I’ve been something of a hermit lately. I’m not sure why, or how to stop.
I downloaded Kill Bill Volume 1 on the second try. It’s probably the most horrible movie I’ve ever seen, and I’m only an hour into it. It’s like a bad, kitschy anime or samurai movie, only everyone suffers in very precise, ghastly ways. Tarantino shows us that not only did the Bride stab and eventually kill Buck the orderly, she slashed his Achilles tendon, etc. Such fidelity is fascinating and incredibly grisly.
I must finish reading E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime by tomorrow, and it’s a brilliant book. Virtues: beautiful and pithy prose, siren characters, and plenty of funny.
This is kind of a secret, but not really: I like Kill Bill Vol 1! As in, I have seen it and adored it. I think I adore it because I recognize a lot of martial arts film techniques and oh man, the fake blood, and oh man, the baseball-loving Hanzo. I like O-Ren Ishii and the music. The violence is really silly, though. I fastforwarded/looked away through the grisliest bits.
anush i agree,
it had a simple plot and a few stunts, but it wasn’t anything special in the least in my eyes. i don’t know why everyone was so excited about it. it was cool, sure, but it seemed to lack some things.
i liked it- it was intentionally kitschy, anush. there was blatant, blatant kitsch on purpose. it was supposed to be sort of a vivid, nervewracking tribute to old-school bad samurai movies. i don’t know if it was this way when you saw it, but i saw it at the dobie, and for previews they used the trailers of all these old samurai movies with classic bad ninja actors in them- and then immediately when Kill Bill started, you recognized like half the names in the credits. tarantino actually brought back all these cheesy martial arts stars to be in his flick. he has this lifelong obsession with samurai.
anyway, i think that’s what made the movie so fascinating for me. it was like he made this sort of hodgepodge creation out of all these other art forms he had a lot of respect for, and then took all the violence they sort of implied was there but were too low-tech to show you and made it really grisly-overdone, just for shock value.
lol, anyway: cool movie. maybe just not as cool as tarantino seems sure it is.
yeah, i got all that (the new yorker told me) — but still, at the beginning especially it was just sadistic. shock value works on me!