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Kill Bill - Vol. 1

Kill Bill - Vol. 1

List Price: $29.99
Your Price: $19.49
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: It's no Pulp Fiction
Review: I have to say that I think Tarantino is starting to lose it. . .if in fact he ever really had it. Kill Bill presents the rather hackneyed theme of a member of a special organization betrayed by said organization and now looking for revenge on everyone who wronged her. This really isn't the main problem with the movie, though. I am a tremendous Uma Thurman fan, but she is a very unconvincing character in this movie. Although she masks her lack of martial arts knowledge acceptably well, she just didn't sell me on her role of a coldblooded killer who has still held on to the humanity and compassion of a mother. I've always applauded her as an actress, but I have to strongly disagree with Tarantino's choice for this particular role.
Throughout the movie, I could see a glimmer of what I thought Tarantino was trying to achieve, but I was left feeling that he just fell short and ended up with a movie that was just plain cheesy. He keeps with his signature technique of jumping around in the timeline which I rather like. It allows the story to unfold like a thousand exciting discoveries that ultimately meld together into a complete picture. My compliments end there, though. His characters acted like they'd been created by a teenage comic book writer. The fight scenes although action packed, lacked any technical skill. As for the cinematography, it was mediocre at best. Frankly, although I tried very hard to accept this movie as a unique artistic endeavor, I ended up finding it simply ridiculous.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Visually entertaining but regretably forgettable
Review: I wanted to like this movie very badly. I had heard the good reviews and I like Tarantino's other works, so I figured this had to be a winner. Maybe my expectations were a little too high because, while I liked it, I was a little disappointed.

Hollywood loves to congratulate itself at any opportunity. As if the 300 awards shows scheduled each year aren't enough, it has to crank out movies like this. I file movies like this under the sub-category "Hollywood F*llating Itself". This movie was like a series of "in jokes" that nobody except critics, Tarantino, and a few other would truly appreciate.

So I wonder if there really is anything lurking below the surface. This is just a shell of a movie-it's a very pretty shell, but still just a shell. It is almost like the critics decided that this was a good movie b/c of the in jokes, and everybody who saw this movie says they like it because they are afraid of being left out. Movies like this come out every once in a while ('Eyes Wide Shut' being a good example).

So what you are left with is a movie that is visually entertaining but regrettably forgettable. Don't get me wrong, the violence, language, and dark nature didn't bother me at all. I liked the movie-I gave it four stars. And I loved the editing, the 'look', the style, and the delivery. I just thought the whole thing was a little empty. This film could have been legendary if the story and plot had been as immersing as it was visually stunning. Because the plot and story were so lame, I feel like this is only a part of a film (Kill Bill 2 was a little better). This is not the type of movie that I could watch over and over again. Kill Bill 1 is like cinematic cotton candy: every once in a while is okay, but making a diet out of it is unhealthy.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: An Abhorrent Film Indicative of Current Moral Decay
Review: As a hard-line, right-wing, ultra-conservative, gun-toting klansman, I expected that I would find this film to my liking. However, upon viewing this film, my thoughts regarding the perverse liberal mores of today were merely confirmed. It becomes evident, quite clearly, that Quentin Tarantino is a Democrat, something which I find quite unacceptable. I was highly disgusted by the utter lack of violence in this film, but was somewhat pleased by it. His political stances are evident, if not elucidated to a great extent, in this film. Take for example the particular scene in which the woman decides to attack the other woman; only a tree-hugging liberal would contrive such a lascivious scene. In summation, however, I would recommend this film, as it is highly entertaining and a delight for the entire family. By the way, I haven't taken a shower today.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Kill Bill, Volume 1
Review: I would have wanted to give this movie 0 stars; however since that is not possible I reluctantly give it one. This movie, i.e., Kill Bill, Volume 1 DVD ~ Uma Thurman, is offensive on so many levels. First it is very violent and portrays violence in a way that is not healthy. Second it is offensive to ones intelligence with stupid dialogue and a story line that is so inane and poorly executed that one starts to think that Tarantino has a stroke whilst writing the script. Stay away from this dog of a movie...

