Kill Bill - Vol. 1

Rating:
Summary: One Half of a Deliriously Over-the-Top Experience
Review: "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" is not in the same league as "Reservoir Dogs", "Pulp Fiction" or even "Jackie Brown", and I don't think it was meant to be. It's intentionally campy, intentionally B-grade, intentionally poor in dialogue and rich in action. It's entertainment, nothing more. So was it entertaining? Yeah, pretty much. There were some slow parts, to be sure, but the action was well choreographed, expertly directed and deliriously over-the-top.

There is plenty of blood and severed body parts, but it's done in such an extravagant way that it comes off as comical rather than horrific. I have every confidence that Tarantino did this intentionally. He knows how to spill blood realistically, but in "Kill Bill" it sprays and showers like water fountains. You are supposed to laugh, so go ahead. Smile. Have fun!

The better one's appreciation for grind-house cinema of the 1970's - specifically Shaw Brothers kung fu flicks - the better one will enjoy this movie, as it is obviously an homage to these films. The film also references spaghetti westerns and samurai flicks, but in a less obvious way. "Kill Bill, Vol. 1" may equal or surpass many Shaw Brothers kung fu flicks, but it's definitely not in the same league as Sergio Leone and Akira Kurosawa - and it doesn't try to be. The film doesn't take itself seriously so neither should you.

The film is at its best when it focuses on O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), queen of the Tokyo underworld. O-Ren is the only character that Tarantino made any effort to flesh out, and she's the only character I really felt any emotions for. Everyone else is just an icon, and that includes The Bride, the main character. I think if the film had been about O-Ren instead of The Bride (Uma Thurman) it would have been much more fulfilling.

Despite a few slow parts, the movie's biggest flaw is the fact that it's been divided in two when it really should've been one whole movie. Knowing this ahead of time, I was still royally disappointed. I expected the first half to feel complete, but it felt like what it was: only half of a movie. Tarantino should've hired an editor, made a single 2.5-hour movie instead of two 1.5 hour movies, then released a double-disk DVD with deleted scenes. Hopefully moviegoers will make a stand against this type of practice so it doesn't become the norm.

For martial artists fanatics, action junkies and rabid fans of Quentin Tarantino, this movie is a must-see. The question is: should you see it in the theater and pay double the price for one movie, or just wait until the whole thing comes out on DVD? I'd recommend the latter.

Rating:
Summary: Kill Bill, Volume 1-Tarantino Does It Again
Review: Kill Bill, Volume 1, Quentin Tarantino's first film in six years is nothing short of spectacular. It's outrageous, ingenious, funny and wildly inventive as well as exceptionally bloody.
The film's premise is simple enough though, Uma Thurman plays the Bride who is out for revenge after her wedding becomes a bloodbath. Her boss and ex-lover Bill (David Carridine, whose face we never see in the film) kills her. After she wakes up from a four year coma, she's out for vengeance after all the gangsters who tried to kill her including Vivica A. Fox, Michael Madsen, Lucy Liu, David Carridine and others. The fightings scenes are top-notch with well choreographed swordplay. Some might view this film as a bunch of pointless action sequences scrunched into one movie, but under Tarantino's masterful direction, it's great. He is the king of pop cinema and has remained to be. The film has been divided into two parts, so Volume 2 won't hit theatres until February 2004.
Kill Bill is rated R for Strong Bloody Violence, Language and Some Sexual Content. Kill Bill is not one for adolescent audiences, since it features extensive bloody violence including limbs, heads, etc. getting chopped off. There is also an equally bloody animated sequence. There is some vile sexual innuendo including discussion of raping a comatose women as well as other sexual references. There is also strong profanity. All in all, mainly one for 17 year olds and up. Luckily I saw this one in theatres and I recommened it to be viewed in theatres cause it's a great film and another Tarantino classic. Now playing.

Rating:
Summary: So, what was the point of it?
Review: I was asked this question after my second viewing of the film by the same guy who laughed at everything in the film, I guess you don't have to understand something to think it's funny. My reply: There is no point to the story, but I love the way he tells it. That's Kill Bill to me, and more over all of Tarantino's works.

Hyper-Stylized, gory, "lacking social value" are all things that have been said in reviews of this movie. Hyper-Stylized was also used to describe Moulin Rouge, I guess people tend to freak out when the filmmakers make it abundantly clear that this is a FILM, a story being told, not a look into a real persons life. So once we all accept the fact that Tarantino is doing whatever the F he wants then it will be a lot easier to accept the rest of the movie, so let's take a moment, and realize that we are all in fact staring at a screen in a dark room pretending we aren't getting annoyed by the guy laughing next to me, I mean us...

