KILL BILL Volume One (SPOILERS YO)

I thought the 5,6,7,8's (the Japanese girl band) should have stuck around for the Yakuza fight scene. Did anybody else get a vision of Phil Two wearing the Crazy 88 uniform after they saw this movie? I did. I imagined him just standing in the corner posing with his sword while the fight went on and trying not to get hurt, with a big grin on his face.

If Volume 2 doesn't have a robot in it I don't see how it can possibly match up to Volume 1. There's only so much to be mined - maybe he'll rip off some Bollywood next?

I want to be a Crazy 88 for Halloween! I just loved that outfit.

I think Kill Bill outfits are going to top Underworld and Matrix outfits this year for Halloween. Should be interesting.

http://actionadventure.about.com/library/graphics/chiakiKB1.jpg

Fuck some two parter bullshit though.

come on you love it!

The anime sequence fit in pretty seamlessly because much of the rest of the movie was a live-action anime flick. The silhouette battle scene is one of the most gorgeous fight sequences ever filmed, matching the drunken battle outside of the restaurant in "Drunken Fighter II" and the Michelle Yeoh/Zhang Ziyi showdowns in "CTHD". I will be interested to see if I like Vol. 2 as much because I'm just not as into westerns.

Other notable sequences in the movie:

- Elle walking through the hospital split-screen w/ comatose Bride. BEST COAT EVER.
- O-Ren's backstory. Can't say enough about how fantastic the anime section was in general.
- O-Ren dismissing The Bride as a silly white girl playing samurai after she just took apart a hundred people. One of the funniest lines in the movie (and underscores another point, namely that while the characters weren't particularly deep they were well-drawn).
- PUSSY WAGON

most of my friends, not movie buffs, thought it looked stupid from the previews. so who knows. im not sure how many non-movie buffs will react to it. both crowds i saw it with laughed at the decapitation scene, so who knows.

THis is possibly the most elitist post I've ever made!

What amazes me is the delicacy of some scenes - like the slow pan left when Black Mamba is checking out the swords.

Oh, and the RZA score - HOLY SHIT.

The people in the row behind us who brought their pre-teen daughter should be shot, though. I'm not one for overprotecting young'uns, and the first movie I remember seeing with my parents was T2, but this little girl was freaked out.

I actually thought it was a well-paced payoff: fronting like she hardly knows Japanese, then busting out "I have vermin to kill". I dug that.

I mentioned this in another thread, but I gotta say it again: the detail of Vernita hiding her gun in a box of KABOOM cereal was pop-art hilarity.

Reminded me of the similar scene in Pulp Fiction where the dude misses Travolta and Jackson from close range. A big continuity error exists in Pulp Ficiton, though, as you can see the bullet holes in the wall before the guy comes out to shoot at them.

No, not really. I mean, nothing much in Vol. 1 happens chronologically after that point.

A marshmallow got in the way

That's not a continuity error! That was intentional! There's an entire dialogue about it afterwards where Samuel L. JAckson takes that as a sign form God to get out of the enforcement racket.

Also, doesn't Vernita Green spin around really quickly before the shot? That could be reason enough for the miss.

maybe not "clever" but perhaps a Bunuel reference? Surprised that hasn't been posited yet.

(btw when it first happened I was really startled because I thought something was wrong with the audio track)

I like how she's still driving the Pussy Wagon once she gets back from Japan.

I was just wowed by Uma's acting throughout. And I thought Lucy Liu was really good, too (I've always been sort of blah about her in the past).

Haha yeah I liked the fact that the most believable badass (Her name is O-Ren Ishii and she is YAKUZA OVERLORD, durr) gets a big story to explain why she can kill the shit out of people without breaking a sweat - meanwhile Uma & Vivica, well, you know, they can just, uh, they learned it in high school! American high schools are violent, right!

To see O-Ren's God-slicer and Go-Go's mace clashing in a field of dead and dying men is to understand how women have taken over for men in action movies. Strange, since women are not nearly as good at killing as men are. Maybe they're cast because the liberal media wants to see them succeed.

Sorry if this was already brought up; I didn't really feel inspired to parse through 1,300 posts to find it

Imdb reports that the name Vivica Fox spoke in that scene was "Beatrix".

is this another one of those in-jokes i'm not getting ?

ew, i know! and all the different (ugly) fonts and different schemes for the credits, it was a mess.

this film appealed to me very little, it was like a bad ile thread or something...a pastiche of lots of different things of course, but very little that was genuinely strange or inspired (to my reckoning). except:

No, the best joke evah was the sword next to the person siiting across the aisle from her!
-- Dan Perry (djperr...) (webmail), October 13th, 2003 1:43 PM. (Dan Perry) (link)

that i really liked. it was like some other cycle of revenge was taking place in the world, more or less parallel, like oh y'know happens all the time, why *shouldn't* they be sharing a flight back from tokyo?

otherwise i found it amusing but kind of turgid (i felt like yawning a few times)--like all the "crazeeee" stuff was a bit too rote and expected, decapitation included.

I came to Kill Bill knowing it was just gonna be a bunch of superficial flash and kicking and that ANY of the film went further than that (which I think it did) and that the kicking was SO fun still impresses me. If Tarantino mixes the character work of Jackie Brown and the visual skill of the second half of Kill Bill his best work may be ahead of him.

Mathieu Kassovitz, director of 'La Haine'

maybe this evidences a lack of social imagination on my part (quite probably it does) but it seems like tarantino's budget and kill bill's status as a "blockbuster" (is it really that though?) is incidental. as i suggested on that other thread, i'm not sure i have an especial fondness, collectively, for the films that tarantino has taken as inspiration--i think certain of them have similar problems, smaller budgets notwithstanding.

If Madonna's next album is deliberately made to sound like it was recorded in a bedroom, is that cool, or somehow rather offensive and opportunistic? And what does such 'representation' in the mainstream mean for the guys who invented the tropes? Some will dine with Tarantino, a couple will produce Madonna. The rest will have to move on, try and stay a step ahead.

More seriously, I enjoyed the movie as a fan of the genres he's pastiching. It's nice to see a western director (and still one whose name carries some weight) who can finally match the levels of atmosphere and energy (two woefully over used words, it's true) of the originals. That isn't to say that this directly means a hell of a lot to the culture/industry that produced them, but it is interesting to see them at this size. For example, millions of people paid money to go see a blockbluster, and ended up watching twenty minutes of anime in the middle. That tickles me.

I accept that the majority of people who care about the source will have seen better, but ther a still a lot of people who won't have. I think Momus's Radiohead analogy earlier is apt, though I suspect I'm on the other side to him: I'm happy that this movie will have crossed wires in the heads of maybe a thousand people who weren't into this scene, but might next week pick up a copy of Akira, and maybe ten of them will think about some ideas they used to have (admittedly Anime is a terrible example for this - no-one ever made one in their back yard in a month).

Also it was an entertaining film by a director who's clearly enjoying himself, and I like those in general. I appreciate that others may not get as much out of that side:)