Nate the Dork: "HOLY FUCKING SHIT HE'S BRINGING IT RAGING BULL STYLE"
― nate detritus (natedetritus), Saturday, 11 October 2003 19:32 (twenty years ago) link
― s1utsky (slutsky), Saturday, 11 October 2003 19:45 (twenty years ago) link
S1utsky: "yeh"
hey that black and white part was obviously that Sword of Doom reference I was talking about it isn't inexplicable !@#$#@!$@
I just heard that there's like an "easter egg" after the end credits, so now I'm pissed I didn't stay for them. Did anyone see it? Could you descibe it to me?
― Dan I., Saturday, 11 October 2003 19:55 (twenty years ago) link
― Dan Perry (Dan Perry), Saturday, 11 October 2003 19:56 (twenty years ago) link
what genre was the vernita green scene supposed to represent?
― ryan (ryan), Saturday, 11 October 2003 19:58 (twenty years ago) link
Dan: yeah, how great was that!
― s1utsky (slutsky), Saturday, 11 October 2003 20:05 (twenty years ago) link
― Dan I., Saturday, 11 October 2003 20:09 (twenty years ago) link
here: http://www.bol.ucla.edu/~alexward/script.htm
― Dan I., Saturday, 11 October 2003 20:24 (twenty years ago) link
― Dan I., Saturday, 11 October 2003 20:35 (twenty years ago) link
― adaml (adaml), Saturday, 11 October 2003 20:46 (twenty years ago) link
― Leee (Leee), Saturday, 11 October 2003 20:54 (twenty years ago) link
― Dan I., Saturday, 11 October 2003 21:14 (twenty years ago) link
Pam Grier blaxploitation, supposedly (though I am disappointed with the lack of razors hidden in her hair)
― nate detritus (natedetritus), Saturday, 11 October 2003 22:05 (twenty years ago) link
movie is worth seeing, but not the greatest that was released this year.
― Kingfish (Kingfish), Sunday, 12 October 2003 00:02 (twenty years ago) link
Bud = ZombieElle = WesternBill = "suspense" of all things.
Sorry.
― Dan I., Sunday, 12 October 2003 01:04 (twenty years ago) link
1) GO-GO! She steals the movie, IMHO, and her duel scene with The Bride is the highlight of the final big fight sequence.
2) The rockin' handclap/kick/synth(?) track that played as the anime O-ren Ishii was rooftop sniping. If this is a RZA track I just want an entire cd of this type of shit. If it's not RZA -- who is it?
: related note : I was surprised at the non-Wuness of the incidental music. Really simple yet suspenseful use of sounds with nary an MPC beat in sight.And that Morricone music *swoon*!
3) The orange skies fake ass airplane scenes.
Good movie. Can't wait to see it again.
― Jay Vee (Manon_70), Sunday, 12 October 2003 14:27 (twenty years ago) link
― nate detritus (natedetritus), Sunday, 12 October 2003 14:52 (twenty years ago) link
― Andrew L (Andrew L), Sunday, 12 October 2003 15:06 (twenty years ago) link
― Kingfish (Kingfish), Sunday, 12 October 2003 15:53 (twenty years ago) link
I will chop up violent people with a machete or bang their heads repeatedly in a door.
― Momus (Momus), Sunday, 12 October 2003 18:58 (twenty years ago) link
― jaymc (jaymc), Sunday, 12 October 2003 19:25 (twenty years ago) link
*those who own Beretta 70 will understand my dorkery.
― nate detritus (natedetritus), Sunday, 12 October 2003 19:40 (twenty years ago) link
but its the only thing the world still loves us for! well, that and our pizza pies. and our, how you say, yankee doodle mutherfucker cheeseburgers.
― scott seward, Sunday, 12 October 2003 19:50 (twenty years ago) link
That sounds like the best Applebee's menu item ever. Eatin' good in the neighborhood!
― nate detritus (natedetritus), Sunday, 12 October 2003 19:58 (twenty years ago) link
― Theodore Fogelsanger, Sunday, 12 October 2003 20:13 (twenty years ago) link
For what it's worth when I went to see it for a second time today (to sort out my conflicting thoughts on it) two jackasses brough their 10-12 year old sons and i thought that was pretty horrifying. I doubt they can appreciate the irony of the violence.