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Can't wait to see # 2
Review: I really enjoyed this movie and cannot wait to see the second volume. This was a great buildup of the characters in a style that can probably only be pulled off by Tarentino. Defintely my second favorite Tarentino film behind PUlp Fiction.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: stupid movie
Review: This movie will be remembered as the worst film of the year.Stupid plot,stupid dialogue,tiresome revenge theme,over the top fight scenes,revolting music,and excessive blood and violence.Please dont buy this DVD.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Tarantino does it again!
Review: If you liked Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown and Resevoir Dogs, you know you'll love Kill Bill.

Tarantino takes a stab at making the ultimate exploitation film, borrowing from as many genres as he can. Only, instead of making it exploitive, he makes it empowering. Uma Thurman is an ex-employee for a team of expert assasins, and she's hell bent on revenge for the murder of her fiance and her attempted murder. She is anything but a damsel in distress. She's a hand-to-hand combater, a samurai warrior, a master escape artist and a crafty detective. (...)If this movie isn't modern day feminism, I don't know what is.

Like any Tarantino film, this movie has brilliant, inventive cinematography, great dialogue, amazing action scenes and choregography, fantastic music and just bursting with wit and well...it's just hip.

Not for the queemish and weak-stomached. And look out-there are subtitles. But then again, if you're not the "reading type", the sheer brilliance would probably go over your head anyway.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: pure excrement from the bowels
Review: This movie is just awful! Its violent and gory,and the fight scenes and dialogue are absurd.Uma looks silly in that yellow jumpsuit,and boy is she ugly!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: repugnant gloss
Review: I love Pulp Fiction, and I possess a whole-heared admiration for Reservoir Dogs (a film utterly unappreciated for its frighteningly hard-line moral stance on its characters, who all pay in effectively repulsive ways). I own many video and DVD manifestations of those films. But Kill Bill I find repugnant.

The very first shot in the film announces Tarantino's giddy, disturbing irresponsibility: a lingering close-in of Uma Thurman bloodied, terrified, pathetic as an abused puppy, vulnerable and gored, panting out her gruesome defeat, while a smooth-talking thug spouts, off camera, his zen-a-la-slaughter thoughts on sadism. Knowing she's about to be killed, Thurman desperately--horrifyingly, to be honest--says she's carrying the guy's baby--and then we see the spray of blood behind her head. Roll titles, to tune of a hip, depressive song about a violently failed relationship.

I could readily stop taking the film so seriously, except that it's foundational premise adamantly, indignantly instructs me to take it seriously. Contemplate her last (we think) gesture, pitiably wasted on that tragically futile attempt to win mercy. My horror at her terror derives from the infinite ache that Tarantino makes her (really us, since he invented the thing to fill theaters) endure before he giggles "Psyche!" and makes his movie into the gushing cartoon it really is. If the whole film is an honorific romp through karate-dom, this opener is inexcusable. Uma's suffering is effectively real, genuinely involving, and repulsively, disgustingly, irrepresibly sadistic as a film invention for this dismissable genre. Tarntino missed that point so badly; the films he's honoring are soap-operatic, superficially involving, and radically forgettable and forgivable. They're also consistent in tone, even dreck like John Woo's Hard Target.

So why this horrifying opening? It's like spinning cotton candy on an unpicked femur. You don't start kung-fu-on-helium with a shot like that. That crucial shot contextualizes violence as something abhorrant, something we're greedy to escape, not greedy to behold. Yet Kill Bill is never, at any point, The Pianist or Platoon or even Ordinary People. It's not even Blade Runner, which values life-urge the way Uma supposedly does. It is just a d@mned sword movie, guys, but the premise Tarantino concocts to impel Uma's revenge World Tour is one that Victor Hugo and Shakespeare and Homer--h#ll, even Leone and Kurasawa, Scorcese, even De Palma--gave potent meditation to, the crushing potency of spiritual and physical agony. I fervently hope that first images, together with what Uma must face then and later, some of it on-screen, disturbed you. A presumably dead baby (sure, it's alive, Tarantino's ironically gutless bow-down to decency, but he makes us suffer our own and Uma's certainty that it's been literally cut out of her), a suffering yet taunted woman, four years of constant rape, repugnant vaseline sight-gags, the emphasis on Passion of the Christ suffering--and then, hot dog!--a plot that treats all other human flesh like hydrants to tap for their edifying blood pressure! What wretched inconsistency! But on the other hand, oh, what intertitles, what colored flood-lighting, what small-cache songs so carefully chosen that Tarantino fatuously identifies them in the subtitles! Maybe it's really not even about swords at all, but about Tarntino's CD and movie collection. Or it's Lorenzo's Oil meets Adam West. Or it's just the most indulgent, irresposible film since Pearl Harbor. Should we pity Uma for her past or envy her for those fetching track suits? I don't think Tarantino has a clue what he wants, except for an audience and a chance to work with Sonny Chiba.

