Last evening, in a fit of "oh-what-the-hell" impulsiveness, I treated myself to a trio of DVDs, a rare thing considering (a) I haven't bought a DVD for myself since I got the player, and (b) I can't even remember the last time I treated myself to a video of any sort. So, I wound up snagging the original The Manchurian Candidate (one of my favourite films of all time, John Frankenheimer at his paranoiac best), Ray (all those various plans to see it gang aft agley), and, as you've probably surmised from the image atop, Kill Bill Volume 2. Saving Ray for a rainy day, and having seen Manchurian as many times as some people change their hairstyles, I settled into the Tarantino last night and prepared for the awkwardness with which I have come to expect as my natural reaction to the ever-vaunted Quentin. Having watched it twice now, I find myself questioning my critical position, for once again it seems I'm in an extreme minority, like a Puritan at a rave, in being one of the very few people unimpressed by the film, and as probably the only person who thinks the first film better than the second. Kill Bill 2, plainly and simply put, caused in me the same reactions that Pulp Fiction, to my mind the most extravagantly overrated film of the nineties, did, by which I mean, among other things, frustration, snarkiness, and boredom. To say that I rolled my eyes a lot is like saying Aretha Franklin can hit a few high notes: it would be an understatement of Wildean facetiousness. I thought the movie nothing more than empty, stylish crap, pretentious and self-indulgent, to say nothing of tedious-- and because of that reaction, cast against what so many others have said about it, I'm wondering if there's something I'm just missing, or if the rest of the world has just been duped by Tarantino into believing that his shit doesn't stink. Writing this now, I can't say I have any answers, but I should probably try to work towards some. You can read the effort here, though with the warning that there are spoilers and countless examples of exasperated invective to follow. Consider yourselves warned.
I should probably stick in a few clarifications here. I'm not preternaturally disposed against Tarantino: I thought Reservoir Dogs one of the best movies of the 90s, a tight, quirky, ingenious little film as energizing as any film I can think of in the past twenty years. I should also say that I'm impressed, generally, by his ambition and his audacity. He has a great eye sometimes, and you have to respect his allusiveness and his generic virtuosity. But let me describe my reaction to Pulp Fiction when I first saw it, years ago in a local repertory theatre in a double bill with Reservoir Dogs. After loving, just loving, Dogs, I was ready for the new flick, but as it progressed I found myself getting so frustrated and so angry with the film that I wanted to throw my drink at the screen. I'd never had that reaction to a movie before, and I haven't since. I felt like my time was being robbed by a guy who knew full-well that he wasting my time, and who was making me sit through two hours and change of his cinematic onanism, not least of which was the idiotic two-or-so minute shot of Bruce Willis' arse as he walked away from the camera. I didn't need this self-important, heavy-handed, narratologically-challenged crap. I'd still contend that you could edit about an hour of that film and no one would miss it. It was like watching one of those dreadful student "art" films that's all intention and no accomplishment: when I wasn't infuriated by it, I was so bored by it that I was (literally) rolling my wrists as if I, in that movie theatre, could make Quentin hurry the fuck up. No such luck, of course. But even now, having had to sit through the film several times in several contexts, my reaction remains the same. I think I'd rather watch Surf Nazis Must Die! again than be forced to endure another sitting of Pulp Fiction.
Mercifully, my reaction to KB2 wasn't quite as strong or as intense, but all the same elements were there: the trite dialogue that thinks it's brilliant, the annoying super-stylization that's really just a testament to Quentin's encyclopedic conceit, the long (long, long), drawn-out sections that could have been trimmed by half or two-thirds with absolutely no loss to the film. I've come to believe that, in his films since Pulp Fiction (with Jackie Brown a bit of an exception here, but not entirely), Tarantino is at his worst when his films are at their talkiest, as in that horrible scene in which David Carradine relates the legend of Pai Mei, occasionally stopping to insert toots on his overly-used flute. The rhythm goes off, the narrative seems to stall like a standard in a snowstorm, and I, sitting there watching the film, just want to grab that flute out of Carradine's hands and shove it right down his throat. There are so many scenes like that in KB2 that I think my shoulders slumped enough times in defeat to have permanently dislocated my clavicle down around my ankles. "Oh Gawd, not again" was probably my most repeated response through the first viewing. That, and Apu's sometime reaction on The Simpsons: "Shut up! Shut up! Why do you not shut up?" Grrrr. Arrgh.
