Excuse me everyone, I hate to disturb the debate here, but noted critic Armond White (noted mainly for his often baffling 'readings' of the sociological meaning of various films) has revealed the secret white supremist drive behind Kill Bill:

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16964

It really is a somewhat interesting article. From what I can derive from it, White's theory is that 'low-culture' entertainment like blaxploitation can only be enjoyed 'without responsibility' by persons existing in the culture that spawned it; other cultures, especially dominant cultures, bear an automatic responsibility to comment upon the culture of origin that curated said entertainment when utilizing that entertainment's influence. Otherwise, the action is merely a racist appropriation of that entertainment with zero regard for the conditions that informed its popularity.

Interesting, but bullshit. At least on the level that a filmmaker apparently cannot simply express his admiration for a form of entertainment without addressing the racial and socio-economic factors behind it, thus displaying some sort of de-facto racism...

[QUOTE]Originally posted by Jog:
[QB]Excuse me everyone, I hate to disturb the debate here, but noted critic Armond White (noted mainly for his often baffling 'readings' of the sociological meaning of various films) has revealed the secret white supremist drive behind Kill Bill:

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=16964

It really is a somewhat interesting article. From what I can derive from it, White's theory is that 'low-culture' entertainment like

I had a really cool reply to this along with a lengthy post but it all just got swallowed up. Totally gone, along with my earlier post. What's going on with these boards?

Haha, thanks for that link, Jog. I've been waiting for White's hatred to start back up. Why, there was almost a week there since the appearance of PULP FICTION that White didn't refer to Tarrantino in a review. Christ, what a dipstick! Tarrantino, the director, whose last film featured a black lead with grace, intelligence and respect -- a role, lest we forget, that was changed to black from the novel's white -- is part of classic Hollywood bigotry for having a black woman being butchered by a white woman, despite the fact that the butchering only took place as revenge for a butchering the latter took from the former years before. I always keep in mind that White loves Spielberg, and not just as a craftsman, but as a moralist. A friend and I once decided we were going to tag team letters to the NY Press mocking White on a weekly basis, but got tired of it after about 3 weeks.

And, Adam, save that shit with a word processing program.

Or at least CTRL+C grab it into memory after each paragraph or so. Then if something botches, you can just CTRL+V back most of what you had.

I've never had any problems with Comicon swallowing posts though.


K

So you guys preferred the Tarantino movies where everybody loved to hear themselves talk? Go figure...

Armond White is a damned jackass. I mean, I actually agree with him on a few small points about certain trends in American indie films, but his whole "OMG! SAM JACKSON IZ A STEPIN FETCHIT 4 TODAY!" spazzing got old so-very-fast. This guy decided that "Unbreakable" was a horrible racist film and so had THE BIG SPOILER for it right up front in his review in the 'Press. Cuz it was just that horribly racist. Ass.

Incidentally, this is getting a nice DVD release this Tuesday.

Suffering from nihilism, myself, I’ve no problem identifying or finding plausible, in a realworld sense, Stefan, but YOUR FRIENDS is a purely fictitious work that fails because it presumes itself to be something extrafilmic. Good examples, as their contrast points to a need for plausible realistic constructs (character and drama) in such films, but not necessarily in a film like KILL BILL. Unlike YOUR F(R)IENDS, if KILL BILL fails, it doesn’t fail in its intention, only in its delivery, the assessment of which is relative to other similarly intended films. Anyway, back to you getting back to your point.