In the final scene, the extended fight at the Japanese inn, the film's sound design makes the bodies sound like fruit and sponges, and the shot composition places Uma inside chambers of well-tailored flesh; the men's bodies become the mere substance walling her in, and she hacks away heedlessly. I can handle the blood sprays visually, but it gets so tedious, so uninventive. That shot when Uma's finished, when she looks over the rail and tells them to leave their limbs--what an apt metaphor for Tarantino's screenplay, an unremitting field of chortling red sameness. Many times her sword strokes assault the viewer, as she slices dudes (corpses-in-waiting) who appear between Uma and us, their backs filling the screen; WE then become Tarantino's target. The zest and piquant bliss we are presumably meant to find in these Matrix meathouse follies hardly jives with the picture of genuine suffering that started the whole movie. That opening shot is as strong an argument against the misuse of film violence as anything in Unforgiven, yet Tarantino simply changes Uma's clothes, rehabilitates her big toe, gets her a vulgar ride, and off she goes on her smiling, well-decored way. Four years of zero dignity traded for popcorn pleasures and lethal schoolgirls. From Desdemona to "follow the yellow cheese road" in a jiff!

Reviews praising the film for being feminist missed all the female suffering, all the vicious-and-then-dead females, the little girls who see their parents slaughtered, Uma's grief when she can't find her baby in her stomach, the rape, the vaseline (p-layed as a joke, of all things!), the name of the pick-up Uma has to drive, Bill's control over Uma's kid--over her motherhood--etc, etc, etc. Ume gets revenge, you say. Ok, but what kind of a person is she? I don't mind that she's a violent character, but that's all she is. She is just the violent one who wins. She is a victorous, arbitrary woman. And anyway, the opener makes us want to see her safe, not just revenged--that far lesser option.

The scene that sums it all up occurs in the suburban house, when Uma and what's-her-hiss (who cares what purposely absurd snake-name Tarantino drew out of a terrarium for her) are interrupted by the little girl. Our discomfort there--and I am sure he wants us to feel some--should be instructive. Had Tarantino actually lowered the stakes in these painful scenes, he could have made a better film.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Through A Glass, Darkly
Review: Kill Bill

Quentin Tarantino has a unique ability to create violent films that combine almost Haiku like moments of extreme mayhem with cutting humor and drama. The inevitable result is a viewer who sits magnetized for the duration and then must puzzle through a variety of simultaneous reactions to the film. In 'Kill Bill,' starring Uma Thurman as an assassin dead set on revenge when her wedding is turned into a bloodbath, Tarantino not only lives up to all expectations but develops a whole new grammar in the process.

Both killers and 'The Bride' were once a deadly team (the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad) but broken apart by Thurman's desire to retire to a more normal life. This is the first film in a series that will follow 'The Bride' as she takes on each of her tormentors, culminating in a final confrontation with Bill, their leader. For this stanza her targets are Vivica Fox and Lucy Liu.

What sets the film apart is that it is conscious of its art. While very much a lampoon of several genres (samurai, lady assassin, Yakuza, spaghetti western, etc.), Tarantino uses black and white as well as animation to set aspects of the story apart. Experiment shot angles and sudden changes of scene also build the nervous energy that marks the entire film. We shift from church to hospital to kitchen and back again like jumping jacks. One moment we are in a nightclub full of whirling killers, and the next we are in a Zen garden in mid-winter.

The result is a visual extravaganza - sudden perfectly choreographed moments that whirl by almost to quickly to absorb. The script is as terse as the visuals are complex. This is physical acting, not narrative development. Tarantino pays surprising attention to the musical work, both the scoring (flamenco samurai?) and the madcap gyrations of the 5, 6, 7, 8's who turn surfer music into a post-modern experience.

The violence, of course, is way over the top, even for Tarantino. Revenge pushes all other considerations out of the way, and I can't think of any scene that someone won't find offensive. In a sense, this is a harrowing look at aspects of our psyches that contradict our preferred view of ourselves. Tarantino allows no space to be sacred or safe. Even though the film has so much that is artistically right, one can't enjoy it without the sense that there is something terrible wrong as well.


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