So, yes, I found KB2 tiresome (and booooring) to no end, to say nothing of being as predictable as an episode of Three's Company. (With, I should add, one exception: the Bride's final discovery of Bill, which was both clever and effective.) But it's frustrating when one knows what's coming, and one knows all too well that style is going to be far more important than story or characterization. The Bride ends up buried alive? Oh, gee, how will she get out of that situation? Let me guess, we're going to have a backstory now to explain how she's going to get out, a flashback that adds precious little to the narrative as a whole. Wonderful. Gee, we've been through a movie and a half in which the primary female characters are named after snakes? Gee, I wonder (I wonder, wonder who, who wrote the book of.... oh, never mind) when one of them will use a snake, of course in the heavy-handed Freudian would-be irony of a woman using a snake to kill a man. Ingenious! We have a character with one eye. I wonder what will happen to her. How inspired! Gee, Bill mentions a secret technique of killing that even he does not know, so how, how I ask you, do you think he is going to die? Give me a bloody break. The movie telegraphs all of its punches so far in advance that I wish my paycheque would come as early. And along the way, we're going to have hear a number of over-wrought, over-written, ham-fisted speeches, including a trite exegesis of the Superman mythology that seems like Tarantino imitating his own Madonna speech in Reservoir Dogs, but with the plodding, "duh-I-never-would-have-thought-of-that-Gomer" (yuk yuk) manner of M. Night Shyamalan. I won't even get started on the film's would-be-noirish prologue that's as overripe as nine year-old bananas, and in which Uma Thurman overacts so badly that she made me think she'd put Bette Davis to shame-- if Bette Davis were high on cocaine and doing her worst snarling Barbara Stanwyck impersonation. And let's not forget David Carradine, whose voice has become a bizarre but fascinating instrument, who seems to have learned from his Grasshopper-tenure at the William Shatner School of Pregnant Pauses. (Michael Madsen has obviously been studying there at the sophomore level.) Tarantino's film is so hammy, even his credits-- his bloody credits!-- are annoying, especially with the grade-three level of sophistication of the Q&U bit and the crossing out of the names of the leads killed off in the movies (with, God help me, that faux-coy sequel-suggesting question mark over Darryl Hannah's name that makes me fear for my sanity). This is the sort of inanity that makes me want to start drinking-- heavily, and straight from the bottle.
The thing is, as much as I was awkward with some of Kill Bill Volume 1, at least it had vivacity to it, something I think sadly lacking from the sequel. For the gaps in the first film's logic and story and characterizations, there was at least a macabre exuberance to it, especially in those magnificently choreographed fight scenes, evident in this film really only in the (unfortunately short) fights scenes with Elle Driver and Pai Mei. Honestly, after a while, I reached the point where I was saying to myself, "Oh, please, don't let them start talking again," which, of course, they would, and I'd feel the story grind to a screeching halt. Thank goodness I purchased the DVD, so I can find the more interesting scenes with ease. Had I bought the damned movie on video, it'd probably never get watched again, and even still it might not.
But this returns me to my original dilemma: why are others so enamoured, even thrilled, by this movie? I get certain reasons-- Tarantino's allusiveness and cheekiness, the would-be avant-garde-ry of the cinematography and the editing, the plain-old-fashioned violence. Beyond those reasons, though, I just don't see what others see in this turgid flick (and it seems to me a "flick" more than it is a "film"). I'm increasingly of an opinion of despair about Tarantino, very much to my mind the Mariah Carey of contemporary film, once a figure of great potential but now given to ego-driven hack work that makes me think redemption is no longer probable or possible.
Perhaps I've become too aesthetically conservative in my old age, though I'd like to believe that's not the case. Perhaps I'm just no longer impressed by the machinations of the so-called "cutting edge." Or, perhaps, I'm just getting old, and I want movies to have both heart and intelligence, rather than just cheeky cleverness. Tarantino is to me a kind of earnest smart-aleck, oxymoronic as that may see. I've become weary of his pretentiousness and his smirking, ironic self-awareness that is neither as ironic or as self-aware as it thinks it is. It doesn't help, either, that I think he's basically become a one-trick pony, and now that I've seen his trick I'm no longer interested.
