# Anyone seen Kill Bill yet? [merged]



## Desdichado (Oct 10, 2003)

*Anyone seen Kill Bill yet?*

?  How was it?


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## Hand of Evil (Oct 10, 2003)

Just got a call from my brother who saw it today, enjoyed it, action, fast pace, BUT 



Spoiler



pissed about the ending, no details just ends.


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## drnuncheon (Oct 10, 2003)

Well, there _is_ going to be Kill Bill, Vol 2, no?  It's not so much an eding as a several-month intermission.


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## Tear44 (Oct 10, 2003)

Went to see it this afternoon. Power went off about 20 min into movie any they kicked us all out. Got a refund and free pass, but still sucks. Movie looked awesome. Can't wait to see the whole deal.

BTW Vol. 2 is out in February. And suposedly there is something at the end of the credits that is suppsed to counter the sudden ending.


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## KenM (Oct 10, 2003)

I heard Kill Bill was going to be one movie, but it would have been like 4 hours, so they split it up.


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## 2d6 (Oct 10, 2003)

It's getting positive reviews, for what it's worth. I can;t wait to see it myself.


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## John Crichton (Oct 10, 2003)

I have my weekly game tonight so I'll be seeing it tomorrow.  I'm not a huge fan of the movies that inspired this one but I am a QT fanboy so I'll probably love it.  Either way, I'm not going in with any expectations except that their will be lots of swords and witty dialogue.


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## Nightfall (Oct 10, 2003)

I'm seeing it this weekend. I'll give you people my review. So far though I don't think it will suck. Not just because of the reviews, but because the fact it has the mixmaster from Wu-Tang clan in charge of the score. Now you know THAT will kick some ass.


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## Tom Cashel (Oct 11, 2003)

KenM said:
			
		

> I heard Kill Bill was going to be one movie, but it would have been like 4 hours, so they split it up.




It would have been 3 hrs.  Reports conflict as to why they split it, but the most convincing (to my mind) is that no sane person could sit through 3 hrs. of such horrendous violence and stay that way.


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## barsoomcore (Oct 11, 2003)

Tom Cashel said:
			
		

> It would have been 3 hrs.  Reports conflict as to why they split it, but the most convincing (to my mind) is that no sane person could sit through 3 hrs. of such horrendous violence and stay that way.



 The story from both Harvey Weinstein and Quentin Tarantino is that quite late in the game, as shooting was winding down, Weinstein (one of the owners of Miramax Pictures, the distributors of the film) visited the set in Beijing, saw some footage and suggested to Tarantino that instead of trying to cram everything into a single film, they release two films and allow him to put in everything he wanted.

Saw the film at a midnight screening last night.

Before I saw _Kill Bill_, my answer to the question of "Is Tarantino a genius or a hack?" was "Insufficient data. Unable to compute."

Now I have sufficient data.

There's no question, this is a violent film. A really, really violent film. And this coming from somebody who watches a LOT of violent films. I am, frankly, shocked to see this film get released with an R rating, and more generally get released at all by a major studio like Miramax. This is one violent film.

And it's not a FUN film. One of the things Tarantino does, or rather, does not do, is provide any moral framework to his revenge tale. We aren't asked to identify with these characters, we aren't asked to sympathise with these characters. We are only asked to watch these characters.

And they ARE watchable.

One of the dizzying results of this lack of moral guideposts is that the only reason for sitting through the movie is to watch the images on the screen go through one change after another. In a sense, this is pure cinema. Tarantino allows himself no sentimental ploys with which to entice his audience -- he flies on image and sound and story alone. The characters speak with a bizarre directness -- there's no witty comebacks, no salacious double-entendres. These characters say what they mean and mean what they say. They tell you outright what they mean to do, and then they go ahead and do it. It's startling.

This is not a movie many people will come out hooting and hollering with delight. It doesn't make you feel cool. It doesn't make you wish you could do that. It makes you glad you haven't pissed any of these people off, because this is a movie about bad people. Really bad people who for the most part come to really bad ends.

One quibble I have (being a sword nerd) is with the very Chinese-looking swordwork -- this even with Sonny Chiba and his daughter on the credits as advisors. Oh well.

