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.

They really are screwups

To anyone who seriously thought that the poorly planned War with Iraq was another fight in the war on terror, my sorrow and pity are with you. You were wrong. You were suckered. This article would probably be worth reading.

But I will also retain my own sorrow- because I, like the many Americans who thought this war was a fool's enterprise, will still have to live with its consequences. We invaded as sovereign nation was not among our top five threats to national security. We did so with little international support or funding. Our government lied or at the very least deceived us to justify this war. This war created increased instability in a part of the world where instability is undesirable. The war "swelled the ranks" of a protean, stateless group of bloodthirsty fanatical terrorists known as al Qaeda, a group that previously murdered 3000 of our countymen. This war was and continues to be insanely expensive.

Saying this, I don't think we should just quit Iraq. Personally, I don't know what should be done. The situation is terribly complicated. As those WMD pollyannas like Rumsfeld tell us, (there's got to be sarin gas here somewhere) Iraq is a large country. It is also a divided country. The Sunni triangle is primarily Sunni, some of whom are the Baathists who keep blowing up our soldiers. The south is primarily Shiite, although there are many Shi'a in the Sunni triangle. Many of these Shi'a are devotees of the fiery apocalyptic Shiite cleric Muqtada al Sadr, who is building a shadow government to challenge the legitimacy of the CPA and who favors a Khomeini-style Muslim theocracy. The North is the quietest region of Iraq at this time, as chunks of it had not been under Baathist control in years. On the other hand, it houses a large Kurdish minority. If Iraq were to split into three sections, it is quite possible that the Kurdish north would come into conflict with Turkey. With nearly two dozen attacks on our soldiers per day, sectarian conflict, a theocratic shadow government, a hemorrhage of cash on our part, few reliable allies, overlong tours of duty for our military, etc. etc., I think the problem is clearly not that the press is too negative about Iraq.

"Intellectual" simpletons like William Kristol and Paul Wolfowitz are the problem. "Courageous" opportunists like our president are as well. Moreso than those who make policy should, the most powerful people in our government live in a world of ironclad assumptions, untainted by reality. This is confirmed daily by the administration's actions, and argued convincingly by Neal Gabler in this op-ed. And though the White House's epistemological disease is disputed (Washington Monthly has called it postmodern, Gabler calls it medieval, and Matthew Yglesias thinks it is best described as pragmatic in the Jamesian sense), there is little question that something is wrong.

sidenote: This war with Iraq was clearly been in the pipes for at least 5 years. If Ted Kennedy thinks this war was cooked up in Texas, he is clearly wrong. The Project For the New American Century has been agitating for a war with Saddam since 1998 from its offices on 17th street in DC (*). And no, the PNAC is not a lefty conspiracy, but an "educational organization" whose signatories include Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Scooter Libby, Elliot Abrams and Paul Wolfowitz. Remind me, who runs America's foreign policy?

Back to this administration's medieval, or postmodern, or pragmatic incuriousity and inflexibility- the PNACers who compelled this counterproductive war did so without a clear, well thought-out plan for the reconstruction of Iraq. They took as gospel the testimony of a con-man opportunist like Ahmad Chalabi. They misinterpreted and demogogued the statements of Hussein Kamel. They insisted, after it had been thoroughly debunked, that Mohammed Atta had met Iraqi intelligence agents in Prague. And the result is that America's foreign policy designed to keep America safe and to break the back of Islamist fanatics like Al Qaeda has merely made their work easier. Thanks, guys.

The best thing we can do is put the experts in charge. That and stop treating our allies like servants. But this administration is not going to do that, so I'm urging you to do what you can to remove these idiots from power.