#7: Kill Bill Vol. 1 and 2

The cinema of Quentin Tarantino is so unique, if one were to copy it (and many have tried), it would never amount to the magnitude and grandeur of the real McCoy. Tarantino was cinema's wunderkind in the 90s with "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction", showing genre movies could be fun, exciting, and unpredictable again. Then came "Jackie Brown", a more subdued work that cooled critics at the time, but has since become his most refined work, his "hangout movie" as he puts it.

Five years went by and fans were waiting anxiously for Tarantino's next bloodfest, but I don't think people were expecting what was to come next. "Kill Bill" is I think the director's greatest achievement to date, it was here he upped the ante in style and turned his obsession of movies into height pop art. The film was cleverly split into two separate pieces, and even though both movies can exist as their own entity, they can be seen stronger as a whole.

"Kill Bill" was released at the height of Hollywood's obsession with epic heroes found in films such as "Spiderman", "Harry Potter" and "Lord of the Rings", all of which broke box office records at some point. Tarantino's films can fall under this same category of creating his own mythology. The main myth in "Kill Bill" has to do with The Bride (Uma Thurman), she is a former hired assassin who is left for dead on her wedding day by her former employer Bill (David Carradine) along with a bunch of other hired guns played by Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Lui, Michael Madsen, and Darryl Hannah. The Bride is left for dead, she is in a coma for four years until she wakes and begins to plot her revenge.

The first volume of the film follows the basic revenge plot as The Bride tracks down Fox's character who has reformed into a domestic home life, and Lui's character who is the leader of the Japanese underworld. The first volume concerns itself with style and is probably the least talky of all of Tarantino's films. The film has been criticised for being a hollow genre exercise, however with Tarantino, it's in the way he plays with genre that it becomes personal to him. "Kill Bill Vol. 1" is full of many different Kung Fu references most of which you would have to be as well schooled as Tarantino himself to know them all. It's with volume one where Tarantino seems to be really having a lot of fun, fusing together so many genres from Kung Fu, to Japanese gangster, to spaghetti western. Tarantino's not just paying homage to all of these genres he's updating it for a contemporary audience, not unlike what Spielberg and Lucas did with Indiana Jones which updated old 1930s Saturday Matinee serials. The Bride is Tarantino's Indiana Jones, a new hero for a new generation, and Tarantino is the director to make this new kind of heroine look and act as cool as possible.



When we get to volume two of the story, we sit into what will become a more natural Tarantino movie. With volume one he has given us the set up and the mythology, now he gives time for his characters to breath. We finally see the face of Bill, who if Tarantino were still following the style of volume one we probably wouldn't see until the very end. Here we see Bill almost immediately, as we flashback to the moment right before the massacre at the wedding. We find out there was a love story between the Bride and Bill, this is part of what makes Tarantino's cinema so interesting, nothing is ever in black and white, Tarantino always pits his larger than life characters in a difficult circumstance, in this case a love story between the hero and the villain, not only that but we also find out they have a child together.

If volume one resembled a kung fu movie, then volume two represents the western, it's a much more slower film and more reflective. The Bride bridges the gap between the two cultures, she holds a code of honour that can reflect both. Uma Thurman gives the performance of her life in these two films, because it is a genre piece and her character is full of action is probably the reason she was never nominated for an Oscar. I would say the strongest characters in Tarantino's cinema as of late have come from his leading ladies. Along with The Bride, we also have Jackie Brown right up to today with Shoshana from "Inglorious Basterds". These are all strong women who fight back at the men who have scorned them, Tarantino shows a certain amount of pathos in these character that he doesn't in others.

All of Tarantino's films have had something to do with revenge, and "Kill Bill" is his ultimate revenge movie, it starts out simple and straight forward, but he's much too interesting a writer/director to just go with that. "Kill Bill" is a masterpiece because it fuses together so many of Tarantino's passions of genre, and transcends them into an entertaining action epic. Tarantino has called "Kill Bill" his most personal film, many people have wondered why since it never seems like he makes personal films. I think for a man who lives in movies so much the way he does, the way he made it is personal to him. He creates movies for his audience, he knows what makes a great memorable movie moment, which is why his films are full of them, I think it's by doing this he's letting us into what he loves, it just so happens the thing he loves the most is movies, and he wants us to love it just as much as he does, which is why we can't wait for the next time he tries to wow us.