October 17, 2003
By D.K. Holm
KILL BILL VOL. 1, Volume two
KILL BILL VOL. 1
[nota bene: The following review, by necessity, contains some spoilers! If you don't want to know the ending, don't read on!]
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Originally I was going to write about INTOLERABLE CRUELTY. I saw it last week and enjoyed it well enough. I'm a huge Coen Brothers fan, and I've read IC's screenplay as well as all the books on the Coens. I thought that in CRUELTY George Clooney and Catharine Zeta Jones were both funny and alluring. And I'm sure I'll see the film again and especially buy the DVD when it comes out. But as soon as the movie was over, it was out of my mind. On first viewing IC didn't have any lasting effect for me. In comic style it's more like RAISING ARIZONA than THE BIG LEBOWSKI, which is fine, but the film is also based on another screenplay, their first adaptation of someone else's work, and so comes across like an exercise, like a holding pattern until they get a project going that they really want to do (maybe they are running out of old screenplays to film — their next effort is a remake of THE LADYKILLERS).
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In any case, in the end and as deadline approached I realized that I didn't have all that much to say about INTOLERABLE CRUELTY.
There were a bunch of other screenings this week, but I missed most of them for one reason or another and in the middle of the chaos found myself still thinking about KILL BILL VOL. 1. Thus, I thought that instead of straining my brain to passionlessly write a "passionate" review of INTOLERABLE CRUELTY, which I'll catch up with on DVD, I'd return to the movie of the year.
I've now seen KILL BILL three times, and it just gets better and better. I can now add a series of notes and questions to my original review.
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Memorable moments No great movie just stops and you go on with your life. It sticks with you; its images pop into your mind like sense memories. What to "mature" viewers, who miss the days of Stanley Kramer, might seem like trivialities and empty posturing and getting all excited over insignificant moments in a cheap exploitation film seems instead to the obsessed as magic moments conjured by the movie gods. There are many, many such moments in KILL BILL. I listed a couple of them last week. Upon further reflection, I also love the way Sonny Chiba and his assistant handle the sword he has made for The Bride, and I also like the dreamy yet concentrated way she worries the handle as she looks out the window of a plane as it descends upon Tokyo. I also like the little gesture of The Bride pushing the front door shut after Vivica Fox fails to get it completely closed. There are many great shots of Uma in this film. I love the frame freeze when she first wakes up from the coma (very '70s).
The seventies By the way, Tarantino isn't the only person making '70s inflected films. Rob Zombie and half the horror film directors acknowledge that they are trying to capture that '70s essence.
Bathrooms Never go to the bathroom in a Tarantino film. You are sure to emerge maimed or dead. QT is obsessed with restrooms. In RESERVOIR DOGS, Tim Roth tells a long (and untrue) tale about running into some cops in a train station rest room. In PULP FICTION, John Travolta goes to the bathroom three times and each time he exits he finds something untoward going on (Uma overdosing, two punks robbing a diner, his own death). Even a kid in the first scene of PULP FICTION comes out of a bathroom to meet a fiery death. In KILL BILL, Julie Dreyfus goes to the potty and ends up losing a limb. I hope our director doesn't himself die on the toilet, like Elvis or Don Simpson.
Uma, D.K.; D.K., Uma For a long time I thought that Uma was the new Shelley Duvall, a ski-nosed kewpie doll who existed to make boys get crushes on her. I even saw her in person once, in a fashionable breakfast diner in Portland, Oregon, when she was shooting EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES (she was wearing a faded jean jacket and she was incredibly tall and narrow). As I did with Jeff Bridges after seeing THE BIG LEBOWSKI, I have completely changed my reaction to Thurman. I love her. She is fantastic in this film.
ALIAS Don't underestimate the influence of ALIAS on this movie. Tarantino apparently loves the show, and The Bride has some definite Garner moments.
Consistency When O-Ren and her crew enter the nightclub, you can see Uma in the distance sitting at the bar.
Inconsistency If the Bride is "killed" because she chose to leave the DIVA assassination squad, why did Bill allow O-Ren Ishii take over the Tokyo vice Yakuza and Copperhead to marry a doctor? AICN talkbacker suggests that in the anime section of the film the person killing O-Ren's father is Bill (same rings), so perhaps his allowing her to take over vice was a form of atonement.
Annotations Last week I made the mournful plaint, "I hope someone posts a "KILL BILL Annotated References" website so I can revel in what all the geeks are enjoying." Readers responded with alacrity.
As mentioned last week, the October AMERICAN CINEMATOGRAPHER makes a few points about the background of the movie.
The first annotations occur in Harry Knowles's report from the set of the film in China. Knowles had read the script and asks Tarantino a lot of questions about sources.
A reader sent the URL for a special page at Hong Kong Flix.com, which is building a fan-written KILL BILL annotation page.
My esteemed editor Chris Ryall found this interview with Tarantino, in which he walks the viewer through a lot of the references. A funny moment occurs when the interviewer mentions one movie, DEAD AND BURIED, and Tarantino says he saw it but asks what's the connection?, and the interviewer refreshes his memory about a direct quotation.
There were also a lot of citations in a talk back to an AICN review of KILL BILL. THE BRIDE WORE BLACK comes up a lot and the films are similar but Tarantino told the Japattack.com that he had never seen the movie, that, when it comes to the New wave, he was a Godardian, not a Truffautian.
The trailer lies The first trailer for the film says that in 2003 Uma Thurman will kill Bill. We now know that she won't do that until February 2004.
The following images hint at what we'll see in the next film, filled with the usual digressions: The Bride's training sequence and her showdown with Elle Driver. From the script I know that The Bride does it all herself. Except for his bathroom fixations, Tarantino doesn't believe in any Deus ex Mocking Ya.
Final note The name of the actress playing Go Go is Chiaki Kuriyama. Please try to memorize it.
NEXT TIME: A movie to be named later.
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