Is Tarantino a genius or a hack?

Genius, my friends. There's no question any more. He has made the world's most violent anti-violence film, an action film that makes you not want to be an action star, a blood-soaked epic without moral purpose, a revenge tale stripped of any and all trappings that are not purely cinema. No sentiment, no easy ways out, no good guys.

You'll either love it or hate it. I didn't know which I did when I first walked out of the theatre, but in the hours since I can't stop thinking about what I saw and what it meant and how I feel about it. I like that.


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## Vocenoctum (Oct 11, 2003)

Chitchatting with someone, we both remarked about the total lack of any mention of it being Part 1 of 2 in the previews and such. Very misleading I think, but I'm not that much of a QT fan and cant' stand Uma Thurman, so I wouldn't see it anyway.


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## Tom Cashel (Oct 11, 2003)

"Can't stand" Uma? Damn, yo.  You might want to check out _The Adventures of Baron Munchausen_ one more time.   

From the _New Yorker_:



> “Kill Bill” is what’s formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap.
> [...]
> Coming out of this dazzling, whirling movie, I felt nothing—not anger, not dismay, not amusement. Nothing.


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## Zulithe (Oct 11, 2003)

Excellent summation, barsoomcore!!

I'm not well versed in some of the history behind this film. Lots of talk about Sonny Chiba, sorry, I have no idea who that is! Guess I'm not as nerdy as some would think.

Even if you aren't in on some of the MANY inspirations Tarantino has managed to wedge into every frame of this picture, you WILL enjoy it!! It's excellent entertainment. And if you thought Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was spectacular to behold... whew... just you wait!!

Fans of Japanese cinema, anime, and Tarantino's previous films (especially Pulp Fiction & Jackie Brown) will have something to talk about! It's a must see.

As for the ending, it's very sudden and ends on quite a cliffhanger (would you expect ANYTHING else???) It's the kind of ending that makes you want MORE, not a disappointing ending at all if you ask me!

Can't wait for Vol 2!


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## barsoomcore (Oct 11, 2003)

_Vocenoctum_


> the total lack of any mention of it being Part 1 of 2




Right. Like the TITLE of the film: "Kill Bill: Volume 1" is really hard to figure out. Yeah, they're really misleading us. Those sneaky film-makers.  

And Tom, here's right back at you, from Roger Ebert:



> "Kill Bill: Volume 1" shows Quentin Tarantino so effortlessly and brilliantly in command of his technique that he reminds me of a virtuoso violinist racing through "Flight of the Bumble Bee" -- or maybe an accordion prodigy setting a speed record for "Lady of Spain." I mean that as a sincere compliment.




I'm telling people the same thing about this film that I said about _Fight Club_: see it. You may not like it, but you should see it all the same. This is an important film, regardless of how good it may be. This is a film that matters.


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## jdavis (Oct 11, 2003)

Loved the film, yes it ended suddenly (there was nothing at the end of the credits when I saw it, I heard there would be but there wasn't) but it is being advertised as Kill Bill volume 1 so it should be obvious there is at least a volume 2. The sudden ending didn't bother me as it was a cliffhanger ending and that fits well into the movie. Look your not going to get any Oscars here, its violence and action and people looking cool, it's all about the action. Yes I didn't relate to anybody in the film and if I did I would need serious mental help, but I didn't care it was like watching a video game full of cool graphics, a heck of a ride that really goes nowhere. It's the type of movie you enjoy for what it is, a rollercoaster ride, it's not for getting deep into it's for a sudden rush. 

One thing that did get me going was a guy who brought his 2 very young kids to see it (I'm talking 4 to 6 range). I don't know if I thought he was more of a idiot for bringing the kids or that he sat there for 15 minutes before he realized he should get them out of there. This is not a movie for children in any way shape or form, of course who takes a couple of 4 year olds to a R rated movie to start with. I was so glad when they left, I felt bad with them in the theater, what a idiot.


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## Pants (Oct 11, 2003)

Good movie.  The music, good god, the music in the movie is fabulous.  Thumbs up right there.
The cinematography was superb as well. I'm not going to give any spoilers, but there is a particular fight scene in Japan near the end of the movie that is positively better than anything I've ever seen.  Ever.  It's brutally violent.  Limbs, blood, and gore fly in every direction and it's executed so very well.

