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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Thursday, April 15, 2004 The Pitch: It's like my hand meets a garbage disposal! I've got that whole best of times, worst of times thing going on. I'm still hugely upset over a death in my friend Patrick's family, taxes this year were like putting a fiscal bullet in my pocketbook's brainpan, and I just found out today that despite my checking almost every day with Brian confirming that the blackline wasn't coming this week, the blackline came this week (today, in fact) and now I have to write the newsletter by, oh, Sunday.On the other side of things, I just watched a boot of Beat Takehi's Zatoichi, caught a screener of Kill Bill, Vol. 2, and pieces by Sirs Frederick Ashton and Kenneth MacMillan at the S.F. Ballet. And all of them sunk my battleship to greater and lesser degrees. Although a bit of a piss-up (okay, a lot of a piss-up, what with meta-cinematic critique going on explicitly in it), Zatoichi shows Beat at the top of his form--I can't think of a better filmmaker today in terms of framing compositions, using color and music and revealing the plasticity of narrative (maybe the Coen Brothers and maybe Lars "Von" Trier and maaaaaaybe Tarantino)--if I had to go with one of my pretentious high concept pitches it'd be "It's like Vladimir Nabokov remaking Mystery Train as a Samurai movie!" By contrast, Kill Bill, Vol. 2 would look a little skimpy but (a) I saw it first, and (b) the best actor in a Beat Takeshi movie is Beat Takeshi whereas Tarantino (at least in movies he directs) lives out his dreams of acting glory through other actors. And so, KBv2 is packed with great performances--while I don't think QT did any favors to Vivica A. Fox or Lucy Liu in part I, the rest of the Deadly Vipers Assassination Squad get to deliver knock outs; Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen and David Carradine all get the roles of their careers and are given time to run with them. Madsen, in particular, who plays a washed-up ne'er-do-well who's a cowboy bouncer samurai fuck-up who's one part lonely drunk, one part vicious sadist, owns his role. (The real killer performance, though, is the guy who gets to play the elderly Mexican pimp near the end of the flick--his flirting, dangerous banter with The Bride, highlighted by close-ups of his teetering, doped-out eyes is the most riveting piece of flashy character acting since Gary Oldman in True Romance. Who is this guy? I've seen him credited as Michael Parks, who I thought was the drawling sheriff in Vol. I (a character, and I didn't realize this until consulting IMDB, who pops up in From Dusk 'Til Dawn). If it turns out that he was both characters--which I doubt--I'll kind of crap my pants a little in shock) Ultimately, both parts of Kill Bill emerge as the world's biggest MASH note to Uma Thurman, who in KBv2 gets to play other sides to her single-minded harridan, and, by the end of the last reel, I think everyone in the audience was in love with her at least a little. Although immature and loaded with a therapist might call "issues," Kill Bill, Vol. 2 is a love letter to Uma--and to B-cinema--that proves surprisingly moving. I'm sure that, just as with Part I, I'll find myself wandering off to the theater to see it at least once or twice more when it opens. Sigh. Okay. Now I get to go do this exact sort of blabbity-blab for comic books. I'll see ya. posted by Jeff Lester | 2:58 PM | |
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