Saw this over the weekend - very watchable and magnificently put together. And yet also completely vacant. Kill Bill = Charlie's Angels III.
i think that, itself, is a pretty superficial comparison.
in many ways, i think a better comparison is to Lola Rennt (Run, Lola, Run). both of them are often dismissed as "style-over-substance confections," but that's completely missing the point.
most "serious" movies are still recognizably descended from stage plays. the appeal revolves around the strength of dialogue, depth of characterization, etc. which is all well and good on most levels. however, it could be argued that there's a misplaced emphasis inherent in that: it's an attempt to work in a primarily visual medium but still judge things in verbal/literary terms.
both Tom Tykwer in Lola and QT in Kill Bill essentially say "fuck all that," and i think they have a good point. film, is, essentially, a sequence of images shown in rapid succession and edited in such a way as to tell a story visually. however good any serious movie with a bunch of people talking can be (and it can be very good), that form is essentially a holdover from the days of theater and fails to fully exploit or understand the nature of film. it's like taking paint, brushes, and canvas and trying to write a novel. you can do it, sure, and it may even be good, but there are so many other possibilities for painting that aren't being explored that way.
Lola and Kill Bill, to me, are examples of a different kind of movie-making, which endeavors to be serious artwork while simulataneously rejecting the traditional literary/verbal paradigm in favor of a more stripped-down, raw cinema that focuses on images and motion, while also grounding the movie in the pure Pop context which really reflects what movies are in our culture. this is not to say that they're the only examples, or the first examples, but they are both good examples.
they are both purely about image, but the whole point is that that's not bad in and of itself. on the contrary, the false notion that cinema can and should solely be judged by literary/verbal standards is the problem. this is a celebration of the image, and it's strangely overdue considering that movies are images, despite the fact that many movie-makers seem to be somewhat ashamed of that for some odd reason.
Kill Bill is a really bold, liberating release from standards which are in many ways poorly suited to a visual medium. it's visual storytelling at its finest. |