This is a very violent movie.  So violent, that it made me and my friend laugh.  There are parts where heads and limbs get hacked off and the blood will literally spurt in every direction.  It gets to be so over the top, that it's funny and that would most likely be the single biggest flaw in the movie.  Now, I do know that the level of violence and blood comes from the movie's anime roots, but Tarantino overdid it in some scenes.

I also get the feeling that Tarantino is a bit on the pretentious side.  I have no real evidence for this, just a feeling.  And from what I've seen of the guy on talk shows, he scares the hell outta me.

But yes, I would recommend this movie for anyone who doesn't mind a high level of violence, blood and gore.  It's very well executed and Uma Thurman is fantastic in the leading role.


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## Kai Lord (Oct 11, 2003)

As far as I'm concerned, I paid 8 bucks to see the Return of the King trailer and the last 35 minutes (Lucy Liu chapter).  Everything in between sucked ass.


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## uv23 (Oct 11, 2003)

Don't kid yourselves. The only reason this movie was split into two parts was money. Big thumbs down to the studio and Tarantino for asking us to pay $30 to see one movie.


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## Argus Decimus Mokira (Oct 11, 2003)

uv23 said:
			
		

> Don't kid yourselves. The only reason this movie was split into two parts was money. Big thumbs down to the studio and Tarantino for asking us to pay $30 to see one movie.





!!!!!!!!!!!    !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
You paid _what_ to see this movie!?!?!
And I was bitching about paying $8.25.  Holy crap.

Anyway, I thought the movie was amazing.  The cinematography alone is worth the watch; Tarantino's unflinching uber-violence is also pretty significant.  I totally agree that what we have here is a hero-less movie.  At first one might think the Bride is our protagonist ... but the way the first fight scene ends pretty much dissolves that view.  Very gutsy.  And the anime back story was truly amazing - and I hate anime, too!

Having said that, I probably will not own this movie, or really ever rent it either.  The super violence just really isn't my thing.  I'll totally see Volume 2, because the story rocks, but even though it was at times comedic in it's over-the-top-ness, I cannot stomach that much gore.

Thanks
Matt


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## uv23 (Oct 11, 2003)

Yep where I live movies cost $14.50. Multiply that by two for this single-movie-split-into-two-parts and thats $30. Well, $29.


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## blackshirt5 (Oct 11, 2003)

Vocenoctum said:
			
		

> Chitchatting with someone, we both remarked about the total lack of any mention of it being Part 1 of 2 in the previews and such. Very misleading I think, but I'm not that much of a QT fan and cant' stand Uma Thurman, so I wouldn't see it anyway.



 Um no, dinner alone.  If you bothered to watch the previews, at the end it says Volume 1. October 10th; Volume 2. February 2004.

And the movie rocked hard.  I think the amount of blood was occasionally overplayed(see also: Sophie!), but as for the head and limb choppings, it's all good.

Also nice that you don't even get to see Bill's face yet.


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## Heretic Apostate (Oct 11, 2003)

_Edit:  Never mind... _


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## Rugger (Oct 11, 2003)

Nothing like a little of the old ultraviolence... 

I loved it.

Lotsa little references and nods to 70's Asian films...Ultra-hot Uma from planet Thurman coming across as a "not so good person"...

I worry about my generation (I'm 28) though...the violence was SO over the top that we laughed our way through. The older folks around us gasped alot and the younger could seem to care less. I guess we're getting de-sensitized.

Oh, and about the "epilogue"...we also waited all the way to the end, and....nothing.

Then today I read that they moved it up to before the credits: 


Spoiler



The bit about her child still being alive is what was originally the epilogue



Great flick. Just don't take your parents to see it. 

-Rugger
"I WantsMeSomeHanzoSteel!"


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## Endur (Oct 11, 2003)

The Return of the King trailer was worth the price of the ticket.

Kill Bill, which was very good, was just icing on the cake.  Violent, but very good.  Awesome selection of music.  Had me thinking Spaghetti Westerns and other violent movies the whole time.