Gory, yeah it's pretty brutal, but I think we have seen the last of the spewing blood, It didn't start until we were put into the animated sequence, "what the hell is this?" another question by my astute cinematic colleague. By taking us into the cartoon Tarantino is setting up the over the top, realistically animated violence that would play out in this "Hyper-Stylized" version of Japan. I guess to really understand any of this you need to do what Tarantino has been doing his whole life and get into some films, animated or live action from overseas. Not like I'm expert, but if you trully want to delve deeper into the influences of the movie check out some of the films by some of the actors who made cameos in the film, like Sonny Chiba.

As for lackig social value, I guess it all has to do with what your definition of society is. After my first viewing, I proclaimed a loud to all of the offended people around me "wow that was really refreshing", the looks recieved after the comment were priceless. But I meant it. The Hollywood machine is dying, if you can't see it look at how many sequels there have been. Kill Bill, while maybe not the most complicated or socially valuable movie in the world shows the audience, and film fans like me, that there are still film makers out there that take risks, do things that piss people off, direct with innovation, etc. I guess when your in Tarantino you can do things like that.

Bottom Line: Go see this movie if you like seeing a story told in a different way, if you don't like that, I recommend Beauty and the Beast.

Rating:
Summary: Oh My God!!! Extremely Bloody!
Review: This is the most extremely bloody violence film I have ever seen before. Storyline is very simple but the resulting effects are hugely successful. Tarantino must have too much japanese Shadow Warriors (Sonny Chiba) and KungFung (David Carradine) TV series, as well as HongKong's martial arts (Gordon Liu) movies. Obviously, Kill Bill carries lots of elements from those voilence movies & animations. Chopping humen heads, arms, legs off, bleeding like a jet stream. Going for extreme bloody but in contrast, not gross at all. There're lots of fighting scenes one by one without giving you any spare time for restroom. Tarantino carefully plans to show audiences extreme violence via animation way ahead of the real people getting heads chopped off. Making sure we're all well psycholoically prepared before watching the real people heads off, arms off, and legs off when the bride swinging her samurai sword. The other great element to help & drive the atomsphere to the peak is the smart way of using various music sound tracks. Feel like watching horrible movie. Excellent result! I am definitely ready for the vol. 2 coming out next Feb! Bloody? Yeah, but extreme entertaining!

Rating:
Summary: Terrible Movie
Review: This is the worst movie I have seen all year. There is no character development just blood and guts. I am a fan of QT however this was a big disappointment after he has had a 10 year hiatus.

Rating:
Summary: OUTSTANDING...BUT NOT HIS BEST
Review: I can say that this movie was very Tarantinoish. What I mean is that Kill Bill was very out of the ordinary which is what made it such a great movie. The directing and filmography was out of this world. QT even incorporated some animation into the film to give to the story telling aspect of the film. KB is definitely not for the squimish though. There is a lot of blood, killing, heads and arms dismembered, kicking and punching...and I LOVED EVERY MINUTE OF IT. One scene was so blood filled that it was filmed in black and white! What I didn't like about this movie was that in a lot of scenes KB was waaay to slow and I was screaming to myself "Get to the point!" This might be why the film was split in two from a three hour movie to two one and a half hour movies. That aside KB gets four stars for being different, very entertaining, and giving me a vacation from usual Action flicks made up of all BLAM! and no HMM...(Not to mention a nice little suprise at the end). See this one.

Rating:
Summary: Overkill in every sense of the word imaginable
Review: If "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction" were vintage Quentin Tarantino, "Kill Bill, Volume 1" is Tarantino after an all-day crack-and-acid binge. It's a nonstop barrage of ideas, allusions, and above all, violence. The gritty urban realism of Tarantino's twin early triumphs has been replaced with a bizarre, schizophrenic revenge fantasy that reveals Tarantino's blatant fascination with Westerns and Japanese Samurai films. He throws jarring visuals (and watery blood) at you with such relentless regularity that by the end the effect has become numbing, but your eyes will probably be glued to the screen just the same.

