Post #54989 by DaneTiki on Mon, Oct 13, 2003 7:06 PM

No arguments here about the perfidy of the MPAA. Has everyone seen the idiotic tear-jerker commercial with the set-painter guy? You can't tell me he's going to lose anywhere near as much work due to piracy as he is from digital sets.

Anyway, back on-topic: I thought "Kill Bill" was excellent. I think many people, especially some of my esteemed movie reviewer colleagues, may have missed the point on this film: It's not supposed to be the kind of Tarantino tour de force that "Pulp Fiction" was. This is Tarantino's attempt to deify the Shaw Brothers and Bruce Lee. That's precisely why there is so much ridiculously stilted/formal dialogue. It's intended to replicate the overly serious/badly translated dialogue in the source material.

"Kill Bill" is also strident on another point: Cinema is about action/movement. The lack of dialogue, plot and character development is intentional and, I think, brilliantly executed. There's no pretense that this movie exists in "the real world." "Kill Bill" is mythic, iconic, religious, reverent. We don't read "The Epic of Gilgamesh" and ask how Enkidu can lose his strength just by sleeping with Shamhat. (Lack of) Verisimilitude is not the point.

So don't look to "Kill Bill" for witticisms or deep thoughts. Go and experience it, as you would a great/awful midnight kung-fu movie.

Don't even get me started on "stylized" verses "realistic" violence....

[P.S. This was post #69 for me, appropriate considering the readout next to Uma Thurman's hospital bed when she is first comatose and Darryl Hannah comes to whack her.]

[ Edited by: DaneTiki on 2003-10-13 19:08 ]