Rate Kill Bill Volume 2

[Wrath of the Swarm]

While we're on the topic, I was rather disappointed in the final installment of LOTR. Fellowship did the best job of presenting a coherent story, while the later movies created plotholes when they stretched too far in including Tolkien's vision... and in some places, they made things worse by deviating from it, whereas in FOTR I thought they actually made a few improvements.

I'm sure if we polled preteen females, we'd find that Titanic is the BEST MOVIE EVER, but their opinions aren't reliable guides to quality.

[edit] Oh, yes: Kill Bill establishes everything you really need to know about the story within the movie itself. I don't think that a person who didn't know anything Christianity from outside sources would have gotten much out of Passion - and virtually nothing if the movie had been left unsubtitled.

Kill Bill presents a complete story. Passion does not.

 

[WizarDru]

She met God. And God was cut.

Damn, I forgot about that. Brilliant. The second half really got into my head. The motiviations of the characters were really beyond what I expected. The character of Budd was an amazing character study, for example. Piecing together everyone's relationships, and how they all played out, was fascinating, to me.

At the end of the day its just one murderer who murders a bunch of other murderers because they tried to murder her. She doesn't grow or evolve and certainly isn't "redeemed" at any point in the story. In fact she degenerates from the bride who wanted to put all that behind her in the wedding chapel back down to the vengeful murderer she no longer wanted to be in the first place. And she's rewarded for it with a care free drive off into the sunset.

Redemption is a touchy question, and I'm not sure if she is, or is not. She certainly does change over the course of the movie(s), as barsoomcore notes. Further, a lot of the movie(s) is steeped in martial arts lore, and that works from a different set of principles. The fight with the Crazy 88s is a much different battle than the one with Vivica Fox's character, for example. As Bill himself says (paraphrasing): "You broke the heart of a murderous bastard, and accepted the baggage that comes with that."

The whole point of some of those scenes was that Beatrix hadn't changed at Two Pines at all. Bill was right, she was play-acting...and knowing what you know later, that scene plays out completely differently. It's not mentor and servant, it's two lovers talking (with HIS baby in the mix). The result of Two Pines was that everyone's life changed. Bill changed after the Two Pines incident, and it served as the lynchpin for everyone in the story, good or ill. Remember, Bill wanted to be found. His mentor says as much, and Bill clearly isn't suprised when she shows up. Understanding Bill is, in some ways, more of what the movie is about than understanding the Bride, I think.

She won't stop being a vengeful murderer...she always was and always will be. The point was why she was doing it, and how. Notice that when Bill argues with her about Two Pines, she doesn't say "At least I'd have had Tom and B.B!" She just says B.B. It's pretty clear she didn't really even love Tom, from what I saw. He was just a cover for a disguise. I'm sure she liked him, but she still loved Bill. And note that Bill had no intention of letting her walk off into the sunset, either. He drew first, he shot first, and he was in complete control right until the end. They were both following their personal warrior codes, again returning to the asian cinema concepts. They stand as anachronistic, but they're supposed to, just like the whole movie is.

Damn, I like that movie the more I think about it. It's got a whole hell of a lot of layers to it. If you just see it as a 'bloody revenge flick', then I guess we'll just agree to disagree, there.

 

[Rugger]

I loved KB2.

C'mon...it was a Love Story wrapped up in ultraviolence: everything that happens to the Bride was because Bill wanted her to be happy and change her life...and to do that she HAD to get the violence and hatred out of her system, and close the book completely on her old life. Mission accomplished.

Beautiful.

-Rugger
"I KillBill!"

 

[barsoomcore]

There's been some off-topic and personal-attack-like posts in this thread that I hope hasn't put an end to the actual debate over the movie.

Kai Lord, I hope you haven't abandoned this thread as a lost cause (though I would understand if you had). I always enjoy crossing mental swords with you and am looking forward to your further thoughts on this discussion.

 

[Kai Lord]

There's been some off-topic and personal-attack-like posts in this thread that I hope hasn't put an end to the actual debate over the movie.

Kai Lord, I hope you haven't abandoned this thread as a lost cause (though I would understand if you had). I always enjoy crossing mental swords with you and am looking forward to your further thoughts on this discussion.

Don't worry, I'm not going to address the hypocritical baiting above since that isn't what the thread is about and it would be pointless anyway. You did make some interesting points about KB2 and I'll address those when I get off work and have more time to post. Stay tuned...

 

[Wrath of the Swarm]

My posts are neither hypocritical nor baiting. Kai Lord's comments were not about his personal assessment of the movie, but claims about its general worth. As such, they're fair game for criticism.

Kai, may I assume that you similarly consider A Clockwork Orange to be an ultimately meaningless example of the glorification of extreme violence? It's just as distasteful, no? All that killing and maiming and sexual content - why, it's practically sinful.

