Come anticipate Kill Bill with me

Pam Grier blaxploitation, supposedly (though I am disappointed with the lack of razors hidden in her hair)

movie is worth seeing, but not the greatest that was released this year.

Bud = Zombie
Elle = Western
Bill = "suspense" of all things.

Sorry.

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.

I will chop up violent people with a machete or bang their heads repeatedly in a door.

*those who own Beretta 70 will understand my dorkery.

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.

That sounds like the best Applebee's menu item ever. Eatin' good in the neighborhood!

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.

fyi to momus-kill bill has a great eyepatch scene.

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!"

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?"

visually too, it was quite lovely. and i enjoyed the music as well.

That thesis was, I believe, disproved.

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?

Probably not a good thing though; little kids shouldn't be watching all that violence!

Oh Momus you're so cute when you're full of it!

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 combat
Mick 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."

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.)

That was one of my favourite moments in the movie! Actually, I'm not really outraged that he didn't like it, but just wanted to take this opportunity to say that I loved it.

what a douche

(Obv. the answer is yes but not for any reasons to do with violence at all, I mean god, have either of them worked out in ten years)

Here is an excerpt from Tarantino's script for Tom and Jerry Kill Bill:

'Boss Tanaka's head is liberated from its body... The head hits the floor... And from the spot between its shoulder blades, a geyser of blood shoots up in the air.'

Hmm, 'liberated', hmm, 'geyser'. Interesting choice of words. Is the author an American, by any chance?

DESTRUCTION IS NOT 'LIBERATION'! NO BLOOD FOR OIL!