Charismatic regarding what, though? Yes, she’s not traditionally as iconic as Mifune and Eastwood’s characters, nor do I believe is Eastwood’s quite as iconic as Mifune's, but they all function in different ways, most notably due to the groundwork laid by each character through time. Leone and Eastwood borrowed a lot from Kurosawa and Mifune to make the MWNN. And, besides the obvious difference, the use of blades, Tarantino and Thurman borrow mostly from Leone and Eastwood to create the Bride. The charisma of the Bride differs from MWNN primarily, contra Tarantino’s protests, on her explicit reflexivity towards the tradition from which she’s coming. Any charisma she has is going to result from how well she’s actively commenting on the tradition, whereas most of MWNN’s charisma would seem to coming from how well Sanjuro’s iconicity is restated in a more Western context. Maybe it’s just me, but I’d rather face down Eastwood’s stare than Mifune’s (perhaps it’s just because I’d rather be shot than sliced – easier to be stitched back up). The more you borrow, the more deluded the icon, I’d say. Only time will tell the degree to which the Bride takes on a new form of iconicity, but it does seem to be more difficult to create icons within a postmodern knowingness (or modernist knowingness, which is basically the same thing, only with a hatred for low culture). So, basically, I think the Bride does have charisma, just not the same kind as the classic anti-hero of Sanjuro (or his replicant, MWNN). Her charisma is something like a walking rationale of vengeance, explaining the rules of the game to those who might’ve violated them (to what degree they might’ve violated them, we’ll have to wait for part 2). Maybe you didn’t find her successful in this way, but I found her intriguing. For right now, I can only say that the first half of the film has me wanting to see how it ends. Only then will I really be able to determine if the Bride really works as a character (yet more reason for hating the economic decision to split the film).



In terms of pure story, KILL BILL isn’t in the same league as YOJIMBO (nor is FISTFUL OF DOLLARS); it’s not as good a movie in general, in fact. However, given enough time to ruminate, to watch KB a few more times, and really pay attention to its visual and audio flare, an argument might be feasible that it has an aesthetic quality all its own. The reason for suspecting this is that I just haven’t seen many contemporary action films which are near as interesting in terms of action as KB. I believe KB is squarely in the league of the more recent action work of (off the top of my head) Suzuki, Scott, Woo, Fukasaku, Hark, and Miike. Why I’d even say it’s better than some of theirs. And, with the possible exception of Scott (essentially an American, by now), none of these guys is overly concerned with the dramatic characteristics of the action genre. So, to nail KILL BILL on that is going to nail them all. Otherwise, I say it’s up to a reasonable debate as to who’s the master action formalist here (but I’d give it Suzuki, since he’s probably had the most influence of the ones just named). But Tarrantino would have to make more action films before he could be fairly evaluated. And I still prefer Kurosawa to them all, but that’s a pretty safe opinion to have.



Fair enough, but I’ll cite one example of a single scene with an actress that completely altered my emotional attachment to a film just to let you know where I’m coming from. Andrejz Zulawaski’s somewhat pneumatic, somewhat ineffable POSSESSION has dialogue as dry and pretentious as an American poststructuralist’s dissertation on Henry James. The dialogue sort of functions as a distancing effect that, by sheer cumulative force, creates a sort of absurdist alternate realm, devoid of any realworld emotional connections. That is, until Isabelle Adjani’s prolonged surreal bout with the evil force taking her over. Now unlike Thurman, she had the advantage of bleeding a milky mucous substance from various orifices, but so startling is her torment, that I was completely balling by the end of this scene, giving the film a realworld weight that was in no way foretold by the austere quality of the earlier scenes. Maybe this scene only had that effect on me, but surely there are such scenes in other movies you’ve seen that cause a complete emotional transformation of how you receive either the rest of the film, or the film as a whole on a later viewing. While I didn’t find Thurman’s big scene that stirring, it was strong enough to add to her “charisma” and to lend oomph to the scenes of vengeance, which will only show all their emotive force upon the film’s completion (due largely to the nonlinear storytellling).

The rest of my response to your views on the film’s dialogue would read pretty much like “does not” to your “does to”, so I’ll wait to see if anything occurs to me later on. Plus, I’m getting a headache looking at my monitor.

Thanks. I knew it was coming out soon due to the really crappy remixes of the song that was recently released, just not when. Do you know if it's going to be the altered version or the original or both?