I can't believe I
almost forgot to write about the portion of the Tarantino
retrospective at The Loft Theater I checked out a few weeks ago. It
was a film festival that played over the course of a couple of
months, showing all of Tarantino's films, including one—True
Romance—that he didn't direct. (I don't recall if From Dusk 'Till
Dawn was a part of the lineup).
They sold a very cool
t-shirt to commemorate the event, and I made damn sure to snatch one
up.
The week I went they
were showing Kill Bill volumes One and Two. I hadn't seen them in
almost ten years—I caught them once apiece when they were playing
the multiplexes, and then once again on cable. My memory of them was
relatively positive—I've never thought they were Tarantino's
strongest work, tilting a little too far in the direction of
too-clever-by-half self-indulgence, but I recalled they had some
great action and beautiful photography.
Some of that opinion
still holds, but it's been tempered a bit now. Some sequences, such
as the bloody sword battle in the House of Blue Leaves and the
opening fight between Uma Thurman and Vivica Fox, I thought still
held up after all these years, and I'll always dig that animated
segment. Some of the other stuff, though...
I mean, I get
it—Tarantino's all about hip cleverness, overwrought dialogue
top-heavy with pop culture references, and visual nods to all his
favorite movies. If you're going to be a fan of his work, you have
to make peace with the fact that his characters tend to be a little
on the shallow side--more amalgams of exploitation film archetypes
than actual people—spouting lines that probably look really good on
paper but sound kind of silly coming out of someone's mouth (Kevin
Smith has the same problem). As one noted British film critic has
pointed out, his characters all sound the same, and they all sound
like him.
I don't think any of
that was what bothered me during this particular viewing. What got
to me was that these movies are pretty flawed in ways that, for me,
are hard to overlook now. It's been said time and again that
Tarantino's films are juvenile, but it's never come home to me more
powerfully than while watching the Kill Bill movies back to back.
They feel like the work of a fifteen-year-old; a very precocious,
very, very talented fifteen-year-old who's seen almost every
movie ever made, but a fifteen-year-old nonetheless.
He tries to purchase
dramatic potency with weak credit—we're intended to feel
outrage that Thurman has lost her child, and root for her as she
travels her road of vengeance, but scenes that would give us any real
grounding in the storyline are few and far between. There's a bit in
the first film where she wakes up from a coma in the hospital to find
that her unborn child is gone, and some more stuff between her and
David Carradine at the end of the second film, but that's about it.
I guess we're just supposed to imagine the rest. Undermining these
scenes are vast hills and valleys of camp. Some fans and critics
might protest that he was playing with the conventions of the
“revenge movie”, but I honestly think he was trying to tell a
more-or-less straightforward revenge story, and with all the
crazy-cool stuff he was planning on including in the movies, he
forgot the most important part—making the audience feel there's a
good reason all this is happening.
Speaking of forgetting
things: it totally escaped my mind how magnificent Gordon Liu is as
the hardass kung fu master Pai Mei. His scenes are the best thing
about the whole Kill Bill enterprise. He's an asshole version of
Yoda, an uproariously sarcastic, curmudgeonly reworking of an old
school kung fu movie expert. He's so good I wished there was more of him;
as in, I would have watched an entire two hour movie following his
exploits instead of Thurman's. It makes me think maybe Tarantino,
like George Lucas, needs a voice whispering in his ear, “You know,
you should focus more on this part of the story instead of
that—it's way better.” I'm not a filmmaker and I'm not
about to tell someone of Tarantino's obvious talent how to make
movies, but I do wonder if he workshops his scripts anymore with
anyone who isn't afraid to tell him that not all of his ideas are
great ones.
There are some cool
meta-ideas going on here that I liked. Thurman's Blood-Spattered
Bride (a name taken, if I'm remembering correctly, from the title of
a Spanish horror movie from the early Seventies) loses her child;
O-ren Ishii, her main opponent in the first film, is herself an
orphaned child who saw her parents murdered. The theme of a bride
covered in blood comes up throughout the two films: in Vivica Fox's
house we see a white painting splashed with red; when Thurman first
meets Pai Mei, she's wearing a white blouse stitched with red
flowers. The idea of the corruption of children, both intentional
and unintentional, comes up several times—there's poor O-ren Ishii
and the training she received from Bill, who partook in her parents'
murder; Fox's daughter who, unbeknownst to Thurman until after the
fact, sees her mother die; and Thurman's own daughter, whom it is
implied will become a killer like her mother when she's old enough,
because what else happens to women taken under Bill's wing?
So it's not like I'm
saying it's all bad. Just flawed. Lots of perfectly decent movies
are. These just happen to be flawed enough that I probably won't
watch them again for a very long time, if ever. I'd say at least
another ten years. I'll watch Pulp Fiction again gladly, maybe Death
Proof one more time just to make sure what I thought I saw was really
what I saw (a genuinely bad Tarantino movie), and for sure I'll check
out Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained again.
But not Kill Bill.
Those two films, I think, I can write off for good now.
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