Rating of
4/4
The cold dish is served...
memento_mori - wrote on 08/24/13
In my review for Inglourious Basterds, I mentioned that my perspective on Tarantino films various between two, usually.
Either he makes an incredibly smart movie, or a gruesome movie. Inglourious Basterds was somewhere in the middle for me, with equal parts good and bad. That's pretty much how I feel about Kill Bill Vol. 1, except it's just more aesthetically pleasing.
Uma Thurman is an actress that I loved from Pulp Fiction. She delivered Tarantino dialogue with fluency and came across as foxy. But in Kill Bill, she proved she could also kick some butt.
When you can get past all the graphic content and things the Bride achieves during her quest for vengeance that may seem gruesome, this is a tale of female empowerment.
I think what worked best in the story was the combination of revenge and female empowerment. I like how the movie took its time to develop the character of the Bride.
The editing is of course, like in every Tarantino movie, completely over the top. But it is strangely appealing.
I can't fault this movie for one thing: It is entertaining. It is well-written and well-performed. The direction and cinematography are stunning, and so is the choreography of the fight scenes.
Where the cruel humor in IB didn't work, here it worked very well. It just fits into every scene.
Something not many people talk about the animated sequence. While the movie could have done without it, I loved it. That was such a creative entry into an otherwise grounded film and really added a lot to the character of O Ren Ishii. Plus, they got away with a lot of violence they otherwise couldn't have.
And that's yet another thing. The violence. The animated sequence and Battle of the Crazy 88 are brilliant, because they are handled with such care and precision. The direction is great, and so was the decision to convert the climax to black and white.
This is an over the top, completely aware, fantastically shot, choreographed and written story about revenge, made in a fashion that we don't get nowadays.
