Kill Bill, vol.1 - To Be Continued...

my rating: undecided / Nathan's rating:

OK, first a confession... one which will certainly sabotage my credentials as a cinéaste: I've never seen a film by Quentin Tarantino until now. Not even Pulp Fiction. So all I know about his prior work is through the filter of the "Tarantino-esque" bits I've seen in other people's work over the past decade.

Second, I want to get this somewhat superficial observation out of the way: that we seem to be experiencing something of a renaissance of The Serial. Kill Bill turned out to be too long for a single screening, so Tarantino split it into two parts, to be released several months apart. Not unlike the sequel to The Matrix: filmed in one go, then released as Reloaded and Revolutions, again several months apart. And not altogether different from The Lord of the Rings, a single epic film released in three annual installments. (It's tempting to include the Harry Potter films or other pre-planned sequel movies in this list, but the better term for this is a Series, not a Serial, since each film tells a distinct story. Furthermore, the delays between installments are longer, dictated by production time, not marketing.)

But what about Kill Bill vol.1? I'm limited in what I can say about it because it really did "end" in serial fashion: with no resolution. OK, Tarantino didn't stop it in the middle of a scene, and even waited until the end of a chapter before cutting to the credits. But there's too much missing from the story to comment meaningfully on it.

But what we have so far is either a work of genius, or insanity, or both. In some ways, it's a parody of old action-movie genres. But it's not a "spoof", which makes obvious fun of its source material with the actors nearly winking at the camera. Tarantino has his actors play it all very straight, with a gruesome seriousness. Absurdities like firehose-gushing wounds share frames with tense drama about honor and revenge. The script contains silly Star Trek jokes on the same page as edgy hyperviolent exposition.

Tarantino is known (even by me) for his cinematic innovation, and here he pulls out a bunch of tricks. Each scenes is done in its own style, including a furniture-shattering knife fight in a suburban home, a hyperdramatic Japanese anime murder sequence, a black-and-white gymnasium-sized sword fight featuring a horde of minions, and a duel in a moonlit Japanese garden in the snow. I expect some kind of cowboy/western fight scene, and a dark urban street scene in vol.2.

Nathan was unimpressed. Although he claimed to understand the jokes (he cited the two Trek references), he didn't feel he really "got" them. He just didn't laugh when other people (including me) did. And I can see his point: it wasn't really all that funny. Especially if you're used to have a laugh track. I still left the cinema grinning, though.

One thing it definitely is is violent. A substantial percentage of the movie consists of fight scenes. There's blood... a lot of blood. Often so much as to render the scenes absurd. Which is presumably the idea. The fact that so much of it went clearly over the top meant that I could laugh with the director rather than sneer and laugh at him. Since fight scenes tend to bore me otherwise, this was a welcome change of pace.

Kill Bill is probably going to go down in cinema history as another creative masterpiece by Tarantino. It may very well be just that. But at this point I'm left trying to decide whether it's a 4-star work of genius, or just a 2-star piece of incoherent pretentiousness.