The Letter K is for Kif
0-9 A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z - €5
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Long awaited and much hyped, had to check my knee-jerk monitor to make sure I wasn't being too bloody minded about
Kill Bill, Volume One
[Quentin Tarantino, 18], 21Oct03Part One, so don't go getting disappointed at the lack of closure. The vid kid's back and the six years since Jackie Brown haven't been wasted. It looks like QT has been rewinding all those musty tapes he watched during his years hiring three for $5 in Manhattan Beach because here he puts his talents and a multi-million dollar budget into creating the B-movie to end all B-movies. A splatter fest of gun-fu and samurai hocus pocus is distilled into a rich weave of a revenge movie, essentially: girl (Uma Thurman) seeks vengeance on one time associates attempt to kill her (and their success at slaying the other nine at the wedding she was attending as the bride). Some sex, many guns, many swords, decapitations, multiple limb removals, gang land bosses in an oriental setting, the list is endless; trailer trash cinema with a kick-ass budget. I don't go much on plot delineation for this kind of film, you've either seen or avoided this movie countless times in the past, but what marks it out from its antecedents is the director’s genius.
Tarantino has neatly fused essence of B-movie with a much more sophisticated art house sensibility, realising a paean to the form. That there is very little at the heart of this complex is by the way, what Tarantino achieves is a spectacle of such alluring intricacy that its true emptiness is forgotten. His mastery of form is unrivalled as he coaxes us into a world of un-policed ultra-violence and cartoon physics that draws heavily on developments in the Hong Kong action genre. Balletic and improbable slayings are fashioned from an Itchy and Scratchy aesthetic: geysers of blood; flying limbs; decapitated bowling ball heads - all set against a rich tableau of movie quotation.
Unfortunately that is all we get. Part One is a nerd-fest of unthinking action. A code of right and wrong seems to exist in this alternate universe but one built on creaking and Manichean notions of good and evil where careless murder and mutilation are legitimated as part of the revenge cycle, action predicated upon the wrong that opens the film. Viewed as another in the cycle of cartoon / video games that confronts us at the multiplex this is High Art, but taken against any other canon it is a weak and exploitative movie that lacks any true substance. Tarantino's Jackie Brown fashioned a subtle and engaging character study around its eponymous heroine facing middle life, Kill Bill Volume 1 is a disappointing waste of time, but hopefully one either to be redeemed by the forthcoming Volume 2 (Spring 2004) or something that Tarantino needs to work out of his system before he can return to more mature movie making.
see also Matrix Revolutions, The
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