Went and saw “Kill Bill.”
Quentin Tarantino movies are pretty hit or miss for me–I did not care for “Reservoir Dogs” because I simply didn’t like any of the characters–I identified with none of ’em, I cared about none of ’em, and I simply wished they’d all die a lot quicker and get it over with.
On the other hand, I quite enjoyed “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn” because it started out as a typically complex Taratino movie of complicated, twisted, unloveable characters, and then, just when you were resigned to it, killed everybody off in a stupidly campy vampiric orgy of destruction, which I much preferred to having to drag through two hours of bad people getting bad things coming to ’em.
“Kill Bill” however, was a riot. It was like the anti-Charlie’s Angels movie. When Tarantino puts his mind to it, he can do some astonishing cinematography–at one point, the thing simply dropped into about ten minutes of Ghost-in-the-Shell style anime, and it actually worked. And of course, the music was fanatastic.
But violent? “Violent” doesn’t even begin to come close to knocking at the door of the observatory with a telescope powerful enough to see this movie on the distant horizon. It was pure Shadowrun style gratuitous, ridiculous, so-over-the-top-you-gotta-laugh katana-wielding hot chicks slicing and dicing their way through armies of Yakuza thugs with occasional moments of delightfully cheesy pseudo-samurai ethos (i.e. the fun honorable sword bits without the pigheaded terribly complicated misogynistic classist bits.) Blood flowed like wine. Severed limbs flowed like…um…chunky things. In wine. And still having fond memories of my own Shadowrun character, “Mouse” who also loved a good sword and would routinely slice her way through armies of thugs with similiarly graceless hack-and-slash brutality, (and was a clone of the lead villainess to boot, right down to kimono-and-katana costume) it was a delight. I laughed. I cheered. I laughed some more. I stopped laughing and stared blankly at the screen going “Holy….crap…” I laughed more. I cringed. I oofed. It was good.
The one thing that bugged me was that there were kids in the theatre. And this was bad, because this was not a movie you bring the family to. I mean, “Alien” would be a better kid’s movie than this. This was nasty. And there’s no way you can’t know that a Tarantino movie is going to be graphic and brutal and icky and full of nasty squishy noises and graphic bloody bits and language that’d peel paint, and just not suitable for anyone under forty.
But if you like astonishing kung fu action silliness in terribly questionable taste, I recommend it highly.