― ryan (ryan), Sunday, 12 October 2003 21:07 (twenty years ago) link
fyi to momus-kill bill has a great eyepatch scene.
― scott seward, Sunday, 12 October 2003 21:22 (twenty years ago) link
― ryan (ryan), Sunday, 12 October 2003 21:24 (twenty years ago) link
― ryan (ryan), Sunday, 12 October 2003 21:25 (twenty years ago) link
Yeah, well, it was a last minute change, I believe. Check the original teasers and trailers, and you may be able to see at least one or two quick cuts that are in color there that were b/w in the film.
...
I'm sorry, but this film just flat out sucked. I'm not even going to go into detail, because all I have to say is this - I was not engaged at all on any level whatsoever in any sort of emotion, experience, suspense, enjoyment (or distate, for that matter). It just felt totally flat, empty, and dull. Actually, fuck that, I'm not apologizing. This film sucked, and I do really only say this about once a year, but"I WANT MY TIME BACK!"
― Girolamo Savonarola, Sunday, 12 October 2003 21:26 (twenty years ago) link
― ryan (ryan), Sunday, 12 October 2003 21:33 (twenty years ago) link
Wouldn't it be nice if, in the year of 'shock and awe', an American director made a film which wasn't 'the most violent movie ever' or 'the ultimate film violence desensitizer'?
vs.
"Wouldn't it be nice if, in a time of racism, sexism, Republicanism, and general assholishness, a 'cool kids' magazine didn't gleefully rejoice in these things, in the name of supposedly 'desensitizing' us to them?"
― Sam J. (samjeff), Sunday, 12 October 2003 21:33 (twenty years ago) link
― Sam J. (samjeff), Sunday, 12 October 2003 21:34 (twenty years ago) link
visually too, it was quite lovely. and i enjoyed the music as well.
― scott seward, Sunday, 12 October 2003 21:34 (twenty years ago) link
That thesis was, I believe, disproved.
― Momus (Momus), Sunday, 12 October 2003 21:40 (twenty years ago) link
Hmm. The music I'm thinking of was during the "sword presentation ritual" with the whistling, with Edda Dell Orso (sp?) type singing - sounded just like something out of a Leone western. I need to check out this Bacalov feller. Any recommendations?
― Jay Vee (Manon_70), Sunday, 12 October 2003 23:02 (twenty years ago) link
― Kingfish (Kingfish), Sunday, 12 October 2003 23:07 (twenty years ago) link
Probably not a good thing though; little kids shouldn't be watching all that violence!
― Dan I., Monday, 13 October 2003 00:05 (twenty years ago) link
Oh Momus you're so cute when you're full of it!
― hstencil, Monday, 13 October 2003 00:28 (twenty years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Monday, 13 October 2003 01:12 (twenty years ago) link
WARNING: minor spoilers
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2003/10/10/DD25088.DTL&type=movies
Bloody 'Kill Bill' slices through endless combatMick LaSalle
"Technically, you shouldn't believe any review of Quentin Tarantino's "Kill Bill: Volume 1" that you've read so far because the film world's auteur du jour decided just this week to make last-minute tweaks in the film coming out today. He didn't finish tweaking until Thursday. On the other hand, it would take more than a few days and a few tweaks to turn this mess into a cohesive product. To be fair, Tarantino never asked anybody to take him seriously. But critics did anyway and set him up for the fall that he is about to take with "Kill Bill: Volume 1," a 90-minute orgy of endless sword fights, multiple severed limbs and gushing blood. It boggles the mind that after six years of silence, all Tarantino has to offer is this garbage.
I say this with no glee. There was a time when Tarantino seemed like the most promising filmmaker of his generation. And of course, he still has talent.
He has flair. He knows where to place a camera and how to maximize tension and take moments to the extreme. But with "Kill Bill," we realize that his flash and panache are in the service of absolute emptiness. This puerile, ugly fantasy is the sad but unmistakable product of a consciousness not worthy of serious attention.
In fairness, since no critic, including myself, saw the final version of the film, I'll go back for a second viewing after the movie opens.
The film -- really half a film -- takes its inspiration from the kung fu movies of the '70s and the Japanese and Hong Kong action extravaganzas of the '80s and '90s. Perhaps that in itself should serve as a clue. Tarantino's inspiration is coming secondhand, not from life but from fantasy, and from other people's fantasies, to boot. Once it was possible to assume that Tarantino's pop culture references were an ironic critique on the barrenness of media-age culture, but there's no mistaking it now: Tarantino's work is not a commentary on the barrenness. It is the barrenness.