Or maybe I'm just out of step, which would not be a new thing. I don't mind being the dissenting voice-- I have been so on such widely-praised junk as Friends, Sex and the City, and Seinfeld-- even if it means me seeming naive, traditional, curmudgeonly, or even clueless. But for all the reviews that I've read of Kill Bill 2, as with Pulp Fiction, I haven't found a blasted one that inclines me even slightly to think I might just be wrong about the movies, that I might just be too set in my critical ways, which I do allow is certainly a possibility. All these years later, I still think Pulp Fiction is a steaming pile of elephant turd, and I suspect my thinking on KB2 won't be any fundamentally different ten or twenty years from now.
I just don't know anymore. It bothers me that so many people are so enthralled by Tarantino's technique that perhaps they're completely privileging style over substance, loathe as I am to make such a distinction. It bothers me almost as much that perhaps I'm missing out on one of the great directors of our time in his prime because I just can't see what other people see. Call them aesethetic differences, if we must. It's a shame, though. I want so much to like Tarantino more than I do, because I genuinely appreciate what he's tried to do. He has, however, become that most dreaded of things: painfully, painfully boring. "Do you think I'm sadistic?" Bill asks at the beginning of both movies, and both times I heard Tarantino's voice lurking in the background. To which I'm now regrettably forced to answer, yes, Quentin, yes, I do. And give my best to Mariah Carey.
Mercifully, my reaction to KB2 wasn't quite as strong or as intense, but all the same elements were there: the trite dialogue that thinks it's brilliant, the annoying super-stylization that's really just a testament to Quentin's encyclopedic conceit, the long (long, long), drawn-out sections that could have been trimmed by half or two-thirds with absolutely no loss to the film. I've come to believe that, in his films since Pulp Fiction (with Jackie Brown a bit of an exception here, but not entirely), Tarantino is at his worst when his films are at their talkiest, as in that horrible scene in which David Carradine relates the legend of Pai Mei, occasionally stopping to insert toots on his overly-used flute. The rhythm goes off, the narrative seems to stall like a standard in a snowstorm, and I, sitting there watching the film, just want to grab that flute out of Carradine's hands and shove it right down his throat. There are so many scenes like that in KB2 that I think my shoulders slumped enough times in defeat to have permanently dislocated my clavicle down around my ankles. "Oh Gawd, not again" was probably my most repeated response through the first viewing. That, and Apu's sometime reaction on The Simpsons: "Shut up! Shut up! Why do you not shut up?" Grrrr. Arrgh.
So, yes, I found KB2 tiresome (and booooring) to no end, to say nothing of being as predictable as an episode of Three's Company. (With, I should add, one exception: the Bride's final discovery of Bill, which was both clever and effective.) But it's frustrating when one knows what's coming, and one knows all too well that style is going to be far more important than story or characterization. The Bride ends up buried alive? Oh, gee, how will she get out of that situation? Let me guess, we're going to have a backstory now to explain how she's going to get out, a flashback that adds precious little to the narrative as a whole. Wonderful. Gee, we've been through a movie and a half in which the primary female characters are named after snakes? Gee, I wonder (I wonder, wonder who, who wrote the book of.... oh, never mind) when one of them will use a snake, of course in the heavy-handed Freudian would-be irony of a woman using a snake to kill a man. Ingenious! We have a character with one eye. I wonder what will happen to her. How inspired! Gee, Bill mentions a secret technique of killing that even he does not know, so how, how I ask you, do you think he is going to die? Give me a bloody break. The movie telegraphs all of its punches so far in advance that I wish my paycheque would come as early. And along the way, we're going to have hear a number of over-wrought, over-written, ham-fisted speeches, including a trite exegesis of the Superman mythology that seems like Tarantino imitating his own Madonna speech in Reservoir Dogs, but with the plodding, "duh-I-never-would-have-thought-of-that-Gomer" (yuk yuk) manner of M. Night Shyamalan. I won't even get started on the film's would-be-noirish prologue that's as overripe as nine year-old bananas, and in which Uma Thurman overacts so badly that she made me think she'd put Bette Davis to shame-- if Bette Davis were high on cocaine and doing her worst snarling Barbara Stanwyck impersonation. And let's not forget David Carradine, whose voice has become a bizarre but fascinating instrument, who seems to have learned from his Grasshopper-tenure at the William Shatner School of Pregnant Pauses. (Michael Madsen has obviously been studying there at the sophomore level.) Tarantino's film is so hammy, even his credits-- his bloody credits!-- are annoying, especially with the grade-three level of sophistication of the Q&U bit and the crossing out of the names of the leads killed off in the movies (with, God help me, that faux-coy sequel-suggesting question mark over Darryl Hannah's name that makes me fear for my sanity). This is the sort of inanity that makes me want to start drinking-- heavily, and straight from the bottle.
