Originally Posted by The Silver Bullet
Kill Bill: Volume One
2003 | dir. Quentin Tarantino
**½
Self-gratifying confirmation that Tarantino's six-year hiatus was indeed a result of creative block. A complete step in the wrong direction after a film that showed real, further development as a filmmaker, 1997's Jackie Brown. Although I'm a big fan of Tarantino, I am worried about where he's going to go from here. Inglorious Bastards is a straight rip [or so I've heard] of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and Tarantino needs more now than just his favourite films to get him buy. He needs originality, not the power of pastiche.
That's the postmodern hallmark - the power of pastiche and homage. Tarantino reshapes familiar images into unfamiliar language and acclimates them to American culture. It's the filmmaker's ultimate fantasy, and the auteur theory in action. No whit abashed, no image left un-scrutinized, no credits for the actors in the trailer.
Kill Bill is more beautiful, more exciting, more emotionally (by way of aesthetics) riveting than all of his other films combined. What he does is incredibly original: takes pieces from his favorite movies and merges them with his own idea of cinema, the result of which is something so arresting that I daresay we won't understand its full brilliance for years to come. It is like
Eyes Wide Shut in this respect, another film that is continually being rediscovered by the cinephiles who shunned it at first (myself included.)
I thought Uma gave the film the only weight it had. The RZA's original score [although even that was pastiche and homage most of the time too] was great. Sonny Chiba did a fine job, despite his entire chapter being a sad and unsophisticated attempt at the Kurosawa-breed of samurai film. The best sequence of the film came in the form of the ending, after the overpraised [and redundant] House of Blue Leaves sequence. Not because it was ending, mind you – it's not as though I hated the thing – but because it really did end very, very well.
Sonny Chiba's chapter was less an attempt at the Kurosawa-type film than it was an outright salute to both the great Japanese director and to himself. This is not Tarantino doing Kurosawa, it is Tarantino doing Tarantino doing Kurosawa. And I agree that it ended wonderfully.
Grossly underwhelming on the whole, with some wonderful but sadly inconsistent moments throughout. I'm not saying Tarantino needs to go back to Pulp Fiction. I don't believe he does. I believe he needs to find an original thought, and stop trying to recreate the stuff he saw as a video store jerk.
What was so inconsistent about it? And don't you think the fact that he's pretty much reinvented the language of genre cinema counts for something? The best comparison, in my eyes, is to Afrika Bambaata and Kid Capri and Jam Master Jay - nobody knew a turntable could be used as an instrument until these guys came along. Now Tarantino is doing the same thing - chopping up, re-interpreting, and shifting cinema into new, original territory, while maintaining its deep respect for the great films that came before it.