The trailer for Matrix Revolutions was good, too, but nothing out of the ordinary.


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## jdavis (Oct 11, 2003)

uv23 said:
			
		

> Yep where I live movies cost $14.50. Multiply that by two for this single-movie-split-into-two-parts and thats $30. Well, $29.



Good grief I went to the early show and it cost me $4.50, the late show was only $6.25. If I go to the movies before 6 pm here it's actually nearly as cheap as renting them at Hollywood video (which is $3.99 plus tax). People here were complaining that they went up to $6.25. To see both movies will cost me $9, I ain't sweating that.


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## jdavis (Oct 11, 2003)

Endur said:
			
		

> The Return of the King trailer was worth the price of the ticket.
> 
> Kill Bill, which was very good, was just icing on the cake. Violent, but very good. Awesome selection of music. Had me thinking Spaghetti Westerns and other violent movies the whole time.
> 
> The trailer for Matrix Revolutions was good, too, but nothing out of the ordinary.



The Return of the King Trailer was great. 

If you like Tarantino then you will like this movie if you don't then don't bother, it just screams Tarantino all the way through it, yes it was violent and bloody and tongue in cheek about it but that's what he does, all his movies are like that, this one just had swords instead of a lot of guns. I didn't find the violence all that disturbing at all (and I'm definatly from a couple of generations back), heck limbs being chopped off and the exagerated bloodspray have been around for a while (the first Conan was very bloody in it's day), this was supposed to be over the top with it, that's the point, don't feel bad about laughing or enjoying it, it was was done to be over the top and in your face, that was the point and the desired effect of it.


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## Pants (Oct 11, 2003)

Rugger said:
			
		

> I worry about my generation (I'm 28) though...the violence was SO over the top that we laughed our way through. The older folks around us gasped alot and the younger could seem to care less. I guess we're getting de-sensitized.



Heh, I did the same thing, and I'm 20.


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## Mathew_Freeman (Oct 12, 2003)

Oh well, maybe I am getting desensitised to violence, but I came out of that thinking "OK, now I thought _Fight Club_ was a black comedy..."  This is a pitch black comedy in places. Tarantino lingers on the blood spraying from people.

Spoilery sections:


Spoiler



Her baby is still alive.


Lovely moment. A very good way to end the movie, setting it up for Part 2. I mean, what else could have surprised you as an audience? What other cliffhanger could he have left it on?


Spoiler



House of Blue Leaves fight. Genius stuff, but I still think there was some really sick humour there. "Go home to your mother!" Plus, the section where she hacks of a bunch of feet off, leaving all these guys rolling around on the floor. I chuckled. Maybe I'm just sick. 


 
Don't go see the film if you don't like the look of it, and if you do go and see it please don't come on here and complain about the violence. It's Tarantino does 70's Kung-Fu bloodfest, you all know it is.

I'm not quite sure about feeling nothing for The Bride. I mean, so far as we can tell at the moment, she was brutally near-killed on her wedding day, along with eight other people, and we've been given no reason. Then she was 



Spoiler



repeatedly raped in the hospital


. I think she has a right to be more than a little annoyed. Especially considering the genre. I sympathise with her more than anyone else. At least she kills people cleanly. Mostly. 

A great film. Soundtrack is great, too.


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## Alcareru (Oct 12, 2003)

Hmm Ill have to see this it sounds like. The reviews from the media are mixed leaning toward the good. From the sound of it, it seems amazing that QT managed a R rating and not a NC-17.

BTW, why is it Kill BIll volume 1? Shouldnt it be part 1?


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## uv23 (Oct 12, 2003)

Saw it this aft to appease the gf who really wanted to see it. I'll reverse my opinion about being upset it was split into two movies. I'm actually glad as I couldn't have sat through such a terrible movie for twice as long. The violence was stupid and nauseating. It tried very hard to be kitsch. And thats about it. Didn't really care about anyone in the movie. White actors who don't know how to swordfight still look like white actors who don't know how to sword fight, no matter how much chorreography is used. Blah. And they didn't even show the ROTK trailer.


