Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2

Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003) and Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (2004)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino. Starring Uma Thurman.

Perhaps there's no excuse for taking so long to see these acclaimed films by Quentin Tarantino, but in a lot of ways, I'm really glad I saw them when I did... Viewing them straight after two semesters of Film History made them all the more interesting. Plain and simple, the Kill Bill films are a cornucopia of filmic styles, cliches, and references that overwhelmed this film student's brain, but left me highly impressed. To some extent in the past, I've felt that I don't understand "the big deal" with Tarantino, but now I definitely take that back. There's no one else like him.

The two volumes of Kill Bill are highly different, but since they were originally intended to be one film, I'll talk about them together. The films are best summarized by Roger Ebert's simple explanation: "The movie is all storytelling and no story." (Source). EVERY possible style is employed at least once... from black & white to voiceover to animation to anything else you can think of. Tarantino jumps from homages to classic Hollywood with a rear-screen projected sequence to Hong Kong Kung Fu films through Gordon Liu to American and Italian Westerns and beyond with a frenzied energy that somehow holds it all together. For every source I identified, I'm sure countless references went over my head. (I mean, just glance at this "Kill Bill Reference Guide" to get a sense of the scale we're talking about).

It doesn't seem enough to call these films "good" -- because they're really not good or bad... they're more in the category of "damn impressive." Sure, the violence is intense, but it's made bearable by Uma Thurman's unyielding determination and stoicism. She's a fascinating heroine. Plus, it's a revenge story, so for every bad guy hacked apart by that amazing sword of hers, you can't help but cheer. Overall, I think everyone should see these films... They're a crash course in film studies in four hours or less. They're proof that filmmaker master artists still exist in an industry where the Michael Bay of the world are slowly taking over. They're classics, less than 10 years after they were released.