Well, I did end up seeing Vol. 2 not long ago; I’ve been trying to write up a big-style, in depth critique of the whole work; but, I’m having difficulty pulling together everything I want to say. For the moment, I give up, and I’ll just give the short version:

I do think that Vol. 2 is a fundamentally sounder piece of work than Vol. 1 and by way of this fact strengthens the work as a whole. The harshness of my initial assessment has been tempered; I do believe Kill Bill to be a step forward for cinema, or, in any event, something far more than the ineffectual masturbation (or “leftover ejaculate,” as I think I put it) that I originally characterized Vol. 1 to be on its own.

This isn’t to say Vol. 2 isn’t plenty problematic, or that it doesn’t have some real clunker scenes. And though the dialogue here is admittedly much stronger than it was in Vol. 1, my faith in Tarantino’s “witty pen” has definitely taken a sharp blow overall. As a writer, strangely, he seems more and more amateurish by the movie.

But conceptually, Kill Bill pans out to be pretty interesting, the elements of this pastiche “revenge story” fleshed out in some exciting ways and in some interesting directions. There are certainly a number of good things to be said about Vol. 2 on its own terms. For one thing, it is more tonally consistent than Vol. 1. Not entirely consistent, but there are no geysers of retro-blood cartoonishly spraying from hacked off limbs to clash with the grittier material which is more Tarantino’s niche. Whether or not this makes the House of Blue Leaves sequence stick all the MORE out like a sore thumb, or whether it give us a more reasonable basis on which to critically set it apart as a distinctly demarcated homage to a particular genre, I’ll leave open to debate for now, though I lean towards the former; -- and the same issue can be debated as regards the Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei. In the case of the Pai Mei sequence, I’m more inclined to grant leeway, because I really appreciate the functional manner in which it punctuates the unfolding events, and the way it simultaneously offers a break from, and dramatically informs the resolution of, the Bride’s, er – dilemma – of the time. Plus, I liked Pai Mei.

But overall, Tarantino concentrates on his strengths here – graphic, realistic violence that prods the audiences’ sensitive underbelly and makes them squirm both physically and psychologically. It helps take the frivolous revenge-fantasy to a more interesting level. The burial sequence particularly stands out as the kind of thing that can rightly go down as vintage Tarantino, alongside the ear-slicing scene of Reservoir Dogs, or the rape sequence of Pulp Fiction. Extremely unsettling, but also a hell of a ride – which almost makes it even more unsettling. And what’s more, quite uniquely handled, technically speaking. It was pretty breathtaking.

Other notes: Not unsurprisingly, Bill and Budd make far, far more interesting characters than O-Ren or (whatever Vivica Fox’s forgettable character’s code-name was, I no longer remember.) And Elle, while there isn’t very much “there,” is adequately performed by Hannah, at least in this half, her scene engaging and effective. All in all, I felt that all the characters could’ve used a little more fleshing out – odd, given the 4 hour length of the total work – but, Bill is sophisticated enough to make the overall climax and resolution rather fascinating on their own terms, as well as (expectedly) a self-reflexive commentary of sorts.

There are some real problems to be encountered when we get down to character motivations; a lot of information is lacking here. Bill, I get. It ain’t pretty, but it makes sense. Kiddo? No. Tarantino overplays the pregnancy issue as far as I’m concerned. I don’t believe for a minute that a hardened assassin, trained under Pai Mei (nor am I given any reason to believe Pai Mei would teach her the Buddha’s Palm or whatever it was), gets a blue indicator on a pregnancy test and – boom – throws in the towel, just like that, growing teary-eyed and waxing poetic on the sacredness of motherhood within ten minutes of her discovery. The scene in which she aborts the assassination – and (successfully!) solicits her counter-assassin’s empathy as, you know, a fellow Woman – is a real turkey on all fronts.