After a brief intro, the movie opens with a brilliantly offbeat scene that shows Tarantino at his best. One moment, Uma Thurman's nameless Bride pulls up to a house and knocks on the door. The next, a woman opens up, and there's a searing flash of recognition that recalls, of all things, the Chinese pulp Kung Fu classic "The Five Fingers Of Death." And just as you're processing this, two gorgeous young women are engaging in a death-defying martial arts brawl that's interrupted when one's daughter gets home from school to find a strange woman in her house and broken glass all over the floor. Everything Tarantino is crammed into these ten or so minutes: wit, action, directorial dexterity, and out-of-left-field surprises that will floor discerning cinephiles (is that a word?).

"Kill Bill" is definitely Tarantino's starkest and rawest film (ok, I haven't seen "Jackie Brown," but there's no way it could beat "Kill Bill" in this regard), both when it's speeding along with hyperkinetic vigor and when it slows down to focus on some smaller detail. When Thurman's Bride wakes from her coma and realizes both what's happened to her and where she is, it's a truly harrowing moment in the midst of the insanity more often on display. Of course, seconds later we discover that a male nurse has been prostituting her comatose body in another one of those "What kind of mind thinks of this stuff?" scenes that Tarantino has seemingly trademarked. Moments after that, following a brutally harsh scene in the Bride's hospital room, the bloodbath is on.

"Pulp Fiction," as everyone and their brother knows by now, consisted of a series of vignettes tenuously connected by a few unifying plot threads, and "Kill Bill" takes that concept to its logical extreme. Like "Pulp Fiction," the action is out of sequence, but "Kill Bill" has an even more disjointed feel than its predecessor. On its most basic level it's a revenge fantasy, but the movie uses its underlying plot to venture into all sorts of territory befitting a filmmaking mind as scattershot as Tarantino's. Of special note is the Japanese anime chapter "The Origin Of O-Ren Ishii" revealing how Liu's character came to be a Yakuza boss in her mid-20's. Filled with equal amounts of blood and pathos, the scene may not have much to do with the plot, but it's still damn entertaining.

Of course, the most grabbing (and sure to be controversial) aspect of "Kill Bill" is the shockingly extreme nature of the violence. Whether intentionally or not, Tarantino has become a mainstream filmmaker, and mainstream cinema has rarely if ever been this bloody. Limbs and heads fly off with alarming regularity, and that's just the start; the stage-blood budget for this movie was probably more than Thurman got paid. Films like "Fight Club" or "Saving Private Ryan" occasionally use in-your-face violence to shock, or in service of a larger point, but Tarantino's motivations are clearly less serious. If anything, he's paying tribute (he likes doing that) to the more over-the-top aspects of martial-arts movies, and the brilliantly obvious use of stage blood lends a cartoonish air to the proceedings. When Liu decapitates the hapless Boss Tanaka and and his neck spews fake blood like Old Faithful, it's so outrageous that it's, well, funny.

Everything comes to a culmination in the movie's epic concluding swordfight, which makes anything in "The Matrix" seem like mere child's play. Forget for a moment any concerns about realism. Of course Uma Thurman couldn't take on a couple hundred sword-wielding Yakuza members at once, especially given the fact that no human being has the wind to kill so many people with a sword in such rapid succession. What really matters is that this scene, gratuitously graphic though it may be, is a feast for the eyes the likes of which you can scarcely imagine. It's actually somewhat refreshing to see violence on such a grand and guilt-free scale. I think the vast majority of people are drawn to such massive carnage whether they want to admit it or not, and fortunately Tarantino is only too happy to indulge our fascination. And there's even one incredibly hilarious throwaway moment that I won't divulge, but suffice to say it's pure Tarantino.

None of what I've written above is to say that this is a perfect movie, or even in the same stratospheric region as "Reservoir Dogs" or (to a lesser extent, in opinion) "Pulp Fiction." Much of the movie has a self-conscious, weird-for-the-sake-of-being-weird air, playing as much like the work of an overly earnest Tarantino impersonator as an actual Tarantino film. Some will surely be entertained by Tarantino's frequent detours, but others may well walk out of the theater asking "where was the plot?" and Tarantino's commitment to eclecticism could be taken by some for incoherence. The film also suffers from an obnoxiously overbearing soundtrack that typically did nothing but distract.

Still, "Kill Bill" is a Quentin Tarantino movie, and therefore worth seeing if only because it's different. His movies have always provided a nice middle ground for those who find mainstream movies stupid and those who find indie movies boring, and this one is no different. Few can combine a flair for esoterica so effectively with a populist instinct. In sum, volume one of this two-part saga is an enjoyable as it is intentionally trashy. Now bring on volume two!

