Anyone seen Kill Bill yet? [merged]

[Mathew_Freeman]

What's confusing me here is why do people keep on and on saying that this film was split purely on money decisions? We've got quote after quote from Tarantino about why he split it...do you just not believe him? If you don't believe him, can you just drop it? A bunch of other people have gone and seen the film, rated it pretty well, mostly, so why keep dragging this up?

 

[Desdichado]

OK, I finally saw the film. I'm not a Tarantino fan or anything, in fact now that I've seen this, that brings my total of Tarantino movies I've seen up to a whopping... one.

Here's the deal, though. I expected it to be innovative, unique, artistic or something, based on what I've always heard about Tarantino and what I've heard about this movie.

This movie had a toilet paper thin plot, wooden characters, stilted and often poorly delivered dialogue, lots of standing around posing, exaggerated goofy gore and violence (I didn't know the human body was a fire hydrant of blood)... in short, it was an anime movie with real people. Except for that part in the middle when it just was an anime movie. It even had some of the same lame "comic relief" (the lazy assistant of Hattori Hanzo who just wants to watch soap operas all day). And it certainly had the same sense of style.

In short, I felt like I was watching an anime movie. It wasn't innovative, unique or artistic, unless you consider the fact that he used real actors instead of animation, or a spaghetti western soundtrack to be innovative, unique or artistic.

I dunno, maybe I'm just not enough of a Japanophile to "get it" but at the end of the day I disliked it for the same reasons I dislike most anime; it just wasn't very good.

 

[drnuncheon]

The Matrix Reloaded has a run-time of 138 minutes. That's 2 hours and 18 minutes. I'm assuming that Revolutions will have a similar run-time. I think that's the reason it hasn't generated the same type of controversy.

No, the reason it hasn't generated the same type of controversy is very simple: they never said at any point that it was going to be one movie. That's all. The entire furor over Kill Bill isn't because it's two movies - it's because it was initially presented as one movie. It's the change that's upsetting people.

If it had been described to the public as two movies from the get-go, 95% of the people saying "I don't want to pay twice to see one movie" would instead be saying "I can't wait until the sequel comes out."

J

 

[Jeremy]

Further commentary from the peanut gallery:

Loved the Okinawa chapter. Had fun with the guy who wouldn't bring the tea. Had fun with the verbal swordplay. Had fun with respect they granted the crafting of those swords and I love it when the good guy gets an ultimate weapon that the bad guys know and fear.

Loved the anime sequence. Favorite fight in the movie was the Chinese-American soldier brutally dealing with the mooks before being cut down.

I've always loved the anime thin red line followed by the gout of blood. So has Tarantino, that's why it's all over the place.

This movie is very much targetted at people who like this genre. I'm very glad it was split into two because that means that all the other gags and in-jokes that Tarantino wants to throw in don't get thrown on the cutting room floor along with good scenes because the execs want a specific running time.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and now have an entire other movie session to look forward to for more gags. Wuxia, Anime, bad Kung Fu, legendary katana, righteous painful vengeance, respect for the warrior way between opponents, and utter disregard for over done hollywood conventions. Yay Kill Bill!

 

[Krug]

Watched it today. Kinda liked it, but prefered Twilight Samurai which I watched recently. I guess the gore was part of the aesthetics of the movie, and it was fun tracking some of the homages, but ultimately an empty exercise.

Of course, it wasn't the most painful thing I watched today, since I was viewing game 7 of sox-yankees... ;p

 

[Henry]

One note of import - had this movie been 3 hours long, my wife, an average movie-goer by anyone's definition, would have walked out. She told me so herself. Any movie over 2 1/2 hours is too long for most movie goers, except for fans of a director/story, or if the movie is absolutely gripping. By the two hour mark, you've had quite enough of The Bride, and the fountains of blood.

Regarding the fountains of blood: They were silly, but not totally unrealistic, considering a decapitated individual would not fountain, so much as spurt. The heart, pressurizing the blood flow as it does, can shoot blood at LEAST thirty to forty feet, easily.

 

[Desdichado]

Regarding the fountains of blood: They were silly, but not totally unrealistic, considering a decapitated individual would not fountain, so much as spurt. The heart, pressurizing the blood flow as it does, can shoot blood at LEAST thirty to forty feet, easily.

Of course it is, unless the human body now contains 30-40 gallons of blood.

 

[barsoomcore]

JD: Sorry to hear you didn't enjoy it. I AM being careful in how I recommend the film -- I think it's important to see, though I don't think that everyone will like it.

I don't think it depends on liking anime, or anything very Japonesque. I have liked some anime (Akira is very cool, as is the first twenty minutes of Ninja Scroll, and I think Miyazaki's a genius, stomp down), but there's tons of crappy anime, and I approach any new product with great trepidation.

Here's a couple of reasons why I thought Kill Bill was brilliant:

Uma's performance. I know you thought it was wooden and stiff, but to me she succeeded in creating something simultaneously perposterous and realistic. I think there are moments in that film where she pulls off some incredibly precise transitions that in lesser hands would have flailed.

