Kill Bill puts a smile on my face. It's so intelligent. It's so vaccuous. It's a gratuitous exercise in pure style. The pacing is exquisite, the execution flawless. And it's so impassioned, so much a work of love.
Quentin and Jean-Luc up a tree- K, i, s, s, i, n, g.
And here's a Hollywood action movie without a single explosion in it. The way to get an audience excited is not to hit them and hit them and hit them in the face, but to keep them waiting.
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Date: 2004-11-06 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2004-11-06 01:44 pm (UTC)I like it how they love one another. They love one another even as they fight to the death.
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Date: 2004-11-06 12:51 pm (UTC)Have you seen Kill Bill 2?
I'd never seen the first movie, but I thought the second one had, oddly, a Zen feel to it.
The first sequence is beautiful and surreal.
The second is thrilling.
You'll find yourself (I promise) overwhelmed at least once, and after you see this movie, you'll know exactly when.
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Date: 2004-11-06 01:42 pm (UTC)This was me catching up with part 1.
It is violent, but- how can I put this- it's a stylised violence. Limbs and head are chopped off and the blood spurts in fountains. It's like the violence in a fairy-story.
Oddly enough- considering all the killing- I found it wonderfully life-affirming. It's a joyous film
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Date: 2004-11-06 11:43 pm (UTC)I loved this film (and even the second installment, despite the excessive narrative exposition of the second one), and not only because I am a complete sucker for films with strong female characters. In a course on film theory I once took in college, I learned that the directors of the American westerns and those of the kung fu films borrowed heavily from each other. What I found really exciting about "Kill Bill" was that Tarantino seemed to be illustrating how these two genres informed each other.
I think he did a brilliant job. (But then again, I've kind of always been a Tarantino fan; he pays homage to directors who've come before him, while putting his own individual "stamp" on whichever of their techniques he tries. I think he's brilliant for that.)
no subject
Date: 2004-11-07 09:57 am (UTC)It's such a pleasure to feel you're in the hands of a director who knows exactly what he is doing. Tarantino makes most of the competition look pedestrian.
Now I want to see the two halves reunited in a director's cut.