This is but one example – there are a lot of minor quibbles I had, particularly with the daughter – but in Vol. 2, the quibbles were balanced out enough by strokes of genius that it never quite reached the level where they sullied my overall appreciation for what I was seeing. I was surprised by how intense Vol. 2 is. It is curious to me that this got an R rating, but that they had to desaturate a bunch of “cartoon violence” in Vol. 1 to get the same.

Was it a mistake to split it? I think so; though, at the same time, I no longer find it as horrendously unreasonable as I was initially inclined to. Four hours is a long-ass time for a movie this intense, and Vol. 2 manages to stand as its own distinct entity a little more successfully than Vol. 1. Though I suppose being Vol. 2 is in and of itself an advantage.

Anyhow, I encourage other detractors – AdamF springing to mind, maybe there was another – to give Vol. 2 a shot when you get around to it. Overall, Kill Bill is a big ball of clumsy, but Vol. 2 is better than 1, and makes the whole seem far more palatable, even admirable for its ambition, and certain aspects of its execution.


K


PS - Dumas; I'm not sure if you've seen 2, but Thurman fares better here also; she's much more convincing crying and screaming and being tortured than she is with Snarky-n-Sassy Dialogue, Quentin-Style.

In related news, Tarantino supposedly pressured Miramax into finally releasing Yimou's HERO -- but what's more interesting is, at least according to the source I'm perusing here, that Tarantino has ultimately convinced them to release the uncut 120 minute version. Due to the original deal Yimou cut with Miramax, the uncut version has previously been unavailable, even overseas in its asian theatrical runs.

Here's the blurb:

http://tarantino.webds.de/tarantino/news/2004/031604.htm

I do wonder as to the actual politics behind all this. Seems sorta fishy to me. Also, I'm not crazy about "It's pretty much what I did for Iron Monkey." (Iron Monkey was edited for content and completely rescored.)

But if HERO's truly uncut now and maintains its original soundtrack, subtitles, etc., I'll definitely catch it in the theater. I suppose a "Quentin Tarantino Presents" plugged in at the front is the price you pay. (Sigh) ....

Again, not that HERO's all that, but it has its merits and I've wanted to see Yimou's cut from the start.


K

This guy gets Tarantino, and offers some interesting criticisms of KB2:



If only he understood Jarmusch ...

I think that's more a problem in, say, the pregnancy sequence than the live-burial sequence. The live-burial sequence isn't about the character of the Bride at all, and her reaction is no more inconsistent than anything else in the film. The live-burial sequence is more about the audience, and vicariously taking them through one of their own worst fears. With Clint Eastwood, with his resolute stolidity, the scene would've lost all of its evocative power and seemed transparently absurd. A character like the Man With No Name simply doesn't get buried alive. An emotional and unconvincing punching bag like Kiddo does.

It was already well-established back in Vol. 1 that the Bride is far from a rock, emotionally speaking, and that's further emphasized in Vol. 2. I agree this is problematic, but in the burial sequence, it actually works to the benefit of the film's intent (or the scene's intent at least.) To me it's more problematic when it comes to, for instance, accepting, even within Tarantino's fictional universe, that Pai Mei actually taught her the Buddha's Palm manuever or what have you, when he refused to teach the obviously more sophisticated Bill. I don't accept that a hardened assassin would grow all weepy and beseeching because of a sudden pregnancy; I don't accept that she'd so profusely mourn the baby's loss when emerging from her coma; I don't accept that if she did, she would have no problem then killing a new mother and leaving her child to fend for itself; I don't accept that she'd master Pai Mei's training; and the list goes on. I do accept that -- particularly with her still womanly emotional nature in place from early on in the movie -- she'd break down in the face of being buried alive, assassin or no. Anybody would break down in the face of being buried alive. I see no trangression on Tarantino's part in maintaining that fact as a part of his own fictive Kill Bill world. And like I say, it assists the scene's power greatly on its own terms.


K

Kiddo wasn't a trained assassin when she found out she was pregnant. The moment she found out, she ceased to be an assasin, regardless of Bill's Superman speech. At that moment, she ceased to be a killer and became a mother. By the time she woke from the coma and grieved her baby's loss, she most definitely was no longer an assassin (she had to become one again, just as surely as she had to will her big toe to move; as she regenerated her body, she regenerated the killer inside her). That was the whole point of the epic.