Rating:
Summary: Nobody will want to hear it, but...
Review: This is bottom-drawer Tarantino, obviously the work of a lion at rest. Tarantino is capable as a director of magnificent things. But here, he slums and sleepwalks through a furious style melange of pop culture references that are --truthfully, now -- worn in two from overexposure. --Or at least for those who have been paying keen attention to the pop scene for the last decade or so: funkadelic 70's schlocksploitation, hong kong chopsaki with that super8 feel (with it's 'the dolly is dead, long live the zoom' bungling grasp of ambience), spaghetti western conventions (mainly extreme closeups, wildly varied object scale and in-front-of-everything music meant to elevate the thing to an abstract level of contemplation, like opera) and bright color, tilted-camera comic book-influenced cinema chic. (Forgive me if I left anything out --oh, did I mention the kitchen sink?) For a lot of people, the presence of these references in and of themselves will guarantee Big Fun. For the aforesaid paying-attention, though, it is likely to be a patience-taxing, been-there-done-that experience. Kill Bill Vol.1 is precisely as stimulating and rewarding as one of the Flint movies from the 60s or Batman from the same era, lacking only real nostalgia. The film will appeal to the Ed Wood Shrine camp crowd, those who love arch style and pastiche pop reference above any other value, and those who are just discovering the glories of genuinely abysmal quality asian cinema, the kind they NEVER show you in film courses.

If I count Kill Bill a cull, it is because I wanted to see Tarantino make a film about real people in real conflict, as he did in the underappreciated Jackie Brown. There was enough quirk in that film to pique the interest of all but the most jaded folk who care about outrageous style and nothing else. But there was as much heart and brain in Jackie Brown as in any twenty Hollywood films of it's year put together. It's the heart and brain part that Kill Bill totally misses.

Maybe Jackie Brown fizzled at the box office because it foiled the expectations of the formative Tarantino audience who came to him through Pulp Fiction, and who were lead to believe he was about one thing from that film's more over-the-top scenes. I think it is this part of his audience that still limits him in a negative way, and it's a pity to see him dancing to please them. Tarantino is deep enough to be any one of several things as a film maker, and is not --or should not allow himself to be-- so easily defined by a popular crowd's junk-food level prejudices. He is a victim of the popular concept of canned style as marketable commodity, the same as Hitchcock was for a very long time.

Next time out, Quentin...

Rating:
Summary: The Wrath of Uma...
Review: You sit in a darkened theater. Suddenly, funky, retro graphics tell you the feature presentation is about to begin. Then, we see the words, "Revenge is a dish best served cold." There is a beat and it is inevitably followed by the caption "Old Kligon Proverb."

Thank you Quentin Tarantino (and Ricardo Mantalban) for that! As soon as we see it, we know that Kill Bill is going to be a fun movie, made for geeks who love fun movies. It carries directly in the tradition of Asian martial arts movies, but it takes more from Japan than it does from Hong Kong. Tarantino obviously has seen the Lone Wolf and Cub and Zatoichi films. There is a lot of swordplay with katanas. Just like in the Japanese films, the plot is "an unstoppable swordfighter who has this adventure..." Uma kicks butt, taking on dozens of opponents at a time. As in the Japanese films, every time she slashes someone, she hits an artery and the blood GUSHES out.

This is a very gory film, so be warned. It is also a heck of a lot of fun. There isn't that much story and there certainly is no closure (for that we have to wait for Kill Bill Volume 2). However, QT once again demonstrates what a natural born filmmaker he is. He uses every trick in the book to make this stereotyped genre into something rather memorable.

Rating:
Summary: Hungry for more
Review: O.K for any of who have seen QT movies before you know what you are getting. For any other I will attempt to explain. This movie is violent, it is bloody, it is gory. There is also action, humor and my own personal favorite an Anti-hero and villans you love to hate. In spite of everything that makes you want to scream "WHAT THE HECK!!" in the end somehow it all makes sense. This one of those movies you have to go see a second like to fully understand it all. In my case it made much more sense the second time through.

The Acting was great David Kariden proves that he can make both an excellent villan and a great wandering Chinese holy man. I also liked the character of Black Mommba and Cotton mouth. This is not your typical action movie, it is more like live action Annime and it will inspire a lot of knock offs. I think it is truly the start of a new trend in movies. Go see it you will see what I mean.