In brief review, brevity bites:
Kill Bill, vol 1 — QT explicitly proving his action mettle with another pastiche work. A complete filmic fantasy indulgence. Dialogue so stilted and crap it’d look absurd even in text bubbles — action heroes don’t spout like this, not even in their video dreams, though the Texan hicks were a nice touch. In fact, I don’t think there was any dialogue in the true sense at all, even less dialogic causality & believability, considering the way critics rave about his ear. But as television (with frequent ad breaks) it’ll do. QT makes ten films when two or three would do. The blood gushers were hilarious. Carradine’s voice sounded garbled with drugs. QT has some thing for feet now. And though his playing with large time frames is good and glib, his complete antipathy to natural segues between sets and scenes turns KB1 into a stitching of stages. I mean, the model planes and flightpaths were fun, but there was a distinct absence of meaningful or suggestive transition throughout, glaring somehow, but that’s the point eh, complete disreality? Even the big fight scene breaks down into smaller set pieces — the silhouette version particularly effective. And the quiet scene between jousts in the snow garden, with the water pitcher tipping repetitively was magical. But the panpipes were wrong and cheesy with holes, desperately trying to reforge the link between samurai and western flicks, for idiots. A film crafted around several key songs, not the other way around. Unnecessarily excessive in its contrived pastiche. I was mentally counting the explicatory ‘Okay?’s from QT as he lays down the referential laws of cinematic homage. That is, any film that is totally dependent on the director’s comments is a piece of shit, if you need them to ‘get’ the film completely. If you want Asian Action, then go out and
WATCH Asian Action, folks. This is little more than a grandiose fetishisation of killing and slashing, done by a teenager hopped up on video references and staged action.
