You know, usually, I write long, well thought-out reviews, which I pepper with grand doses of comedy, both of a sardonic and sometimes silly nature. I'll go into everything, from music to the actor's portrayals (all things Johansan left out BTW), but w/Kill Bill, there's just a few things to say about it:

Don't think too much...and enjoy the romp.

I mean really...EVERY movie made by ANY director is mastabatory. That's the nature of the business. It's the kind of personality the biz attracts. The only movie I can think of that does NOT fit in this mould is "Nightmare Before Chistmas" b/c Tim Burton laid it all out and Henry Sellick was forced to do what he was told (and when Sellick masturbated without the use of Burton's right hand in his next two flicks "James and the Giant Peach" & "Monkeybone" -- he proved to be nothing more than the leaking wet dream to Burton's Peter North of a moneyshot).

Tarantino's plot is cartoonishly simple...and yet you empathize w/his main character. To me, in the goofy setting of this homage of a movie, THAT is a major achievement. So, like I said...sit back...and enjoy the romp.

Oh, and go here now: http://www.comicon.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=4&t=001254

: D



Jesus ... sure, gangsters reacting "violently" (misleading description I think) to homoerotic teasing -- that just seems way out of character, you know? It'd be so much funnier if when dubbed "Mr. Pink," Buscemi was like: "Mr. Pink, huh? Some would argue that sounds a little feminine, but that's okay with me, because I'm comfortable with myself and my sexuality. My masculinity, I'll have you all know, is in no way threatened by the name Mr. Pink. Now, let's move on." Why harp on that? Why not Tarantino's disdain at his name, Mr. Brown, being too close to Mr. Shit? Perhaps Tarantino is actually betraying a deep discomfort with human feces. But, you know, human feces is perfectly natural, we all go poop -- Tarantino should learn to deal with his hang-ups. He totally has an issue with it, because people are often depicted in or even using the bathroom in his films. Right?

...

It's also news to me that the rape scene is Pulp Fiction's "climax" or that it's comparable to homoerotic "teasing" in some way. Why are contemporary critics so hell-bent on picking at this stuff? Even if one did want to argue that there's evidence Tarantino is "homophobic," again, this has exactly what to do with, well -- anything?

I'm also not sure how he extrapolates an "adolescent embarrassment about adult sexuality" from Tarantino's movies. The absence of a fixed interest in "adult" sexuality, maybe -- but embarrassment? When does he get around to reviewing the actual movie?

Ah, here we go:



I think all the to-do about movie-violence, in Tarantino or elsewhere, is pretty much the sole result of the endless repetition of inane critiques just like Mendalsohn's preamble. If you can't handle graphic movie violence, go watch You've Got Mail or something. Don't bore those of us who've no issue with it to tears with your endless maternal concern for our fragile little minds. Kill Bill, beyond the opening ten minutes or so, is pure cartoon, and the constant preoccupation with it's "violence" has had me scratching my head from the beginning. Have these people watched ANY of the movies that have influenced Tarantino? Taken a cursory peek at horror movies? Splatterhouse? Contemporary Asian cinema? Verhoeven, Miike, Scorsese, Takeshi? Woo? Anything? Has it been a steady diet of animated Disney features and romantic comedies, or what?



With this part I agree.



Touches on part of Charles' much earlier defense, and I agree with the general thrust of Mendalsohn's thoughts on it. I don't see it so much as a defense as a confirmation that -- with Kill Bill at least -- it isn't so much a movie, as it is a belaboured commercial for the movies QT happens to like. Granted, everything builds upon past work, cuts-n-pastes and re-orders its elements to some degree or another -- but Tarantino takes this to the extreme in Kill Bill. Which might be a valid cinematic option, except I have trouble accepting the notion that Kill Bill is intended purely as some kind of experiment in film collage per se. For all its intended homage, it is still supposed to work as a revenge story, and Tarantino cheats his way out of earning any viewer investment in it by barraging us with adoring but ultimately masturbatory "references" and assuming we can just fill in all the "blanks" for ourselves with no effort or help from him at all. That's not what I call successful "synthesis," since many of those "blanks" are what make storytelling of this nature work in the first place.

(Put another way, "I don't need to develop the characters because Lady Snowblood already did," doesn't cut it for me. I'll just watch Lady Snowblood.)

