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Message: <blockquote data-quote="barsoomcore" data-source="post: 1176139" data-attributes="member: 812">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?</blockquote>

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