Kill Bill Part I

The new film (or part-of-a-film) by Tarantino has caused a bit of controversy lately, perhaps most bombastically in this bizarrely antisemitic Gregg Easterbrook freakout. I thought I should give my take on it. Unlike Easterbrook, I'm not going to blame the Jews.

I was ambivalent about the prospect of this film. There is something to recommend each of the movies Tarantino had directed before. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction both had clever dialogue and were fairly enjoyable. I remember enjoying Jackie Brown as well, but I suspect that has something to do with the fact that it's an the film translation of an Elmore Leonard movie. But I've always had serious problems with his movies. They reminded me of the precocious children. They seemed to assert cleverness in place of story and characters, and to be full of themselves. To toss out film and pop culture references, expecting their audience to pat itself on the back for "getting it."

It turns out I got pretty much what I expected, if a bit worse. Worse in that the dialogue which had rambled comfortably in his earlier films was stilted. The early exchange between Uma Thurman and Vivica Fox's characters, in particular, with its gratuitous and strange use of the word "bitch," felt awkward and forced. Uma's ridiculous stolen car and the fact that its owner had raped her comatose body and pimped it out for $75 bucks a go was also excessive. Instead of garnering sympathy for Uma's character, its sheer unbelievability tore a hole in my suspension of disbelief. That's cool if you're trying to make a post-structuralist media critic's point for him, but I came to see an entertainment. If Tarantino was trying to create a Breaking the Waves-type debased heroine, that's one thing, but that didn't work, tonally, with this film.

The much-ballyhooed violence in the film was, indeed, extreme. Dispatching of several dozen Kato-masked yakuza by samurai sword is bound to be bloody. Unlike Easterbrook, whose moralistic view of screen violence seems to come straight out of Joe Lieberman's playbook, I don't think this is, in and of itself, a problem. Violence, even ultraviolence, can be interesting in a film. In the early films of Sam Raimi and Peter Jackson, violence is treated in a cartoonish gag fashion. The end result does not condone real world violence- it's light-hearted and clearly unreal. Anyone who thinks that type of violence fueled Columbine or any such rampage killing has a pitiful view of human capacity for judgment. Violence in movies can be unredeemable and toxic. The bloodlust of The Patriot and the recent Get Carter remake come to mind- I'm talking about skewed cathartic violence that justifies its love of disproportionate carnage with trumped up retributive justice. Tarantino's violence fit in neither of these categories. While the violence was self-consciously filmic, it was rushed and only occasionally formally interesting, despite a fervid effort to be so.

The violence in the film's mock balletic swordfight scenes was at the very least more enjoyable than the "anime" sequence. Looking like an ugly Derek Hess poster come to life, this animated interlude was grisly, melodramatic and ulitimately sort of rote. Kind of like the movie in full, really.

I got the feeling that this movie could have worked, but it didn't know what it wanted to be. Between the the cheezy pomo evocation of Chinese chop-socky and Japanese styles, a typically oh-so-shocking hardboiled comic book plot, and vacant, stilted performances by its actors, this film lost its way. This film also suffers from the typically shortsighted decision on the part of the studios to cut it in two. For now, I'm giving this film the benefit of the doubt that it would have worked better as a unified whole.

For now, I'm giving this sucka **. Kind of an interesting ride.