| Comments on Wednesday 24 December 2003: |
It's review time again, and this time it's the turn of Kill Bill: Volume 1. All the good bits of Kill Bill are in this one picture The current front review at IMDB tells me that other IMDB reviewers were complaining about too much blood, gore, and nonsensical violence. Those reviewers, and also the reviewer attacking them, are stupid. The latter because he or she accepts the claim that there is a lot of blood, gore and nonsensical violence. There isn't. There's a lot of bloody long pointless scenes of nothing happening which also don't serve to enhance any characters or provide any emotional significance, and only a little bit of blood, gore and nonsensical violence. There is no need for a two minute scene of the main character screaming at nothing in a hospital bed. There is no need for three minutes of cuts back and forth between main character on an aeroplane, and a bunch of people on motorbikes. The aeroplane cutting was even preceded by her asking for a ticket to Tokyo, then a classic cartoon aeroplane-on-a-map that lasted two seconds - one snippet of the motorbikes in the middle of that and the entire travel segment would have been done with in five seconds, no need to show plane-exterior shots, no need to show sitting-in-a-plane-seat-with-a-samurai-sword, no need for more shots of motorbikes and baddie-in-a-car, and certainly no need for each of these to be repeated seven times. I said it about Lord of the Rings part 2: Symbolic Double-Penetration, and I'll say it about this - just because you want to have a piece of music playing doesn't mean you have to extend the scene to the length of the piece of music. Fade it out, or get a fucking shorter piece of music. Of course, if I was given free reign over cutting, Kill Bill would be a single 80-minute movie, at most, rather than two 100-minuters - but it'd be an absolutely fantastic movie, rather than a piece of crap that opens with 30 minutes of tedium, and interjects another 30 amidst the 20 minutes of content. Actually, I also have to marginally side with the people who complained that there's too much blood. There isn't too much gore - in fact there's no gore - but there's about two Sumo wrestlers worth of blood inside every skinny character. Splattering blood is fine, but spraying blood just looks stupid. And cutting to black-and-white in the middle of a scene, with no reasonable justification, is not artistic. It says "ooh, look at me, I'm an artist", and prances around, like Homer Simpson would if hypnotised and told he's an artist. Particularly aggravating is that later in the same fight-scene, a cut to black-and-white would have been quite reasonable, as the music changed, the style of fighting changed, and the situation changed. The place where it did cut, however, had nothing except the colour-scheme changed. Also, what's wrong with putting subtitles on black bars, rather than putting pale yellow subtitles against white backgrounds? It's not hard to do, and it's not hard to see that it would be better, either. Quentin Tarantino? Bag of ass-hats, more like. [09:01] |
| AttackOfTheSpam |
| Yeesh. I realize that that particular statement was not a word or anything particularly resembling a word, but it was all I could think of. Is it really as bad as all that? And, more importantly, have you ever reviewed a popular movie well? I'm not trying to be stupid and annoying, but I don't believe I've ever seen a good review in the paltry month I've been visiting your sight. But perhaps that's just me. |
| Alana |
| Yes, it really was 'as bad as all of that' and more. People need to get off Tarantino's G3N1U5 nuts. In regards to the later half of your statement...'sight' might have something to do with it. |
| King Klear |
| When a guy blows another guy's head up in the car in Pulp Fiction, it's funny. When the bride in Kill Bill keeps cutting all limbs off everybody who stands in her way... It just isn't fresh.. No way I'll go see the 2nd part... |
| der vaalrus |
| Bah. I've never felt that QT was a genius, but I'll admire the stylish effect that was pulled off here. For a piece that was end-to-end homage to action "exploitation" flicks, it hung together pretty well. |
| redTEETH |
| mmm... perhaps if the blood gouted, rather than spraying. I'm not sure what the technical difference between gouting and spraying is, but I assure you, it would have looked much better. |