Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Saturday, October 11, 2003 Kill Bill, Vol. I, is less like a movie and more like a meal. It's almost two full hours of visual and aural stimulation, and it is a film geek's wet dream. Of course, that film geek is Quentin Tarantino. In an interview over at MSNBC, Tarantino says: All I can say is, if I went and saw Kill Bill; I wouldn't be able to even think about seeing another movie until I saw Kill Bill again. I'd feel like, "That's a movie like sex. That's a movie like drugs, you know? I can't even think of another girl until I've had another piece of that pussy. I've got to get high on that drug again, like, tomorrow.How this top-notch-designer drug--designed for a clientele of one--will set with the rest of us, there will apparently be a lot of variation. Hayden, a cool cat I know from CE who sat behind me, said, "I wasn't that impressed. It's incredibly derivative. I'm glad they broke it in two parts, though." Justin, Edi's brother, said as we were heading back into the car, "The story didn't engage me at all, but everything else did." And Edi seemed to enjoy it, but said, "That felt like a movie broken into two parts. That wasn't a full movie." Justin probably offered the best oblique critique of the movie when he said of Tarantino, "I bet that guy has a great apartment." Kill Bill is a revenge story where Uma Thurman, playing The Bride, seeks revenge on the her ex-comrades who killed her husband, her child, and put her in a coma for four years. In KB(Vol. I), The Bride is less a character as a revenant, something like the Clint Eastwood character in High Plains Drifter, a fierce stare and a hunger for vengeance. Thus, the first part of Kill Bill is a ferocious, enormous beast, like a dinosaur, propelled by a story as dim and as driven as a dinosaur brain, as slight as a tiny twitch in the basal ganglia. A dinosaur, an apartment, a meal--five full courses of rampage and over-saturation, in which Tarantino not only has the movie open with an announcement that it's filmed in ShawScope but also a vertiginous "And Now Our Feature Presentation" intro straight from a Times Square grindhouse. It has a Tokyo beautifully rendered in deliciously fake miniature, an anime sequence set to Spaghetti Western music, a banana-yellow truck with "Pussy Wagon" painted on the back, Sonny Chiba as a retired swordmaker turned sushi chef, the Green Hornet theme song, a japanese school girl wielding guilltoine, and Darryl Hannah, wearing the eyepatch from Switchblade Sisters, whistling a Bernard Hermann theme. All of these things, like the tiny arms of a T.Rex, appear to lack little use other than the resultant delight of the viewer. More than any movie I can think of since, I dunno, Godard's Band A Parte, Kill Bill, Vol. I is the post-modern toybox opened wide explicitly to delight and excite the senses. And its very success in this area point to its failure: it's KB(Vol. I) that finally made me understand the connection between the sensualist and the fascist. A tribute to his beloved exploitation films and their international scope--Shaw Brothers Kung Fu flicks, Japanese samurai movies, Italian spaghetti westerns and the unflinching baseness of blaxploitation films--Kill Bill (v.1) tries to capture all of these movies at once (Again, from the MSNBC interview: "I told [cinematographer] Bob Richardson, 'Look, I want each reel to play like it's a reel from a different movie, all right? You take this reel from Death Rides a Horse, and this reel from Zatoichi's Revenge and then that reel from a Shaw Brothers film. We didn't need one look to bring the movie together. What will bring the movie together is one voice; my voice, my personality;and Uma's image, all right?"), a sweep of incorrigible ambition and ultimate fascism. Exploitation movies, done on the cheap and with little to offer the viewer other than the chance to see what they've never seen before, ultimately can never show everything the moviemakers or the audience can want. They simply don't have the budget or the means. And the best exploitation movies use this limitation to their advantage--leaving scenes unseen and lines unsaid to grow in the viewer's mind. You don't know how the family in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre got so fucked up. You don't know what force powers The Shade in Halloween, or why civilization has fallen in Switchblade Sisters, or who's behind the gang in Assault on Precinct 13. And in the rich alluvial earth of the unknown, the imagination is allowed to take root and, should it choose, grow. But in Kill Bill, you're not allowed to wonder about O'Ren Ishii's origin--you're shown it. You're not allowed to wonder why The Bride hates Julie Dreyfus' character, you get to see it. You get to know what happened to The Bride while she was in the coma, you get to know what the policemen who find the massacre in the church say, you get to know why The Bride was allowed to live. The only questions you might have are for things I suspect Tarantino will answer in Volume 2. But otherwise, Tarantino has the budget and the ambition to show you everything. The endless jets of arterial spray, the beheadings and eye-gougings and ankle-severings--that's one thing. But this inability to let anything go unseen bleeds into every bit of Kill Bill, and leaves the imagination strangely stunted and inert. Such attempts to shut down the imagination are the province of fascism, where the imagination is always an enemy, because it allows the self, time and again, to break away from state. Tarantino wants the audience to know what it feels like for him to watch a movie--where nothing exists but the movie, where your eyes don't move from the screen for a second, where the mind is quieted under pure sensation, and the eye sees every detail, the body twitches under every blow and the mouth laughs at every crudity. This, Tarantino seems to be saying, is what it's like to love film if you're Quentin Tarantino. But that knowledge comes at a cost, one that many viewers may not care to pay (or, for that matter, pay twice). You might feel a little too oversaturated to be cranky at the end of Kill Bill (v.1), but you might find yourself withholding your affection for the film; I think because your imagination, like someone who's sat next to an entertaining party guest who won't shut up and has no interest, ultimately, in what anyone else has to say, is going to come out of Kill Bill feeling slightly cramped and jostled, tired and sore for being continually elbowed, but otherwise unacknowledged. I don't think many people will feel they "need" to see Part II, because need grows from the imagination, something tied to, but stronger than, mere pleasure. People might go see Part II, just like they might return to a restaurant that seved them a good meal. Don't get me wrong--I enjoyed Kill Bill, just as I enjoyed Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian, a book similarly ambitious and breathtaking and ersatz. If ntohing else, Tarantino knows how to use Uma Thurman as an actress as no other director does, and her strange mix of classic beauty, actorly ambition and modern self-consciousness, which trips her up in nearly everything else she does serves her to excellent effect here. The Bride is a creature of rage, and her pain feels real enough to keep the viewer grounded in the movie no matter how cipherous the character actually is. But it's the way she moves, the way she looks in her yellow jump suit, with a sword in one hand and blood spatters across her face and chest, that propulses Kill Bill from thrill to thrill. You'd never believe a blonde girl in a track suit would be an even remotely convincing Bruce Lee imitator, but Thurman captures not the air of genuine threat Lee used to generate (no one, I think, will ever be able to capture that air) but she does get the genuine charisma Lee produced in such situations. As a meal, as a well-decorated apartment, as a love letter to Thurman and as a strange thudding beast misplaced in time, Kill Bill Volume I is a success, at least to me. Like Tarantino, I want to go see it again, and probably would be at it now if it had opened yet. But as a movie, Kill Bill is bloated it totters on the verge of being a burden. It is so over-abundant it had no choice but to submit to a Procrustean solution to get released, and, from its tottering girth, if you climb to its peak and look to the horizon, you can see what may well be the end of cinema, cinema fading like the setting sun into the many folds of the movie's extravagant obesity. posted by Jeff Lester | 9:40 AM | |
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