The lack of sympathy or identification with any of the characters. None of these people are likeable -- they're not even believable. These people don't live in our world, and I don't think for a second that QT is pretending they do (katana on airplanes, for example). Contrary to popular thought, I don't think that sympathetic characters or characters one can identify with are important parts of story-telling -- I think they're crutches bad story-tellers fall back on because they don't know any other way to engage their audience.

I loved the hard-core, balls-to-the-walls attitude of the film. Nothing was too shocking, nothing was held back. It was fun to see just how far he was going to go -- pretty far, it turns out. It made the story more gripping for me because I knew ANYTHING could happen.

Finally, I thought it created a world that was complete in itself. Not realistic, but absolutely convincing in its details. That for me is the ultimate task of a film director. All cinema takes place in an imaginary landscape that exists only in the union of the mind of the director and the mind of the audience. Mediocre directors think they have to reproduce "reality" in order to be convincing. Great directors create their own reality and bring it to the screen with such razor-sharp focus that their audiences are sucked right in and never even notice.

Pretentious? Me?

 

[Pielorinho]

Contrary to popular thought, I don't think that sympathetic characters or characters one can identify with are important parts of story-telling -- I think they're crutches bad story-tellers fall back on because they don't know any other way to engage their audience.

That's a pretty bold statement, bordering on bizarre. I dare say you'll fnd just about every storyteller from the late 1500s through the early 1950s had some sympathetic characters; were they all bad storytellers using crutches?

I agree that sympathetic characters aren't necessary, but that's a fairly recent phenomenon in Western storytelling; Shakespeare, for example, generally had heroes in his stories, and if they were flawed heroes in true Aristotelian fashion, they were generally sympathetic but for their one flaw (which may be patricide, suicide, etc.). Indeed, if your list of good storytellers contains more than half a dozen well-known names, you'll find that the list includes storytellers who have sympathetic characters.

Daniel

 

[Desdichado]

JD: Sorry to hear you didn't enjoy it. I AM being careful in how I recommend the film -- I think it's important to see, though I don't think that everyone will like it.

I should clarify... I didn't not enjoy it, I just didn't enjoy it very much and I thought it was over-rated. I don't see it as innovative, unique or particularly noteworthy or important, except maybe that he's a big name and he may very well bring this type of style to a more mainstream audience.

I don't think it depends on liking anime, or anything very Japonesque. I have liked some anime (Akira is very cool, as is the first twenty minutes of Ninja Scroll, and I think Miyazaki's a genius, stomp down), but there's tons of crappy anime, and I approach any new product with great trepidation.

No, and Roger Ebert liked it a lot, even though I doubt he's even seen Fist of the North Star for instance, which Kill Bill reminded me of strongly.

Uma's performance. I know you thought it was wooden and stiff, but to me she succeeded in creating something simultaneously perposterous and realistic. I think there are moments in that film where she pulls off some incredibly precise transitions that in lesser hands would have flailed.

I should clarify again: many of the performances were wooden or stilted, however, her's typically were not. She (and Lucy Liu) did an admirable job or making a good performance out of an awkward screenplay.

The lack of sympathy or identification with any of the characters. None of these people are likeable -- they're not even believable. These people don't live in our world, and I don't think for a second that QT is pretending they do (katana on airplanes, for example). Contrary to popular thought, I don't think that sympathetic characters or characters one can identify with are important parts of story-telling -- I think they're crutches bad story-tellers fall back on because they don't know any other way to engage their audience.

Perhaps. After all, even Stephen R. Donaldson has a fairly large following with the most unlikeable protagonist I've ever seen. To me, though, the movie would have been much better had the characters been somehow more engaging in some way or another. And even if I had really liked the movie, I think it would have been even better for engaging characters.

I loved the hard-core, balls-to-the-walls attitude of the film. Nothing was too shocking, nothing was held back. It was fun to see just how far he was going to go -- pretty far, it turns out. It made the story more gripping for me because I knew ANYTHING could happen.

Apparently the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre has that same attitude. And maybe it's because I was prepped, but I actually didn't find the violence to be all that shocking. It was way too cartoony, way to anime, for me to take it seriously and be shocked by arm removals, feet flying through the air unattached to legs,

Spoiler

Lucy Liu being scalped

or any of that. If the violence had been even a little bit realistic in terms of the the effects on the characters, it might have been shocking.

Finally, I thought it created a world that was complete in itself. Not realistic, but absolutely convincing in its details. That for me is the ultimate task of a film director. All cinema takes place in an imaginary landscape that exists only in the union of the mind of the director and the mind of the audience. Mediocre directors think they have to reproduce "reality" in order to be convincing. Great directors create their own reality and bring it to the screen with such razor-sharp focus that their audiences are sucked right in and never even notice.

Pretentious? Me?

I'll grant, QT did create a purposefully unrealistic movie and made the audience (at least some of them) accept it without a problem. Then again, so do most action movie directors. So much so, in fact, that movies that go out of their way to be realistic, such as The Hunted or S.W.A.T. are particularly noteworthy, and come across as radical stylistic expressions of the genre.