. That’s a line to send you reeling out into the lobby, already hungry for the rest of the story. When he shatters the conventional chronology of his films, he does so for effect, not just because it’s “cool.” PULP FICTION, if told in order, would have a totally different impact on the viewer. As it is, the last time we see Vincent Vega and Jules, they’re walking out of that diner, each of them having just faced an epiphany, their lives changed by the events that have just transpired. Watch it told in chronological order and the end is John Travolta gunned down in a bathroom. Not really the same sort of emotional high point. The end of this film is probably the best ping-ponging through past and present I’ve seen since the love scene from OUT OF SIGHT.
Is the film violent? Is it, in fact, “the most violent American film ever made,” as the VILLAGE VOICE put it? Well, no. Not really. I mean, yeah, there are limbs that fly and heads that come off and there’s one move that just floors me (“that WAS a Hattori Hanzo blade”), but it’s certainly not the most violent film I’ve ever seen. It’s a joy for a fan of make-up effects or swordplay. I think it makes the best use of swords in battle since John Milius’s CONAN THE BARBARIAN. I found the battles exhilarating. There is some truly ugly violence in the film as well, which is as it should be. When Uma gets shot in the head at the opening of the film, it’s a graphic splash, but that’s not what makes it hurt. It’s the way she suffers leading up to that splash. It’s what she says just before the trigger is pulled. It counts. Quentin makes it count. And so people react, and they recoil, and they refuse to be disturbed by it. The way I see it, if you’re going to make a revenge movie, then there better be something that is sufficiently horrible to make me understand just why this lead character is driven to such lengths. ROBOCOP did that beautifully. Murphy’s “death” was so incredibly horrible, so sad and awful and lonely and painful that it justified anything he did when he finally caught up to Clarence Boddicker or Emil or any of the others. Here, the Bride’s fury is a righteous fury. They took her life. They took her child from her womb and killed it. The moment when she wakes up and realizes her belly is empty, flat again, and her child is long gone... Uma’s great. Broke my heart. I was willing to forgive her anything she did to these motherfuckers after that. She earns it. Quentin earns it. And so the violence is not gratuitous... it is dance, it is music... it is pure artistic expression. It is expression of emotion, and it is what we wait for. The movie builds from crescendo to crescendo, and it manages to make each new sequence immediately involving. These are classic moments, classic showdowns, classic encounters. Hattori Hanzo’s introduction in Okinawa is surprising because of the sheer warmth that Sonny Chiba projects. I didn’t know he had that side as an actor. I can’t think of another example of him onscreen that comes across so approachable, so charming. Again, Tarantino seems to have reached inside an actor and found something forgotten or unexploited and tossed it up onscreen, and it makes the first viewing of the film a discovery, or even a series of discoveries. I may have a whole different reaction the second time. In fact, I can count on it.
I loved the sequence by Production I.G., and their work here makes me positively rabid to see their new GHOST IN THE SHELL sequel and the recent TV series version as well. I thought The House Of Blue Leaves was incredible, and if I was a little frustrated by the black-and-white version of the fight, I can imagine how it’ll play even better when I get the eventual and inevitable look at the Japanese version of the film that Tarantino has talked about. For now, it’s a minor stylistic choice I disagree with, something I can get past without any hesitation. The energy to the scene is just so persuasive, so non-stop and dangerous. The conclusion to the sequence between Uma and Lucy is striking, beautiful and theatrical and somehow balances a totally artificial look with a very immediate emotional edge.
Julie Dreyfus is a very cool find for Tarantino. I’m unfamiliar with her, but she’s excellent as Sophie Fatale. Go-Go Yubari is not an actress. She’s just Go-Go Yubari. She is like Darth Maul, a villain so well realized on a visual level that an entire imagined subtext seems to erupt, full-blown, around them as you watch, no matter how little actual backstory is explained. When someone is trying to create something iconic, it frequently fails. A manufactured cult film rarely connects because the very nature of cult fans depends on them finding something that’s been misunderstood or overlooked, something they can embrace as their own. My co-writer turned to me as we walked out after the film and said, “That felt like an entire QT Fest or Butt-Numb-A-Thon all jammed into two hours. I’m exhausted.” And he’s right. That’s a great description. It’s like, there’s this cult film that you’ve been reading about for years, one of those things that played in New York in the mid-‘70s and then vanished, something that Danny Peary mentioned in CULT MOVIES 3, and there’s this one print that someone uncovered, and it’s playing at midnight at the Nuart, and you’re not even sure what version it is because there are four or five different cuts, and the one from Europe is TOTALLY fucking crazy, but whatever cut it is, who knows if this is going to screen again, and you and your friends go in a big group and get drunk and it’s one of those perfect movie nights, and the movie... it’s everything you’ve heard all those years, and it’s cooler than you imagined, and holy shit, isn’t that the dude from that one film?!
KILL BILL is like something uncovered, something found, and it works beautifully, both as a film by itself and as a tease for the next movie. It would have been great if both volumes had been in theaters at the same time. I’d go see Volume II sometimes, Volume I sometimes, and I’d organize buddies who felt up to both of them, back to back. This is going to be great on DVD, when you can take it apart, chapter by chapter, and really play with the films. The reason I love this movie the most is because it feels so generous. I won’t lie... I’ve been lucky enough to visit Quentin’s actual home movie theater. One time. And I don’t have any illusions about why it happened. I got invited along as Harry’s ride. We ended up watching a bunch of films. CAT O’NINE TAILS by Dario Argento. JADE CLAW, this insane martial arts film that I haven’t been able to find again. MR. SCARFACE, an Italian crime film with Jack Palance that was wild. And all of them were better than I expected, and Quentin was so proud of being able to screen the prints, and it was just a great evening about movies... generous. It feels like with KILL BILL, Quentin’s finally gotten back to the business of filmmaking, and he’s realized that what he wants to do more than anything is infect us all with that same crazed delirious love of movies that he has. If Volume II is anywhere near as good as Volume I, then he will have succeeded more than even he could have hoped.
And even though I haven’t seen INTOLERABLE CRUELTY or SCHOOL OF ROCK or even (don’t kill me) AMERICAN SPLENDOR yet, I’m going back to KILL BILL on Wednesday night. My dad’s in town, and I want to take him. He’s the one who introduced me to Leone and Carradine and kung-fu movies over the years, the one who loved those things to begin with, and I want to see if Quentin’s crazy cocktail makes him as movie drunk as it made me. Isn’t that the best recommendation you can give a movie? Dragging someone else back to see it again? If so, this one gets my highest rating.
"Moriarty" out.
