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I'm kind of amazed that this film has avoided a savage Peruvian Death Squad style critical hatchet job so far. My thoughts on it are not organized enough to say very much, but since no one else seems to be opening up on it like a climactic Peckinpah shootout, I'll try my aim.
Yuen Wo-Ping: Totally fucking wasted. The sheer volume of the killing makes watching the damn thing a chore in the first place, and when 60% of the interest of a fight scene for me lies in the choreography, a directors insistence upon filming half of the fights in tight closeup kind of kills it for me. Also, Kill Bill is probably the most boring thing I've ever seen Yuen do. Nothing lives up to Fist of Legend in my opinion for just fucking jizz-in-your-pants awesomeness, but we're not dealing with athletically-trained actors, right? Well, he did a lot better work with Crouching Tiger.
Which Brings me to Gordon Liu. Also totally fucking wasted. Having Gordon Liu do a cameo in your kung fu tribute flick is like having Ornette Coleman sit in on kazoo with your high school woodwind ensemble. So why give such an icon this ridiculously short amount of screentime, and waste him in a few seconds of rather dull fight choreography?
Talking about dialog and character development is really fucking silly. It is a revenge play, and it does that job admirably. I do think it's interesting that all of Lucy Liu's acting (aside from her boardroom decapitation rant) is done by a bad cartoon. Considering how much time is devoted to her in the script, Oren Ishii doesn't have very much screentime of importance. Also, the obvious parallels between Oren and the Bride's quests for revenge are not even touched upon, a source of dramatic tension that really could have been exploited to great effect. I'm not asking for modernist narrative storytelling here--just take advantage of what's right there in front of you in your own god damned script, Quent.
Tons of offensively stereotyped characters. I know it's a cartoon with real people, but the amount of originality put into them takes up approximately the amount of space between one line of coke and the next, that being most likely where they were concieved. Buck who likes to Fuck? Texas boy. You know they're all a goddamn bunch of borderline necrophiliacs who live in trailerparks and do meth (which, unlike cocaine, does not make you a smarter or a better person). And he's from Huntsville, see? Where us barbarous Texans put people to death by lethal injection, for those three of you who didn't catch that scathing political broadside, hot from the benzedrine-polished decks of the S.S. Tarantino.
I don't even want to touch Vivica Fox. How she sleeps, I don't know. The women in this film are not even cartoons of women. They are the deranged abstractions of the fantasies of a B cinema-addled 12 year-old who got dropped on the head a couple times too many as an infant.
Wow. Reading back over that, Kill Bill is starting to sound kind of good.
I will say that there were moments and lines and scenes that I enjoyed. Boy's got skills, when he stops to think about things. Darryl Hanna's split screen assasination attempt in the hospital was a very special piece of filmmaking. The soundtrack was super hot. "That tall drink of cocksucker ain't dead" was almost witty in context, as was the array of sunglasses of the dash of the sherriff's car. The Seijun Suzuki feel of the entry into Tokyo was nice, if not really revolutionary. I feel like I know what Tarantino was trying to do here. I would have really loved to see the movie that he thinks this is, because I love the same filmic archetypes that he does. I can feel around the edges of what he was trying to create, and I think it was a really good idea. It just came out misshapen, stillborn, and dull.
And he uses way too much coke. There is no other excuse for this sort of thing. If I was snowed-in like Vermont in January when I saw this, I would have been hooting like a rabid mandrill, or some other like-minded primate. I'm sure that's what the editing room sounded like: "*snnnrrggt* OHMIGODIMSUCHAJEENYUSSSS!!" If you'd told me before that QT was just hyperactive and exciteable, I would have bought it. After seeing Kill Bill, I feel sure I know who needs a new septum for Christmas. |
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