Anyone seen Kill Bill yet? [merged]

[barsoomcore]

That's a pretty bold statement, bordering on bizarre.

You betcha.

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?

Yeah, pretty much.

Look, nobody's going to tell me that William Shakespeare ISN'T the greatest writer in human history. My admiration of the man's ability knows no bounds, pretty much.

But look at his greatest stories. Let's pick three that you could make a reasonable case for being the best Shakespeare plays:
Hamlet, King Lear and The Tempest. With heroes Hamlet, Lear and Prospero.

These are not sympathetic people. Now, Shakespeare's a genius, so he can do things us mere mortals cannot. He can create unsympathetic people (really look at those three characters -- they don't have single flaws, they're just BAD people. Hamlet lets Ophelia suffer and die rather than give up his pretense of kookiness. He cuts down Polonius for no reason and never even thinks twice about it. He casually sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. He dances around in graves. And all the pain and suffering of Hamlet could have been avoided if he'd either A) told the ghost to get lost, or B) just up and killed Claudius from the get-go.

Lear, likewise, is weak and petty and selfish and costs everyone around him massively. Prospero is a manipulative, cold-hearted SOB who, far from learning any big lesson, really just gets rewarded for being so. (wait, I was in the middle of a sentence here. How did that go? Oh, yeah, "He can creat unsympathetic people")) and tell stories about them that drive us to care about what happens. Even get emotionally involved.

Every time I read Lear I get to the end when he comes out carrying Cordelia and I start to cry. Every bleedin time. It's amazing. Here's this old shrivelled up whiner of a man, and by the end I'm crying over him. I don't like him any better, but there I am, suffering his pain right along with him.

But all that aside, I'm NOT saying (or didn't MEAN to say) that a story with sympathetic characters is bad. What I MEANT to say was that creating a compelling story WITHOUT using sympathetic characters was a mark of real genius. Of greater genius, let us say, than doing the same thing with sympathetic, likeable characters.

And that's different than taking an unsympathetic character and MAKING them sympathetic. What I love about Kill Bill is how QT refuses to give us even that. The Bride is no more likeable than any of the bad guys -- less so, to some degree. And yet, she's what we watch the film for. To see what she'll do next. To find out how she'll overcome this next challenge.

THAT'S storytelling.

Did that make sense?

 

[Desdichado]

Did that make sense?

Absolutely. In fact, that was a big gripe I had with the recent Count of Monte Criso remake -- they just couldn't end the movie with the protagonist as a revenge-obsessed bad-guy, like Dumas did in the book.

 

[Pielorinho]

Barsoomcore, I confess that I'm not familiar with The Tempest or with King Lear. A personal failing, I know.

That said, I personally find Hamlet sympathetic, and I think that's part of the point: he's a young guy in an untenable situation, and he flips out. Starting sympathetic, he lets his lust for revenge overtake everything else in his life. If I didn't sympathize with him in the beginning, his descent into madness/psychotic murderousness wouldn't be nearly so tragic.

And in Midsummer Night's Dream, even as you mock the whiny, self-absorbed lovers, you're rooting for them. Bottom's an ass, but aren't you happy when everything works out?

Sure, the lovers in Romeo & Juliet are full of themselves. They're teenagers, that's how they're supposed to be. I sympathize with them.

I don't think using unsympathetic characters is a mark of genius or a mark against a storyteller. It's simply one technique among many.

Daniel

 

[Desdichado]

I'd also agree with you, Daniel, and was actually logging back on to say as much -- although the characters mentioned certainly aren't "good" guys, they are at least sympathetic -- at some level, at least, we can identify with them.

