Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2
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Kill Bill Volumes 1 and 2 directed by Quentin Tarantino Miramax Film Corporation, 2004 The Emperor’s new clothes: volumes 1 & 2 by driving a table leg through his heart. blame Robert Redford. It’s all his fault After the two-for-one failure of Jackie Brown really. When he bailed out a small, Utah- and his acting career, Tarrantino disappeared Ibased independent film festival, the and spent a couple of years sulking, licking Sundance Film Festival was born. Under his his wounds and battling writer’s block. But guardianship, Sundance has become one of now he’s back, louder than ever, with his the most influential film festivals in the magnum opus, Kill Bill Volumes 1 & 2, world, championing the best modern based, apparently, on several drunken American and international independent film conversations between Tarrantino and Uma makers, among them the Coen Brothers and Thurman while they were filming Pulp Steven Soderbergh. And Quentin Tarantino. Fiction. Kill Bill is a sprawling martial arts epic charting the globetrotting vengeance A model of low-budget independent cinema, wrought by The Bride (Uma Thurman), a 1992’s Reservoir Dogs was fresh, vibrant, pregnant assassin, who is shot and left for funny and violent; a showcase for Tarantino’s dead on her wedding day on the orders of her pop culture sensibilities, his perverse sense of former lover and employer, Bill. Waking up humour and his cheerfully vulgar dialogue, from a coma 5 years later, The Bride is which amused and offended audiences in understandably a little bit peeved and sets out equal measure. And then there was the ear to get even with her former colleagues (Lucy scene. Elvis impersonator Michael Madsen Liu, Vivica A Fox, Michael Madsen and tortures a bound and gagged cop by dancing Daryl Hannah) and Bill (David Carradine). to a Gerry Rafferty song. And slicing off his Shot in the US, Mexico and China, and ear with a straight razor. Unfortunately, the originally conceived as one film, Tarrantino cop still has one ear left and is forced to listen and Miramax supremo Harvey Weinstein to the rest of the song. The scene was decided that the film they had was too good horrific. It was nauseating. Worse still, it has to edit down to a manageable length. So they inspired drunken men to dance to Stuck in the chopped it in two and decided to release Middle With You. The controversy Volume 1 and Volume 2 6 months apart. It’s a surrounding that scene made the film and gamble that almost pays off. gave Tarantino a reputation as a dangerous young director surfing the pop culture Time hasn’t curbed Tarantino’s magpie zeitgeist. So what if we found out later that tendencies. Taken together, the two films are the film was an unacknowledged remake (or something of a curate’s egg, veering wildly rip-off) of Hong Kong director Ringo Lam’s between surrealistic bloodletting, gritty excellent City on Fire? violence, martial arts fantasy and black comedy. With his earlier films it may have Tarantino was suddenly everywhere. been fun for film buffs to indulge in geeky Passionate, arrogant and as excitable as a fanboy reference spotting, but with Kill Bill puppy in a room full of unhumped legs, you it’s almost impossible not to spot the either loved him or you loathed him. He was deliberate and wholesale plundering of 30 and he had the world at his feet. No-one cinema. Watching Kill Bill reminded me of knew what he was going to do next. What he the Gray’s Study Notes, which have helped did next was Pulp Fiction. It jump-started so many poor students through their exams John Travolta’s failing career and made a star in the past. Kill Bill is the cinematic of Samuel L Jackson. It won him the Palme equivalent. Never seen a spaghetti western or d’Or at Cannes. It won him an Oscar for Best a Shaw Bros martial arts movie? Don’t Original Screenplay. So what if he had to worry. Tarrantino’s seen them all and he’s share it with former friend Roger Avary, cribbed the best bits for you. Elsewhere he whose story (about a boxer and his daddy’s ‘pays homage to’ (steals from) among others, gold watch) he’d filched and made the Kurosawa, Nagisa Oshima and John Ford, as backbone of his movie? well as less mainstream sources like the kitsch Japanese gangster movies of Seijun Then he lost his way a little. Despite a stellar Suzuki and cult TV shows like The Green cast, 1997’s Jackie Brown just wasn’t very Hornet. So if you’re watching Kill Bill and good and for a while it seemed that Tarrantino suddenly you experience déjà vu, do not be was more interested in his acting career than alarmed. You have seen it before. on