muvies

Kill Bill, Vol. 1

Was very excitedly awaiting this one, even refusing to watch or listen to the ubiquitous TV ads, to the amusement of my friends, but I bore their mockery, hoping to keep visual, stylistic and plot surprises as surprising as possible. I suppose you could then say that I was hoping for too much and bound to be disappointed, but I think Kill Bill, Vol. 1 was bad enough that my expectations couldn’t have been low enough.

I have always thought Quentin Tarantino was so good primarily because of the dialog he wrote. Yes, he had a good/great sense of timing, great taste and a lot of narrative clarity. But it was the way we heard our own neuroses and never-expressed curiosities and musings coming from the mouths of Armed and Dangerous Men, desperate men, men who knew the angles and had no mercy, that really hooked you into his stories. It was Steve Buscemi not wanting to be Mr. Pink. It was Samuel L. and John Travolta debating every possible way of understanding a foot massage, it was Bridget Fonda impressed with zonehead Robert Deniro for having spent a whole four years in prison. It was Robert DeNiro blowing her away on a whim because she wouldn’t stop nagging at her and he was just so damn annoyed. I could identify!

Well, Kill Bill doesn’t have much of that. When I think of it actually, all I can remember is this utterly interminable samurai swordfight scene (no explanation of why we’re in a world without handguns) which takes place in a gymnasium-sized tokyo nightclub which looks like nothing more than a Hollywood soundstage with a bunch of carpentry and faux painting nailed onto it. I’m sorry, there’s not an indoor space in Japan that large. Anyway, it’s a scene where Uma battles an absurdly numerous number of swordfighters and slices them all to bits. It’s intentionally referential, but all that’s added to the source material is a kind of burned-in quality, an oversaturation and a level of bloodiness that is so gross it makes you think of plumbing. The thing is, Tarantino doesn’t really have the whip-quick editing and choreographing skills, nor does Uma have the past-master fight wizardry, to bring the kind of energy we need to this scene. Even if it was there, there are no confrontations or ways of killing that seem especially original, and it just goes on FOREVER. We KNOW she’s going to kick all their asses and there’s not even any witty dialog, so who cares?

When Uma awakes from a coma and realizes the child that had been in her womb is dead and gone, her sobbing is so intense that we briefly care about her and what happens to her. But we step out of her inner life and into the action, and then never leave – eventually it’s like watching someone play a real cool-looking video game.

The projection was awful at the Loews Boston Common where I saw it. The top 3/20 of the picture was cut off, meaning the top of everyone’s head was touching the top of the frame, which bugged me enormously. It got kind of funny though in the scene where Uma cuts off the top of Lucy Liu’s head herself. That was the only scene where I didn’t miss anything!

When I went to complain about the projection (I was the only one in a theatre of a couple hundred to do so!), the nearest theater employee was so far away from the theatre, this being a multi-story superplex, that by the time I got back I had missed almost the entirety of the animated sequence, so maybe that means I missed the whole point of the movie because that part was so amazing. If so, I apologize.

As reviewers have said, this movie takes referentiality to a whole new level, basically aping a whole slew of grade-bad flicks, mostly 60’s and 70’s. But the problem is that very little of substance is “said” about these old genres, and there is no “life breathed into them.” Also not enough uniting them, the film felt like a bunch of “cool scenes” or what Tarantino thought would be cool scenes just kind of stiched together. The same point of tension, Uma’s desire for revenge against her old compadres, must make do for the whole film, there is no beginning or end, only a long chasy middle with no twists or reversals, and very few specific emotional ideas. Basically, the movie sucked.