 

[Pielorinho]

Looks like it's time for a group hug, then!
Daniel

 

[jdavis]

Still don't get the anime references (I'm a big anime fan too, I just wasn't all that reminded of anime when I watched it). Even the anime scene in the movie didn't remind me of anime it reminded me of 70's action movies. My like for this movie probably stems from the fact that I grew up watching the same movies he got this movie from. Papaer thin characters and intentional plot holes didn't bother me, cheesy dialog was a must and long walkingscenes where everybody tries to look cool are a staple of this kind of movie. He made a B movie with a real budget and good actors, it's all about style and cool scenes because that's what those movies were about, and it's not just martial arts films, heck get a old Eastwood movie and tell me who the hero was? Most of his characters didn't even have a name (just like "The Bride") or any kind of background, Heck get a copy of a old Charles Bronson movie, he was just mean and violent in them even if he was the good guy, and it's not like he portrayed deep characters he was always the same in every film. These are not character driven plots with lots of in depth development, these are shoot 'em up and make people go "Dirty Harry is so cool" movies. Tarantino intentionally left holes in the plot and included mistakes because that's how those movies were, he didn't write in deep character progressions because that's not what this was about, watch Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee's character is lucky to even have one paper thin dimension to him and the dialog was so outlandish it was almost too silly to actually sit through, people call it a masterpiece. It's his mimicing of the movies I watched when I was 10 that makes me like this movie so much, it's a bad movie, but it's supposed to be a bad movie it goes way out of it's way to be a bad movie, it's got that throwback cult classic type feel to it. It's made in a old style with old tools and old plots in the same places where the old movies were made (part two takes us to Mexico and includes a master of the 5 animal styles of Kung Fu, the Japanese part is basically over). This is a movie made in the movie world, it basically is a movie about a bad movie, your not supposed to suspend disbelief that this could happen in the real world your supposed to watch it as if it is in some cool movie world. It's all about style and movie history. Pulp Fiction was the same, heck the title of that movie was "Pulp Fiction" which is a term used for crap literature.

If you don't like this type of movie then you will not like this movie, If he made a homage to old Hammer horror films and you hated those films whould you like the homage? If you don't like cheesy action movies then you probably won't like Tarantino's salute to cheesy action films. They used a Godzilla set for pete's sake, it was a model of a air liner flying over a obviously fake Godzilla set, it was intended to look fake and cheap, that was the point. They had places to put your sword on the airplane and the bad guys were evil high school kids in Kano mask. Heck she wore the same costume as Bruce Lee wore in Game of Death. There was nothing original or innovative here it was a stylistic throwback to 70's B movies, if you don't like those then this is not the movie for you. Heck even if you do like those movies there is no garantee you will like his take on them but if you don't like those then I can pretty much say you won't get this movie. I liked it because it made me remeber when I was young watching Commander USA's groovy movies on Sunday afternoons in the early '80's, it made me remember staying up late to catch A Fistfull of Dollars or sneaking around my mothers back to watch Deathwish, it was action and violence and people looking cool while doing it. I love 40 foot blood sprays and people overacting their death scenes, I love people who walk cool in movies, I love movies that are so shallow I don't have to think at all to figure out what is going on. That's not to say I don't like long winded movies aimed at winning oscars or John Grisham inspired thrillers it's just that sometimes I want to see somebody cut somebody elses head off then say something off the wall, sometimes I want to see a world where everybody owns a samurai sword and people name their assassination squads after snakes, sometimes I want outlandish and silly and this movie delivered in spades.

 

[barsoomcore]

Pielorinho: What is the untenable situation that Hamlet finds himself in? That a ghost has appeared to him and claimed that his uncle murdered his father? That his uncle is now married to his mother? Oh, boo hoo. Cry me a river, Danish boy.

Hamlet's situation is untenable because Hamlet is a mean-spirited coward. The fact that we find him compelling (and I continue to submit that only by not paying attention (or through unsophisticated performances) can we truly find him SYMPATHETIC) is a tribute to the genius of Mr. Shakespeare.

It seems to me that we're basically in agreement here, possibly using different terminology. I have a very complicated and not-very-well-thought-out-at-this-time theory on the differences between sympathy, identification and the lack of neither, but I'll spare you that for now...

 

[barsoomcore]

What you COULD do to further mock me and my poorly-thought-out-theories is GO READ MY STORY HOUR!

But only if you wanted to.

Am I getting annoying yet?

 

[Pants]

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.

Actually, Roger Ebert is one of the biggest proponents of anime in the states, so I wouldn't be surprised if he's seen it.

 

[Darrin Drader]

Actually, Roger Ebert is one of the biggest proponents of anime in the states, so I wouldn't be surprised if he's seen it.

Yes, but what would Gene Siskel have to say about it?