Matthew

Which I think is the fundamental problem the critic Charles quoted is calling attention to. (Unless that's what you're responding to?) I.e. "Tarantino does attempt to generate the kind of catharsis that he usually makes it his business to mock," and "Kill Bill Vol. 2 is the one in which Tarantino most consistently attempts earnestness, and as a result it's his weakest effort."

I like your summation though, you put it clearly and simply and of course you're right. But it's exactly that emotionally cloying core that I think makes the movie fundamentally weak. It plays against Tarantino's strengths and he looks amateurish trying to reconcile a colorful, high-adrenaline retro-homage-martial-arts-romp with a tear-jerking ode to the beauty of Motherhood (in a fictive universe where such Chicken Soup For the Soul style sentimentality has no coherent place and in the kind of cartoonish characters one is not prone to aesthetically accept it from.)

I realize you disagree with this and that the emotional core of the story worked very effectively for you, that you're able to accept the narrative's ambitions on their own straightforward terms. More power to you; but maybe having said this will help further demarcate our differing reactions.

To me, ultimately, Kill Bill probably would've worked better if it was modeled even more closely on the kind of story Lady Snowblood tells. Not that he doesn't already borrow liberally enough from it. But, in Lady Snowblood, Kaji Meiko's character is more decidedly archetypal. In the kind of over-the-top formalist universe employed in both Snowblood and Kill Bill, it makes aesthetic sense, to me, to embrace the mythic. Lady Snowblood IS revenge -- she was the seed of vengeful intent, conceived in hate and never permitted to consider a "normal" life. She's barely human, and yet, Toshiya (and Meiko) manage to eke a moving vulnerability from this deadly character, arising more out of the fact of her being imprisoned by what she is -- a victim of the very mythicism being invoked, if you will. This works for me -- I think -- because it's an emotional evocation that can work on its own established terms, without crossing over to borrow from real-world dramatic cliches. Talking about it reminds me of an argument that (I think) Charles was making a while back about it being silly for, say, the Hulk to try to tackle real-world issues like, I dunno, AIDS or homelessness or gun control. Though "motherhood" would be far easier to mythicize (?) than issues like those; but Tarantino doesn't really mythicize it much. He plays it straight and let's the emotional cliche of "the beauty of motherhood" do his work for him as a storyteller, in a context that renders it (to me) fairly absurd.

Anyhow, if you ever end up seeing Snowblood, let me know your thoughts.


K

Well said, I wish I'd come up with that. Still haven't watched LS (on sale at Tower, 20 bucks), though, but I'm getting there.

And, "mythologize".

Also, I don't necessarily agree with whatshisface's particular criticisms, but it was refreshing to see someone take on Tarantino as a grindhouse formalist rather than some wanky pastiche peddler who writes funny dialogue. David Denby dismissed him as a guy without any taste, which couldn't be more thickheaded if a critic tried (but Armond White gives it his best). Just because one takes things from films which aren't very good seriously doesn't mean one accepts whatever's given (obviously, when stated this way, but those guys never state it obviously).

There's a related discussion about masculinity and KB2 over at the film philosophy forums . This was sparked by a link to the recent Sight and Sound review of the film.

Thanks; though really, there's not much credit to be taken: the film itself expresses this exact thing rather explicitly. It's a big part of what impressed me about it; it has the kind of sophisticated understanding of itself you just wouldn't expect from a b-grade movie of this nature, and explores its own narrative with a level of innovation that strikes me as way ahead of its time.

K

I know what I'm going to be watching tonight.

See, I didn't find Kiddo's turn toward motherhood particularly cloying, and it seems to me that that critic's claim that this move doesn't play to Tarantino's strengths reads more like the writer's refusal to accept the filmmaker not doing what he (the critic) expects of him. Not the first time a critic dissed a filmmaker for not giving her or him what she or he wanted.

Matthew