Kill Bill, Vol. 1

I’m going to keep my comments here fairly brief, as this is only the first part of a two-part story. So, briefly, first impressions of the first half of Kill Bill:

• Much butt-kicking fun.
• There is far less dialogue than you might expect from a Tarrantino film, but in this case, I can’t see it any other way.
• There’s also a very bitter, sorrowful tone to the film that is easy to overlook during the fights and general carnage, but is very present, and very important to the tone.
• Yes, it’s violent. Very violent. But two points on that:
  1. It’s Quentin Tarrantino. Did you really expect anything else?
  2. How can you take it seriously when every severed limb or head (and there are many) is apparently attached to a high-pressure firehose?
• Best line (delivered by The Bride while spanking the last living henchman — a sixteen (?) year old boy — with the flat of her katana): “This is what you get for fucking with Yakuza! Now go home to your mommy!”
• I hope that Vol. 2 gives us more of The Bride’s background. But if it doesn’t, that might not matter — in an almost zen-like way, she simply is. More background might actually detract from this.
• Using anime for O-Ren Ishii’s background: very nice touch.
• The fight scenes were deliciously over the top. Unrealistic, but enjoyably so.
• One shot in the mass battle royale towards the end — a grainy, black and white travelling shot of a spinning hatchet — was almost a mirror of a shot in the diner scene of Natural Born Killers.
• Favorite sequence (at least right now, immediately after my first viewing): the blue background silhouetted section of the battle in the restaurant.
• I know I’m not catching the majority of the references Tarrantino is making throughout the film. That’s okay, though. I’m guessing there’s enough to fill an entire book — which will probably be at your friendly neighborhood bookseller not long after Vol. 2 is released.
• This review (which I found thanks to Kalyx) may sum it up the best:

  Gratuitous in the most passionate, brutal and aesthetically exacting way, this first half of Quentin Tarantino’s blood-drenched mash note to the eclectic, disreputable genres he grooved on as a kid is a remarkably pure orchestration of imagery and attitude. The content of those magnificently moving pictures is whatever the opposite of pure might be: an endless orgy of degradation, dismemberment, cruelty and bile. The “Pulp Fiction’ auteur has ratcheted it all up into a fantasy realm, and he has a point when he claims that anybody who thinks this disturbing stuff is happening to anything like a real person is crazy — or, at least, crazier than he is.

  Still, there’s nothing wrong with avoiding “Kill Bill’ if you’re easily offended by violence to women, violence by women, violence observed by traumatized children or lots — LOTS — of violently detached body parts scattered all around the screen.

  But if you’re not like that: Man, is this movie cool.