Kill bill vol 1 and vol 2: thoughts and impressions.

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 My favorite movie is kill bill. It’s one of my favorite things. If it was not a perfect rendition of grind house/exploitation revenge madness of captured light. Then the world would be poorer place for it.


When I was an early teen I loved what most people consider bad movies kaiju, kung fu, tokusatsu and spaghetti westerns. 


Now these are little more in vogue but the kind of crap I was into at the time made me the odd man out.


Kill bill is the summation of certain strands of aesthetic thought for me. I downloaded and read all of Quentin’s scripts when I was in high school. Kill bill is not his best script in some ways but it is his most honest. A Strange skeleton to layers a collage of shots from other movies on a chassis that is pastiche of every genre that film snobs hated.


 And yet this orchestration of cut paste aesthetic comes to life like frankensteins monster every time you smash the play button.  


The house blue leaves… the best fight scene ever.


O’rens Origen story likey the only time a western director found a way to use anime that did not seem completly incongruent with the project except maybe the animatrix.


As a story it is simple (someone did some bad stuff and now they got to pay).  There are some reversals and subversion of expectations (B.B. being alive) Yet ultimately it is a revenge story. 


Most of Quentin’s movies are characters like in true romance harping on things that are part of a personal mythology. Kill bill is the scripture/Rosetta stone of that mythology.


Tarantino said it was the movie he was put on this earth to make. I get that, I agree with that. It is very much an anomaly in the work of cinema. Most people who enjoy the kind of movies this one is in love with. Don’t respect them enough to make one without it being a parody.  Or like riff tracks they are something to shit on.


Kill bill’s strangest gift is an ability to give humanity to cliches and absurdist tendency and say I don’t love movies inspite of that stuff but sometimes it is because of it. 


Kung fu and samurai flicks are like a musical or a ballet. The song and dance number has a relationship to the ass kicking choreography of exploitations classics. 


It is the main dish the very reason for the film existing. Kill bill subverts even this closing on a non violent (except pai mei five point exploding palm technique) note of two murdering bastards talking about their feelings. 


More than anything kill bill’s primary originality is to use camp and absurdity for tragic pathos. When bill takes his last five steps it has dramatic weight. He literally walks into the hell he has earned.


“There are consequences for breaking the heart of a psychotic murdering bastard. You experienced some of them.”


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