A Review from
L.A. City Beat
‘Bill’ the Killer Thriller
by Andy Klein
It’s been 11 years since Quentin Tarantino got famous with his debut film Reservoir Dogs and nine years since he got really, really famous for Pulp Fiction. When the former came out, I wrote (as a mild negative in a generally positive review), “In many ways, Reservoir Dogs feels like a film student’s debut, based more on old movies than on life itself … .”
While Kill Bill Vol. 1 certainly doesn’t feel like “a film student’s debut,” it is most certainly based more on old movies than on life itself – unabashedly so, gloriously so, entertainingly so. It’s a tribute to and pastiche of the genre films of the ’70s (spilling over the ends into the ’60s and ’80s). For once, the description in the press notes is exactly on the money: “an homage and a reimagining of the genre films that Quentin Tarantino has seen and loved: spaghetti westerns, Chinese martial arts films, Japanese samurai movies as well as anime. Put simply, Tarantino describes the [Kill Bill] movies as a ‘duck press’ of all the grindhouse cinema he’s absorbed over the past 35 years.”
It was late in the game that Tarantino and Miramax decided to release the movie in two parts – the second due out next February – but Vol. 1 feels more satisfying and self-contained than this year’s other half-movie, The Matrix Reloaded. Yes, the heroine is only halfway along on her mission at the movie’s conclusion, but the episodic nature of the story made it easy to find a natural cutoff point.
That story is very simple, constructed of iconic riffs from a million other places. Uma Thurman plays a character known only as The Bride (a` la Clint Eastwood’s The Man with No Name). Once a member of the elite Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (a.k.a. the DiVAS), The Bride tries to retire and get married, prompting her boss (and erstwhile lover) Bill (David Carradine) to dispatch the rest of her cohorts to, in the other sense of the word, dispatch The Bride and her entire wedding party.
It’s a slaughter, but miraculously The Bride survives, lapses into a coma, and wakes up years later with only one thing on her mind – revenge. She makes up a checklist of the people she must take vengeance on: O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), Budd (Michael Madsen), Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) … and, of course, Bill.
Tarantino may have copped the basic notion from Cornell Woolrich’s The Bride Wore Black or the Truffaut film version of that book or Toshiya Fujita’s 1973 Lady Snowblood (recently remade as The Princess Blade) or any one of a zillion movies, be they bridal revenge or just female revenge or just revenge. It’s a variation on a classic concept that long predates martial-arts films and westerns, and probably predates even The Count of Monte Cristo.
Of course, it’s not in Tarantino’s blood to tell a simple story in a simple way, so, as in his other films, he has scrambled the temporal order. The film is divided into five chapters, and it’s initially confusing when we see the title card “Chapter One: 2.” until we realize that “1.” on The Bride’s list has already been confronted. Tarantino just doesn’t want to show us that scene right now, so he starts at a later point in time and backtracks.
That’s just one of the ways Tarantino puts his own stamp on this familiar material. While you don’t have to recognize a single reference to enjoy the movie, the very nature of the film also makes it a parlor game for hardcore film geeks: Oooo, is that strikingly designed shot from Hideo Gosha or Seijun Suzuki? … There’s a plot element from Once Upon a Time in the West … . That fight concept is from King Hu … . Wait a minute, what is an early Brian De Palma scene doing here???
There will doubtless be some complaints – particularly from really hardcore film geeks – about how derivative the film is. But one might as well complain about A Fistful of Dollars being ripped off from Yojimbo or about Yojimbo being more than a little inspired by Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. When Leone transplanted Kurosawa’s script rather faithfully to the American West, he automatically made it something different, even ignoring for the moment the differences wrought by Leone’s style.
Tarantino has jammed together so many disparate genres and sensibilities that he has transformed his sources even more strikingly. Very early on, you get what might sound like curiously stilted dialogue between The Bride and another character in the kitchen of a middle-class Pasadena house. Now, even his detractors would probably concede that Tarantino knows how to write appropriately idiomatic dialogue – hell, Pulp Fiction contributed more phrases to the language than any other film of the last 20 years – so you wonder why, and then you realize: Since this is essentially a confrontation of honor as in swordplay/samurai/kung-fu movies, the dialogue is written partly in the locutions of two warriors squaring off in a movie about 16th-century Japan. The dissonance is enlightening and … well … cool.
Likewise, the juxtaposition of music and image is often unexpected enough to create new moods and meanings – flamenco music for a samurai fight, for instance. Tarantino has always had a clever and eclectic ear for found music; none of his earlier films had a newly composed score. While Kill Bill does have a soundtrack credit to the RZA, his contribution – in this first installment, at least – is minimal. Instead we get a blend of spaghetti-western music from Luis Bacalov and Ennio Morricone, blaxploitation soundtracks from Isaac Hayes, American and Japanese pop, part of the theme from Ironsides, and even a great track from, I kid you not, Zamfir, Master of the Pan Flute.
Kill Bill Vol. 1 is also likely to come under fire for its extreme violence. Most of it is so cartoonishly over the top that it’s not real enough to be actually disturbing, particularly during the final big fight scene – The Bride against The Crazy 88 (of whom there are actually about three dozen) – where heads and limbs get sliced off, generally resulting in a firehose-like discharge of more blood than a human body could possibly hold.
But the squeamish should be warned that there are some wince-inducing moments, most of which have less onscreen gore but are made to feel more violent through sound-effects editing. Yet other scenes are more grueling because they have genuine emotional resonance – starting with the very first shot and continuing notably with an interpolated anime sequence. Some people also may not find the river-of-blood approach in the second half to be quite as amusing as I did.
This is simply a great “movie movie.” It makes no attempts at realism or at deep meaning. But, besides being a fabulous thrill ride, it does still have a particular kind of emotional richness. Like the genres from which it takes its cues – like classical Greek drama, for that matter – its emotions are purified, simplified, and heightened rather than realistic. It may take place in an unreal world, but the basic emotional elements couldn’t be more real.
Kill Bill Vol. 1. Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Based on the character of “The Bride,” created by Q & U. Martial Arts Advisor, Yuen Wo-Ping. With Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Sonny Chiba, Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, Gordon Liu, Julie Dreyfus, Chiaki Kuriyama, and David Carradine. Citywide.
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