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Kill Bill: Vol. 1
SPOILERS AHEAD
I think I really said my piece on this movie with the last review so all that remains is to add a star rating and a cover image. I enjoyed this on this viewing more than on my last. I love how the whole movie is “really” under all the violence about a mother’s love for her murdered daughter only to find before the end credits that she’s not really been murdered. There’s so much here that’s ridiculously non-Tarantino-esque, like Sonny Chiba’s sushi chef scene, so comic, almost Fawlty Towers or something. There’s so much respect and honour about the violence, however comic-book extreme it is. And the soundtrack is perfection. One thing I want to say that I thought I’d said in the other review but hadn’t is a stupid niggling thing but when I saw the movie the first time, the end credits actually began before we saw B. making her deathlist on the plane and Bill’s revelation. After B said “They’ll all be dead as O-Ren …” came Tarantino’s director credit, and the whole ‘preview’ of Vol. 2 plus the big twist came after, kinda like a post-teaser. This TV screening and, I think, my DVD, place all the end credits after the action’s over. I think it works so much better when you have that brief moment of, “What? No, that can’t be it!” Much as I’d love to see the big-ass complete cut that Tarantino talked about once upon a time, this two-parter would lose so much without the cliffhanger.
18th March 2004:
Disclaimer: I’ve been a Tarantino fan since the time I was only allowed to read the 4-screenplay pack I got for Christmas in (I think) 1994 when I was 14. I’m of that lucky age where I remember the thrill of Reservoir Dogs being a “banned” movie and that was basically my route into Tarantino, I was really big on anti-censorship when all kinds of movies were unavailable in the UK, and I guess that’s why Tarantino caught my eye. I’m pretty much forever biased ‘cos of this early introduction to his work, but I hope my opinions not completely skewed.
Aside from the ones he didn’t direct (True Romance, Natural Born Killers, From Dusk Till Dawn), before Kill Bill came along, my favourite Tarantino film always turned out being the underdog Jackie Brown, Tarantino really broke from the things he was infamous for with that movie and showed his intelligence a lot more, despite the source material not being his. With Kill Bill he’s combining that intelligence and depth with the things he’s infamous for, emphasising both by multiple degrees, and adding another layer that’s hard to describe but most comparable to Oliver Stone’s interpretation of Natural Born Killers, which was shot by Robert Richardson, the same cinematographer as here. We’ve got flipping from colour to black and white, music being cut with the visual cuts, a whole reel of animé (some of the most beautiful images ever), a mix of Hong Kong action and Sergio Leone, more homages and references than you can shake a stick at; yet it’s all unmistakably the work of one man. They advertised it The Fourth Film By Quentin Tarantino and he is one of the few directors who can rightfully claim the slightly selfish “Film By” credit.
It would’ve been nice if they’d delivered the movie in one chunk rather than these “Volumes” – it wouldn’t have made any difference to the overall movie, I don’t think, and I’m hoping there’s some kind of DVD which allows the viewer to watch it all unterrupted, maybe even chronological, could be fun (but I guess we’re still waiting for them to do that with Pulp Fiction so I guess we’ve at least a decade to wait..) But there’s one great part of this first part that would have never come about if it had been released as one movie – the beautiful, fairly predictable but incredibly moving, cliffhanger. There’s a real sense of Vol. 1 working on its own – the title tells you where it’s going to end, The Bride has already proven herself a great “warrior”, and flashes of the story outside the story give glimpses that expand in your imagination to fill the gaps. Of course Vol. 2 is probably going to be even better… but I still think Vol. 1 has the ability to standalone somehow.
This feels like it’s been a less passionate and gushing review than I’ve been giving 1) in the past few days and 2) in general for movies in my top 250 list… maybe I’m just tired. I do feel compelled to say that the animé sequence is worth watching the movie for alone, it’s probably the key sequence that propels the movie up so high in my memories and thoughts. Raining blood… it just thrills me and breaks my heart all at once and makes me imagine what a feature-length animé by Tarantino could be… can’t wait till Vol. 2.
March 21st, 2007 at 3:44 am
[...] Somehow I don’t feel bad about being completely incapable of summarising the plot of this one, nor about the fact I watched the American dubbed version. I was actually happy to find that the copy I had was the dubbed version, lol – my first knowledge of this movie came from Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Vol 2, and when you see The Bride and B.B. watching this movie and hear that kid’s haunting voiceover, you really just wanna be watching it with them, lol … and that’s just the kind of movie this will forever be to me. It is simply awesome to have on in the background. The violence is beautiful – there’s one shot where a guy gets his head chopped off and it has that ridiculous spray of blood like Tarantino rips off in the first Kill Bill, yet against the backdrop of a man with a child in his arms and a sunset it is anything but ridiculous … it reminded me of the surreal, stomach-churning beauty of Lavinia’s death in Julie Taymor’s Titus. If you love martial arts / Asian cinema, I don’t need to tell you to see this since you probably already have … but if you liked Kill Bill or like highly stylised violence, it’s highly recommended. [...]
April 6th, 2007 at 2:36 am
[...] Kill Bill: Vol. 1 Quentin Tarantino [...]
April 13th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
[...] There’s something massive missing at the end of this movie which for a long moment I saw as a major problem with the movie, and it concerns the revenge that is dealt upon the abusive Big Al, played terrifyingly convincingly by Angus Macfadyen. For what we see him do to Milla Jovovich’s Kate early on in the movie – a scene which goes down with such scenes as Noodles’ rape of Deborah in Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in America as one of the few scenes in cinema that I physically can’t keep my eyes on the screen for – it is far from enough. This movie is no Kill Bill. But the more I think about how Kate exacts her revenge, the more astonishing I think this movie really is. [...]
April 20th, 2007 at 4:26 am
[...] The camerawork in this movie is amazing – from the first time I saw it on the big screen, my favourite moment has always been the death of Beaumont, that camera staying behind while Ordell drives away, craning up, then coming back down again. That scene also makes use of a motif that I noticed this time around comes up time and again throughout the movie – the way people are always stopping and starting their cars, and the music always shutting down and coming back on in the same place of the song it left off at … it’s such a simple thing, but for some reason it just creates such a great feeling. On the Beaumont death, too, it’s worth commenting on the violence in this movie as it compares to most of Tarantino’s other work – the violence in this movie, rather than being wall-to-wall like Kill Bill, say, it mostly all falls into the same category as the ear-slicing sequence in Reservoir Dogs – with the Beaumont death, we see it from a distance – with subsequent deaths, though each becomes more and more shocking (not because of the gore, just because of who kills who) it’s always fast and mostly clean, but we feel the violence completely, I think it’s done brilliantly – I remember the double-whammy of Melanie and Louis had me just about shaking for the rest of the movie the first time I saw it … it’s the menace of the killer in both cases, the way Louis warns Melanie, the way Ordell bows his head almost in prayer for a long stretch before getting the information he needs from Louis before pulling the trigger – whatever you want to say about Tarantino elsewhere, you certainly can’t call the violence here mindless. [...]