As for the rest:

Adam, you've piqued my interest in Maddin, thanks for the descriptions and info. Careful and Tale from Gimli Hospital and the others all sound pretty interesting to me. I look forward to checking a couple of these out.


K

Charles,

Oh, right, I left one part out by accident...

"It's just so blandly melodramatic that perhaps its easy to miss for some, e.g., Van Sant's need to make the killers sympathetic to bourgeois liberal interests: they're queer, one's a classically trained pianist (no, Madget, I'm not making this up), they're programmed by video game violence."

Maybe there's something I'm forgetting about the film, but I don't see how Elephant is saying the killers were "programmed" by video game violence. It seems a ludicrous, incredibly reaching claim. It's as likely the point is that the interest in violent video games is not the programming itself but the *result* or a *reflection* of the programming. That these two particular kids are interested in violent video games because they're killers, because of whatever it is inside of them that makes them killers, not the other way around.

Matthew

Sure, but there's a question of style and degree. I'm not even sure it's accurate to call Kill Bill masturbatory, ultimately, because masturbation is exciting. Kill Bill is more just the leftover ejaculate.


K

Kopper,

"I mean really...EVERY movie made by ANY director is mastabatory. That's the nature of the business. It's the kind of personality the biz attracts. The only movie I can think of that does NOT fit in this mould is "Nightmare Before Chistmas" b/c Tim Burton laid it all out and Henry Sellick was forced to do what he was told (and when Sellick masturbated without the use of Burton's right hand in his next two flicks "James and the Giant Peach" & "Monkeybone" -- he proved to be nothing more than the leaking wet dream to Burton's Peter North of a moneyshot)."

Well, there have been plenty of cases thruout Hollywood history of people wondering if films were really the babies of their credited producers rather than their credited directors. Cases where a producer is so identified with a kind of film that people have wondered if they weren't "really" the director. And cases where actual reports to such effect exist, at the very least claims by some of the parties involved in a film that such was the case.

It's easy enough to wonder if some of the films Howard Deutsch directed for Teen King John Hughes, like Pretty in Pink and Some Kind of Wonderful, weren't in effect John Hughes movies. Of course, the matter is muddied by the fact that Hughes wrote those two films. You could say, "looks like a John Hughes movie to me," because he provided the script; or it could be that Hughes, having his "finger on the pulse of youth" at the time, was bound to be a very hands-on producer on these two teen flicks.

One famous case of producer hands-onism in Hollywood were that of producer Irwin Allen intruding on the set of The Poseidon Adventure to the extent that some consider portions of the film to have been directed by him rather than by the credited director, Ronald Neame. And in certain quarters there's still argument as to whether or not director Christian Nyby or producer Howard Hawkes actually made The Thing. In cases like this, how much room did the credited director have to really put her or his stamp on the film, and how much did they simply knock out the film as laid out by the producer?

Similarly, people have wondered how much of Poltergeist is truly the work of producer Steven Spielberg vs director Tobe Hooper, and most non-rabbit-movie-fan folks think of both James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas as "Tim Burton movies."

Matthew

That’s the arresting power of the film, right, that it poses all these questions without providing any answers, like a subtle, probing ethnography of the modern teenager's milieu?

Was it ugliness that causes the violence? Well, clearly Van Sant has no problem with the symbolic value of beauty; the one ugly kid in the film was first to be shot and wasn’t the one who went postal. Was it the bill coming due from the culture industry’s marketing of violence to our children? One of the killers was shown playing a video game, but that neither conclusively proves that videogames were part of the cause nor that Van Sant gives the explanation any credence. However, by contrasting the other killer’s love of classical music with the video game playing, Van Sant must be saying something, but what? Little Beethoven is clearly from a fairly bourgeois existence, based on his house and his music playing, whereas the other video game playing killer is from a poorer background due to his constantly eating over at lil' Beets’s house (and that he has no knowledge of classical music other than “that’s really cool, man”). Was it the brutal bullying of the geeky kids? Maybe, since the jock that partook in throwing a wetwad at one of the killers was killed with particular relish. But maybe not, since the only ugly kid, the nerdy religious girl, didn’t exact her revenge on her pretty girl persecutors. Instead, the only 2 kids who might sympathize with her plight do her in first. Which brings me back to the first possibility, ugliness’s seeming lack of any real exchange value might just trump any other possible value the ugly girl might symbolize. Or, maybe the one distinguishing feature of the killers was their homosexuality; were they queer and was white-hetero-male-patriarchy to blame for the violent eruption? I’m sure that all the boys who take showers together, grab each other's wangs and passionately kiss don’t turn up queer (this being a fairly common occurrence among all my straight friends). But in a context where queer criticism reads every male bonding scene in classic Hollywood as revealing the palpable absence or “lack” of homosexuality, I find it a tad amusing that such a scene would even be up for debate as to what it probably tells the viewer about the killers’ sexuality. Assuming they’re gay and weren’t just fucking the first thing in sight as death quickly approached, was it the sense of latent homosexuality that might have been the reason for their being abused at school? Again, we just don’t know, and neither does Van Sant, but he's willing to ask the important questions, just like the talking heads on the news channels.

