Quivering over Quentin’s queasy comeback

First,
let’s put some of the rumors to bed: Quentin Tarantino always envisioned Kill
Bill as a two-volume opus — he just didn’t spring the idea on Miramax
until things were nearly finished. Volume
1 actually lends itself to episodes better than, say, The Matrix Reloaded or either of the first two Lord of the Rings pictures. The reason it works is because
Tarantino breaks up his action — which covers a broad, Adaptation-like scope of time and settings — into chapters, so
the cliffhanger seems very natural.

          Volume
1 speeds by in a taut 97 minutes (at least 10 of which are credits), and,
as pledged by Tarantino, is virtually non-stop action. Volume 2 promises more character development and substance (not to
mention the name of Thurman’s character, as well as a likely appearance by the
guy she’s trying to kill), which makes it difficult to critique Volume 1.

          It’s
anybody’s guess how long Volume 2 will be, but since the two halves seem like they’ll be very different films, I
don’t have much problem with the dual release (other than twice as much green
lining Miramax’s coffers, in addition to shots at Oscars in two separate
years). It sounds like they would have been clunkier as one flick.

          I didn’t know much about Kill Bill, other than some of the
casting and its simple premise — a pregnant woman is shot and left for dead
on her wedding day but lives and tries to exact revenge on those responsible
— but as the opening credits unfurled, I got more and more excited.

          The Street Fighter‘s Sonny Chiba (if you
know True Romance, you know him)
co-starring and choreographing some fight scenes while Crouching Tiger‘s Yuen Woo-ping handled the rest? Photography from
Robert Richardson, who won an Oscar for JFK and shot the equally frenetic (not to mention Tarantino-penned) Natural Born Killers? A score from
Wu-Tang’s RZA? Music and an appearance by Japanese trash rockers The 5.6.7.8s?
Michael Parks returning as the From Dusk
Till Dawn sheriff? I could have gone home after the credits and been happy
just to have seen that collection of names following the super-cheesy feature
intros from the ’70s.

          But things got even better, starting
with a tight black-and-white close-up of Uma Thurman’s bloody face as an
unknown man attempts to clean her up (hint: his handkerchief is monogrammed
“Bob”) before shooting her in the head. Somewhere in there, Sonny & Cher’s
“Bang Bang, My Baby Shot Me Down” was played, but by this point, my head was
spinning and my notebook had fallen off my lap without me realizing it.

          The rest of Volume 1 plays out in non-sequential chapters, showing Thurman’s
character (we never learn her name — it’s bleeped out whenever anyone
mentions it, making it kind of like the suitcase in Pulp Fiction) hunting down her former associates, a group of hit
men called the Deadly Vipers Assassination Squad (DiVAS).

          If
you’ve seen the trailer, you already know that The Bride (that’s what we’re
supposed to call her for now) faces Lucy Liu’s Cottonmouth and Vivica A. Fox’s
Copperhead. Anyone suffering from ophidiophobia will notice they’re both named
after snakes, as are the DiVAS other two members, who are briefly seen and
played by Michael Madsen and Daryl Hannah.

          If you’re up on your Tarantino, you
might recall the whole idea of a five-member assassination squad from Fiction (remember Fox Force Five?), which makes sense because Tarantino and Thurman
came up with the loose idea for Kill Bill‘s
story while shooting Fiction. In Volume 1, we see The Bride overcome the
bullet to the head and subsequent four-year coma and partial paralysis to hit
up three different cities on three very different missions, which generally
involve gallons of blood as well as flying heads and limbs (one scene resembles
the wide shot of casualties at the train depot from Gone With the Wind).

          A Wind homage may not have been
Tarantino’s intention, though he pays tribute to so many other films, you’d
need a doctorate in cinema with a minor in pop culture references to catch it
all. They include martial arts epics like Game
of Death and The Master of the Flying
Guillotine, in addition to Kaboom cereal, borderline necrophilia, Japanese
anime, spaghetti westerns, and The Green Lantern. In other words, all things I
dig, aside from the anime (which is done really well), so take this review with
a grain of salt.

          Essentially,
it’s a mélange of the less sexual grind house films Tarantino saw as an
impressionable youth, and in keeping with his penchant for resurrecting
long-forgotten stars, here he attempts to revive Chiba and David Carradine (the
former reprises his television role of Hattori Hanzo, while latter plays Bill).

          But Volume 1 is all about the action. Remember how ridiculously lame
the big fight scene between Neo and the thousand Agent Smiths in The Matrix Reloaded looked? You won’t
get any of that here. There’s no CG, and that makes the fight scenes so much
more satisfying. Tarantino does it all with clever old-school camera tricks and
editing, and a little wire fu, too. Most of the battles involve knives or swords
(holding true to Fox Force Five dogma),
and one 20-minute segment is so bloody, it’s shown in black and white.

          And Volume 2? I can’t wait.

Interested
in raw, unsanitized movie ramblings from Jon? Visit his site, Planet Sick-Boy (www.sick-boy.com),
or listen to him on WBER’s Friday Morning Show.

This article appears in Oct 8-14, 2003.