Yet all would be forgiven if he at least turned in a decent kung fu movie. He doesn't. Instead of something kinetic and fast-paced, we get a ponderous wallow in gore. Originally conceived as one movie, "Kill Bill" is being released as two films, but "Volume 1" does not play like a discrete entity. Scenes are allowed to go on forever, as if to stretch this installment to feature length. And then it doesn't really end; it just stops. At least it does stop.
Uma Thurman's blood-covered face fills the screen in the movie's first shot.
She plays the Bride, an elite assassin whose wedding has been interrupted by her former associates. They've come and killed all her guests, and now her former boss, Bill (David Carradine), is there off camera to finish her off. As he shoots her in the head, the screen goes black. It's a disturbing opening, but it's also arresting. At this point, there's still hope.
"Kill Bill: Volume 1" is essentially a revenge saga. The Bride wakes up after a four-year coma, and just as soon as she can get her atrophied legs moving, she starts working her way down a list, killing people. In that way, the movie is like "A Chorus Line": The story doesn't move forward but sideways,
with each character getting a turn.
When the Bride shows up at the door of one enemy (Vivica A. Fox), the camera, as in an Asian action film, moves in for a pair of ominous close-ups as the soundtrack blares. It's an amusing touch, until we realize that Tarantino isn't making a parody but a bloated American tribute. The '70s- sounding soundtrack is cranked just into the zone of distortion, to replicate how it might have sounded in a small, empty theater 30 years ago. It's an authentic touch, but it's also 90 minutes of very loud, very bad music.
The movie is full of similar indulgences, including a tedious sequence about the making of a sword, and, even worse, a dull expository sequence, in which we find out how an American-born woman, Cottonmouth (Lucy Liu), became head of a Japanese crime syndicate. It's rendered as a Japanese anime, with lots of cartoon blood. Mainly, though, the movie is about combat -- with scenes of Thurman kicking with her long legs and holding a sword with two hands, as the bodies pile up in a circle around her.
Heads, arms and legs are cut off, and the blood gushes as from a shower. These dismemberments are not isolated incidents but the substance of the film, a blood-running motif. The centerpiece is a ridiculously overlong and grotesque scene in which the Bride, in pursuit of Cottonmouth, kills and dismembers scores, maybe hundreds, of people. The scene must go on for 30 minutes. It feels even longer.
As the body count mounts, and the blood soaks the floor, "Kill Bill" gradually begins to seem like a deeply neurotic expression hiding behind a screen of genre convention. Among Tarantino's many women with swords, we get Go Go (Chiaki Kuriyama), a 17-year-old in a Catholic school uniform who is Cottonmouth's lethal bodyguard. Whose delicious fantasy is this? And when steel nails penetrate her brain, and her eyes fill with blood, is that supposed to be funny? Or cool? Or arousing?
Let's just call it pornography. And let's just admit it's indefensible."
― Girolamo Savonarola, Monday, 13 October 2003 01:55 (twenty years ago) link
― Nicolars (Nicole), Monday, 13 October 2003 02:20 (twenty years ago) link
― scott seward, Monday, 13 October 2003 02:32 (twenty years ago) link
― TOMBOT, Monday, 13 October 2003 02:51 (twenty years ago) link
― nate detritus (natedetritus), Monday, 13 October 2003 02:51 (twenty years ago) link
― s1utsky (slutsky), Monday, 13 October 2003 04:24 (twenty years ago) link
― adaml (adaml), Monday, 13 October 2003 04:26 (twenty years ago) link
Then we'd both cry and cry and cry realizing that these were our fucking neighbors.
(translation: Girolamo, if you don't like it, fine, but that review is the biggest bunch of bullshit nonsense I've ever seen. How about you look up his review of Charlie's Angels and post that? I'm curious if he'd hate that too, since the only difference violence-wise between this and any number of films I've seen in the past, oh, five years is the fact that the violence is almost entirely perpetrated by and aimed at females.)
― Ally (mlescaut), Monday, 13 October 2003 04:29 (twenty years ago) link
― adaml (adaml), Monday, 13 October 2003 04:31 (twenty years ago) link