In his own films, Tarantino strives to assemble that one great movie from all the elements he's picked up elsewhere whose original artists just couldn't make them work as a whole. It's very rare to find a cult movie that is thoroughly good from beginning to end in every area – story, direction, writing, acting, production values, etc. Those elements that do work are so good that they stick with viewers, and bring fans back to the movies again and again, remembering them as better than they really were. The movie is also loaded with Tarantino's trademark overly-talky dialogue, during which the characters wring profound substance and meaning from sources as trivial as a cereal commercial catch phrase.Īs an unabashed junkie of genre and B-movies, Tarantino recognizes that films of that sort often contain a great idea or a few great scenes, but altogether usually aren't very good. The mix of vibrant colors and striking black & white in the visual design is propelled by the director's impeccable taste in music to create a kinetic montage of dynamically stylized movement and sound. A commercial airline has sword-holders at every seat, and a view of the Tokyo cityscape is an obvious miniature from the 'Godzilla' series. Its cartoonish violence (every wound issues a geyser of ruby red blood) forms a heightened fantasy accentuated by numerous surreal touches. The film has outstanding action sequences choreographed by Chiba and Yuen Wo-Ping. The actress is put through an emotional wringer and was unjustly passed over for an Oscar nomination that year. She's by turns cold, strong, vulnerable, heartless, heartbreaking and above all human. More than just a collection of disparate movie and TV references, 'Kill Bill' fully coheres into a distinct artwork with richly drawn characters, a tightly structured plot and an elaborate mythology all its own. Sonny Chiba makes an appearance as the descendant of a character he played in a 1980 Japanese TV series. An anime flashback is played to an operatic score in the Ennio Morricone mold. The Bride wears Bruce Lee's yellow track-suit from 'Game of Death'. logo followed by a quote from 'Star Trek II'. 'Kill Bill' is a crazy collision of all the film and TV influences swirling through Quentin Tarantino's head: samurai and kung-fu movies, Spaghetti Westerns, the works of Alfred Hitchcock and Brian De Palma, 'Death Wish', 'Charlie's Angels', 'Lady Snowblood', 'The Green Hornet' and countless more. Fox), master of edged weapons and O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), current head of the Japanese criminal underworld. In this first installment, our heroine makes her bloody To-Do list and tracks down her first two targets: Vernita Green (Vivica A. That's the sort of thing that leads a person to hold a grudge. It turns out that The Bride was once part of a secret organization called the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and is more than proficient with kung-fu, firearms and "the exquisite art of the samurai sword." For the crime of attempting to leave the DiVAS, get married and start a new life, her four colleagues and the mentor/father figure/lover in charge of the team (the Bill of the title) wiped out her wedding party and put a bullet in The Bride's head. Uma Thurman stars as a mysterious character initially known only as The Bride who awakens from a four-year coma determined to hunt down and exact revenge on the five people responsible for putting her in that state. 1' is the more action-packed of the pairing and the one that sets the plot in motion. Originally planned as a single movie, the script for 'Kill Bill' soon grew so epic and unwieldy that it had to be split into two separate pictures. At least in a Tarantino movie something happens. Meanwhile, they treated Kevin Smith like a god for doing much the same, and I've never been able to understand that. It became very fashionable among my film snob friends to complain about Tarantino's hip posturing and affected air of "coolness," as well as the artificiality of his character dialogue and convoluted plots. Even as he was rewarded by the box office and critics for 'Pulp Fiction' in 1994, my film school professors at the time lectured endlessly about the cultural bankruptcy of his alleged style-over-substance approach to filmmaking. Ever since he burst onto the film scene with 'Reservoir Dogs' back in 1992, the director has been alternately praised for his clever dialogue, pop culture homages and non-linear storytelling, or reviled for glorifying violence, recycling (or "ripping off") past movies and celebrating all that is shallow and superficial in the art of motion pictures. Perhaps more than any of his other films, 'Kill Bill' remains the clearest and arguably most successful example of Quentin Tarantino's cinema of pastiche.
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