"Kill Bill" Review

[TaranT]

...But let's address "Kill Bill," which is the story of a character called The Bride (Uma Thurman), a hit woman who avenges her newlywed husband's bloody murder at the altar. The enemy is Bill, her former lover and employer and his squad of vicious killers known as the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, or DiVAS. They are played by Daryl Hannah, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox and Michael Madsen.

You know this is a movie that's going to be a flash point for all the cinema-geek-Internet-whatever writers. Tarantino is a cult figure. His every move is dissected by these 'experts.' God love them, to have the time and interest for this minutiae. Some want him to fail. Some want him to succeed. Me? I really liked "Jackie Brown," so go figure. I have not watched the special edition DVD of "Pulp Fiction" over and over in slow-motion....

I will admit I'm not a fanatic expert on the subject of samurai movies, 'grind house' pictures, spaghetti westerns or Japanese anime. (The latter all looks like "Speed Racer" to me.) Until I read the extensive press notes for "Kill Bill," I assumed a "duck press" was something served a la orange or with plum sauce. But I do know that "Kill Bill, Volume 1" is the hippest thing I've seen on screen since "Pulp Fiction."

From the opening credits (which are in Japanese) to the big finale in a place called "The House of Blue Leaves" (sorry John Guare), "Kill Bill" is full of visual knockouts. There are set piece homages to Tarantino's favorite Japanese films, which are going to be parodied and copied as slavishly as "Pulp Fiction."

It's "Crouching Tiger" and "The Matrix," mixed together and served with hot sauce. What a meal these three films will make some day at a revival house!

What surprised me most about "Kill Bill," though, was Thurman. She's had an iffy movie career, with some good stuff ("Pulp Fiction," "Dangerous Liaisons," "Hysterical Blindness") and some famously bad stuff ("Gattaca," "The Avengers," "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues").

In a way, she's perfect Tarantino material -- someone we think of as a star whose resume is littered with junk. Tarantino taps into that very insightfully. "Kill Bill" sort of marries these two ideas together for Thurman. Now she'll be a star like never before. Her performance is just stunning, a really glorious piece of physical, witty exertion.

I'll tell you more about "Kill Bill" as its release date (Oct. 10) approaches. But these were the impressions I was left with after the screening: that it rocked, that the violence and spurting blood was cartoon-like fun, that Lucy Liu was the best she's ever been.

I also thought that "Kill Bill" succeeded on every level that "Charlie's Angels" didn't. And that I really wanted to see Part II as soon as possible (I'm told it's not finished yet), but that I was happy there was a break.

Oh yeah, and one more thing: The soundtrack is simply amazing.
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(emphasis added)

It’s the most expensive exploitation movie ever made. The script took a year and a half to write. Lensing the movie extended for 50 weeks. And there are only a handful of digital effects shots in it.

The movie is KILL BILL and it’s writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited return to the big screen. Whereas audiences knew what to expect with the summer’s big guns – HULK, TERMINATOR 3: RISE OF THE MACHINES, MATRIX RELOADED and so on – KILL BILL is likely to slay moviegoers by sheer virtue of underexposure.

“I have to tell you, a lot of people know about KILL BILL and know it’s coming out,” Tarantino says. “The only thing they’ve seen is that trailer, but we put that trailer together while we were shooting the movie. There’s nothing from the second half. It’s mostly from the first half because that’s all we had done. I’m not trying to get high on my own vapors, but people don’t know what they’re going to get into.”
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If you're registered at the Cinescape online site, there is an interview with Tarantino. These are a couple of quotes that stood out:

Tarantino: I felt that whenever I had to do that (digital effects)...I figured I failed. My whole thing was if we couldn't do it on set and we couldn't do it in camera, then we can't do it. I'm just f***ing bored to tears with this CGI stuff. This is my big grindhouse movie; I'm using old techniques to get stuff across....

Tarantino: ...There's even a 10-minute anime sequence in the movie. I wrote the script for it. I don't do storyboards; I just wrote this intense script that described it. Production I.G., who did Ghost In the Shell and Blood: The Last Vampire, animated it.

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