Well, do any of these questions result in a movie worth a damn? You know my answer, but I can’t help but be amazed by the fact that in BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE Marilyn fucking Manson is more thoughtful than Van Sant when he proffers the Adorno-esque explanation that teenagers are brought up in a culture of fear and consumption. That 5 minutes for whatever its worth is far more engaging than the 2 hours of tracking shots on Gap models. Poetic ineffability tends to lose its mystique if the questions are simplistic and banal.

I must've missed this when it appeared, but Rosenbaum calls ELEPHANT a masterpiece .

(Exhausted as the original topic may be, I'm going to veer vaguely back that way for a minute.)

It occurred to me while finishing up with the extra features on my Band of Outsiders DVD the other day how alike it was to Kill Bill in technique, or rather, how alike Kill Bill to it. I mean, in that both movies are a cobbled together hodge-podge of references, cinematic intertextualization, or whatever other term you want to apply, placing their own little tricks, winks, and experiments in the foreground, while relegating the actual story to the background, and even in that background giving us a rough sketch at best. (Mind you, I did actually like Band of Outsiders, but leaving that for the moment.) I find it interesting that despite this similarity, Tarantino claims in interviews to have "outgrown" Godard. He likened Godard -- and this is rather amusing to me in retrospect, having now seen a Godard film -- to Frank Frazetta. Somebody who's really cool and gets you excited about the possibilities of art, but who -- (and this is my own extrapolation) -- is kind of self-indulgently juvenile and exactly the type of artist who, while talented, one would tend to "outgrow."

There's another film-maker who I think would fit this description much better ... someone working today ... oh, what's his name again? Quentin something?

But in all seriousness, what I would be curious to ask of Tarantino is what he feels makes Kill Bill a more mature work than something like Godard's Band of Outsiders -- or if it isn't, why would his technique be so similar (if not necessarily in style) to something he claims to have outgrown? Is it the more dynamic style itself that elevates it? "Cooler" references?

While my little internal and oft-weeded jury will have to remain "out" on Godard until I see some of his others, I think Band of Outsiders to be by far the more successful of the two films, but will assume for now that it's probably unnecessary to go into detail on that.


K

Uh, Madget, I don't want to lecture you or anything, but Godard's use of the little tricks you mentioned has an extremely involved intellectual history. They aren't just meant to be cute. This is what I meant before when I said that Godard's use of genre-pastiche, Brechtian alienation-effects and all the rest had some meaning while Tarantino's use of them is "empty shtick." Maybe you could read up a little on this. I'm sure Charles could provide a link. Godard was essentially a political director and made use of Marxian aesthetic strategies perfected by Brecht and Artaud, among others. The Brechtian signboards and deliberate "movieness" aren't just meant to be "winky", they have a very specific function. This is pretty basic stuff these days, Film Studies 101. Again, not to lecture, but it's important to grasp this stuff if you want to understand the difference between these two.

You also might want to read up on the events of May 1968, the key event in France of the last 35 years, to understand where the post-'68 Godard is coming from.

? ... Maybe I could. But I'm already well aware that Godard's tricks have more meaning and context than Tarantino's. (Just because they have an intellectual context, doesn't mean they can't be winky or cute.)* My point is that if Tarantino has, in his own eyes, OUTGROWN Godard, his similar tricks and references in Kill Bill should be at least as intricate -- in fact, they should be more so. And, of course, they aren't; and yes, this is clear even to someone who isn't a film major and who hasn't studied Godard in detail.

If they aren't going to be as intricate or meaningful, they should at least be half as amusing and fun. Which again, they aren't.

Your condescension was, as usual, not particularly necessary, but thanks for the pointers.


K

* (or even masturbatory and/or inane, for that matter)