The thing is, as much as I was awkward with some of Kill Bill Volume 1, at least it had vivacity to it, something I think sadly lacking from the sequel. For the gaps in the first film's logic and story and characterizations, there was at least a macabre exuberance to it, especially in those magnificently choreographed fight scenes, evident in this film really only in the (unfortunately short) fights scenes with Elle Driver and Pai Mei. Honestly, after a while, I reached the point where I was saying to myself, "Oh, please, don't let them start talking again," which, of course, they would, and I'd feel the story grind to a screeching halt. Thank goodness I purchased the DVD, so I can find the more interesting scenes with ease. Had I bought the damned movie on video, it'd probably never get watched again, and even still it might not.
But this returns me to my original dilemma: why are others so enamoured, even thrilled, by this movie? I get certain reasons-- Tarantino's allusiveness and cheekiness, the would-be avant-garde-ry of the cinematography and the editing, the plain-old-fashioned violence. Beyond those reasons, though, I just don't see what others see in this turgid flick (and it seems to me a "flick" more than it is a "film"). I'm increasingly of an opinion of despair about Tarantino, very much to my mind the Mariah Carey of contemporary film, once a figure of great potential but now given to ego-driven hack work that makes me think redemption is no longer probable or possible.
Perhaps I've become too aesthetically conservative in my old age, though I'd like to believe that's not the case. Perhaps I'm just no longer impressed by the machinations of the so-called "cutting edge." Or, perhaps, I'm just getting old, and I want movies to have both heart and intelligence, rather than just cheeky cleverness. Tarantino is to me a kind of earnest smart-aleck, oxymoronic as that may see. I've become weary of his pretentiousness and his smirking, ironic self-awareness that is neither as ironic or as self-aware as it thinks it is. It doesn't help, either, that I think he's basically become a one-trick pony, and now that I've seen his trick I'm no longer interested.
Or maybe I'm just out of step, which would not be a new thing. I don't mind being the dissenting voice-- I have been so on such widely-praised junk as Friends, Sex and the City, and Seinfeld-- even if it means me seeming naive, traditional, curmudgeonly, or even clueless. But for all the reviews that I've read of Kill Bill 2, as with Pulp Fiction, I haven't found a blasted one that inclines me even slightly to think I might just be wrong about the movies, that I might just be too set in my critical ways, which I do allow is certainly a possibility. All these years later, I still think Pulp Fiction is a steaming pile of elephant turd, and I suspect my thinking on KB2 won't be any fundamentally different ten or twenty years from now.
I just don't know anymore. It bothers me that so many people are so enthralled by Tarantino's technique that perhaps they're completely privileging style over substance, loathe as I am to make such a distinction. It bothers me almost as much that perhaps I'm missing out on one of the great directors of our time in his prime because I just can't see what other people see. Call them aesethetic differences, if we must. It's a shame, though. I want so much to like Tarantino more than I do, because I genuinely appreciate what he's tried to do. He has, however, become that most dreaded of things: painfully, painfully boring. "Do you think I'm sadistic?" Bill asks at the beginning of both movies, and both times I heard Tarantino's voice lurking in the background. To which I'm now regrettably forced to answer, yes, Quentin, yes, I do. And give my best to Mariah Carey.
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