 

[barsoomcore]

WotS -- if you want to discuss Kai Lord's tastes and morals, can you take it up with him or her directly rather than in a thread I'm hoping will provide some interesting discussion on Kill Bill Vol 2?

If you want to have a general discussion on the role of violence or distastefulness in cinema or art, I'm up for that, but can we leave Kai Lord's preferences aside? I'd rather hear YOUR position on things than read your efforts to characterize KL's. If you've got a theory whereby extreme violence can be justified in art, lay it on me. I think such a discussion has all sorts of worth.

But I'm not actually interested in what you believe is Kai Lord's position. Let KL give us that.

 

[Wrath of the Swarm]

He's given us his position already, and he seems to feel that "extreme" violence reduces the quality of a film, or lowers it to a different level altogether compared to films that don't possess it. More to the point, he's not presenting this position as his own personal standard, but implies instead that this is an "objective" view that will hold across an entire culture.

That's merely annoying. His approval of Passion combined with this attitude is what's offensive.

Kill Bill doesn't use violence as a way to compensate for poor plot development or flat characters. It's an inherent part of the movie's theme. It is a coherent, consistent story presented as a whole. Perhaps some people feel the theme itself lacks value, and that's fine, but the quality of the filmmaking has nothing to do with that. Others will be blinded by the violence and fail to notice the subtle meanings in the movie. That's fine too, and they can disapprove as they like. Shakespeare contains plenty of violence and sexual content intended to excite the peanut gallery, and he wasn't even considered a great dramatist until after his death. Are his works trashy, or great works of genius? Neither. They're trashy, great works of genius.

I'd bet we could sit down together, analyze Kill Bill, and come up with interesting ideas that were intentionally buried in its events. We could debate why stylistic choices were made, what messages were being sent, what the director was thinking. But the movie lacks hidden obsessions and unconscious messages - Tarantino clearly thought about what he was doing and was aware of why he chose as he did.

It's common knowledge among sociologists that people's beliefs about their beliefs often bear little resemblance to what they actually believe, and people rarely think enough about the differences between what they claim to think and how they actually act to notice this themselves. I don't think Kai Lord has thought at all about why he disapproves of the violence in Kill Bill while considering Passion a great movie despite its (IMO unnecessarily extreme) violence.

I wouldn't consider Kill Bill a classic in any sense, but it was a cleverly-made piece of cinema, and I don't appreciate people trashing it mindlessly.

 

[barsoomcore]

Well, I don't agree with your assessment of Kai Lord's position, so let's leave that for Kai Lord to provide details on.

I'd like to know your reasoning behind the statement "the movie lacks hidden obsessions and unconscious messages." I find it tremendously unlikely that this is true, and I wonder why you think it is.

My take on critical analysis is a little different from yours -- I'm largely uninterested in authorial intent. Like you say, people are usually mistaken about what they believe. This applies to artists as well as to anyone else, so there's no reason to think that an artist is an authority on their own work. They can overlook details, forget elements and miss connections as easily as anyone else. I'm interested in what a work says in itself -- as opposed to what it was MEANT to say.

I'm not saying, for example, that Quentin Tarantino set out to make a movie about the journey of the self when he started writing Kill Bill. Maybe he did, maybe he didn't -- I don't care. The film, however, IS about that journey -- or at least you can look at that film and see a point of view on that journey. Not Tarantino's point of view, necessarily, but a point of view nonetheless.

I'm interested in story primarily for how it illuminates the world around. For the presentation of new ideas, or the application of old ideas to new situations. For the most part, we like movies which express ideas we agree with. Every now and then a movie expresses ideas we haven't encountered before, and actually gets us to think about them and maybe change our current perceptions.

Kill Bill didn't do that to me, I don't think. Very, very few movies do. But I do agree with the ideas present in the story (on the journey of the self, and on relationships and on (nod to Kai Lord) transformation (maybe not redemption, but I'm not sure I buy into redemption anyway)), and they're not ideas that get presented a lot, so I was glad to see them.

But I'm curious about your comment on hidden obsessions.

 

[Abraxas]

Unfortunately - except for a few minutes here and there the most entertaining part of this movie was (IMO) the preview for the movie "Hero".

Kill Bill doesn't use violence as a way to compensate for poor plot development or flat characters.

General disagreement here. Violence compensated for the flat characters of
- O-Ren and Vernita in KB vol.1
- Bill and Elle in KB vol.2.
(they were merely targets for the bride to enact her violence upon)
and the bride in 1 and 2.

Budd was the only character (again IMO) that had any substance of interest.

Of course there's always room for the sequel in which Elle gets to Vernita's daughter, raises her and prepares her so when she grows up she can kill Beatrix - it can be called Kill Bea. Which would lead the the sequel where Beatrix's daughter hunts down her mother's killers called Killed by B.B.

This movie reminds me of the Thomas Covenant books.