delivering a good film. Obviously he put himself in his own movies. If you had an ego Of the two halves, I preferred Volume 1. The bigger than your gargantuan chin, you would film opens with a quite literal bang; the too. But other people started using him too, battered, bleeding Bride begs (in crisp and he made a pretty good motor-mouthed monochrome) for her life and the life of her scumbag who gets shot in the face in films as unborn child before the unseen Bill shoots diverse as Reservoir Dogs, Desperado and her in the head. Fast forward a couple of From Dusk Til Dawn. And here lies one of the years in technicolour and we’re thrown guilty pleasures of any Tarantino headlong into the pitched battle between performance. Audiences really enjoy seeing knife-wielding assassins The Bride and Tarrantino take a bullet between the eyes. Vernita Green (Vivica A Fox), one of her reflection Particularly if George Clooney follows it up former colleagues, as they demolish Green’s 564 The British Journal of General Practice, July 2004 A survival guide to later life Marion Shoard Constable Robinson, 2004 PB, 644 pp, £9.99, 1 84 119372 0 suburban home. But watch the background While there is much to enjoy in Kill Bill closely and, in a moment that’s quintessential Volume 2, it is overlong and reliant on the The past is a foreign country, but so is Tarantino, you’ll see the ominous shape of kind of tired Tarantino dialogue that was a old age, and as you enter it you feel you the school bus stop outside the house as notable, and very welcome, absence from are treading unknown territory, leaving Green’s daughter arrives home … Volume 1, and swaps the graphic but surreal your own land behind. You’ve never been bloodletting of the first film for the gritty, here before.1 In the past, I’ve always found Tarantino’s nihilistic viciousness of his earlier films. The films to be too static. Apart from his patented disjointed chapters of narrative drag, they HIS quotation sets the theme for this stylistic flourish of playing around with the lack the sheer kinetic energy of Volume 1’s helpful and practical book. The narrative structure, his films take few animated origins of O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) or Tauthor of A Survival Guide to Later chances. They’re stagey, dialogue-driven the playful humour of Sonny Chiba’s Life deals sensitively with issues such as pieces of fluff, long on quotable lines swordmaster and his sushi house, while Daryl moving house, retirement housing and the beloved by students, but shockingly light on Hannah’s one-eyed Aryan she-bitch is never selection of a care home. She includes, in character. The framing and editing are the serious threat to The Bride that Volume 1’s the latter, a guide to the quality of tea bags pedestrian. They’re flabby. They don’t move. psychotic fetishised Japanese schoolgirl and coffee used. Apparently, if both are Well, whether it’s down to Tarantino or his Gogo (Chiaki Kuriyama) proved. Nothing in cheap, then the presumption is that the action choreographer, the legendary Yuen the second film comes close to the lyricism management of the home may also scrimp Wo-Ping, Kill Bill Volume 1 moves. and beauty of the final snow garden duel on lighting, heating and ‘second helpings’. Tarantino’s direction is tight and confident. between The Bride and O-Ren Ishii which Limbs fly, swords flash, geysers of blood echoes the films of Kenji Fukasaku and The chapter ‘Adapting surroundings’ spray and the camera dances around it all Nagisa Oshima. details changes that can be made to major with almost as much energy as Thurman’s rooms and gardens. There is also an vengeful harpy. While his narrative is as The most surprising thing about Volume 2 is excellent list of gadgets and aids, including disjointed as ever, the film is lean, pared to just how good David Carradine is as stair lifts, alarms and walking aids, and the bone. Gone is the playful dialogue and Thurman’s nemesis Bill. While The Bride clever ways of funding them. Bugbears laid-back delivery of earlier films; elegaic dominates the first film, the second film such as incontinence are described, samurai sword battles replace his tense gun- belongs to Bill. An unseen menace with including suggestions of useful clothing and toting Mexican stand-offs. The film switches mixed feelings in Volume 1, he is revealed as equipment like ‘kylie sheets.’ from black and white to colour to frenetic both father figure and jealous lover to The Japanese anime and back again, climaxing Bride, whose only chance of redemption lies There is a detailed section on professional with a stylised (and gratuitously violent) in his restoration of her stolen daughter.