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## Kai Lord (Oct 12, 2003)

uv23 said:
			
		

> I'll reverse my opinion about being upset it was split into two movies. I'm actually glad as I couldn't have sat through such a terrible movie for twice as long.



Agreed.  I found the final chapter entertaining, but Kill Bill isn't a great homage to classic martial arts films, its a mainstream I Spit On Your Grave.

I can handle severed limbs and buckets of blood, the violence is really only an extension of Braveheart, Saving Private Ryan, and so on.  The fact that 



Spoiler



Uma had been raped while in a coma in the hospital for four years


 was nauseating however, and that they played the revelation as comedic effect gross out humor (the vaseline) was even more sickening.

And apparently since Quentin got to spread the story over two films he felt he was above editing the picture.  Even as a shortened first half, many scenes were way too long.  The Okinawa sequence was ridiculous in its lack of brevity.

The opening sequence with Vivica A. Fox was simply horrible.  Horrible choreography, dialogue, and delivery.  It made the teeter totter showdown in Daredevil look like a masterpiece.

This is by far the least of Tarantino's work.  Where was the quotable dialogue?  Nowhere.  Where were the endearing characters?  Nowhere.  Oh that's right, this wasn't a film for Tarantino fans, its I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE, with Pulp Fiction's jumpy narrative style.

News to Quentin, jumpy narratives are no longer clever.  We've seen it in Pulp, we've seen it in Go, and we've seen it masterfully serve the story in Memento.  Its time to catch up, its now no more than an aging gimmick.  Another news flash, Hollywood stars doing there own kung fu was also clever years ago.  Now WE NOTICE when they can't keep up with the choreography.

At least Kill Bill had an anime sequence as backstory.  Oh wait, that isn't clever anymore either.  Its one thing to polish tried and true gags and gimmicks, and another to invent new ones.  Kill Bill did neither.  

But at least it was nauseatingly crude.  And had cool music.  Oh yeah, with lots of 70's in-jokes.  IOW, an R-rated Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle.  THAT's all a Tarantino film is anymore?  Pathetic.


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## Vocenoctum (Oct 12, 2003)

barsoomcore said:
			
		

> _Vocenoctum_
> 
> 
> Right. Like the TITLE of the film: "Kill Bill: Volume 1" is really hard to figure out. Yeah, they're really misleading us. Those sneaky film-makers.





Actually, I've never seen Kill Bill volume 1

Only looking around on the web have I since seen the addition "oct 10th, volume 1"

I see that in the trailers on their site, but haven't seen it on the TV ad's, perhaps I have to search for it...

So, I'll gladly retract what I said, and admit it may in fact be squezed into some place, after the release date.
They do tell you it's QT's "Fourth film" a lot though. Too bad they didn't mention his fourth and half film is seperate. 

And hey, Mel Brooks did History of the World Part 1. Doesn't mean it was half a movie...


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## Wormwood (Oct 12, 2003)

My wife and I saw it this evening.

Twice.

We are truly living in the Geek Golden Age.


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## Zulithe (Oct 12, 2003)

Durring the opening credits it clearly says "Kill Bill" and then under it, "Vol 1", unless you're blind, stupid, or can't read you should know there will at least be a Vol 2. Personally I would have prefered a 4 hour movie, but even after the Lord of the Rings films I don't see a 4 hour movie flying too well at the Box Office. 3 hours I think most can handle, 4 hours is pushing it for all but the most dedicated film geeks (like a lot of us here).

Now that we know RotK will probably see a 3.5hr theatrical release it will be intersting to compare it's Box Office take to The Two Towers. Given it's fanbase and noteriety by now, it probably will outgross it but, something like Kill Bill might have taken in less.

Anyway, I'll take a Tarantino movie any way I can get it! Release it as two fims? Fine by me. I thought Vol 1 was superb. It might not be as quotable as some of his past work but it does bring a lot of cool stuff to the table (now EVERYONE will be whistling the Twisted Nerve theme hehe)

Kai Lord: You have no idea what you're talking about. You're post lost all credibility after that Daredevil comment.


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## drnuncheon (Oct 12, 2003)

*Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned from Kill Bill, Vol 1:*


 If you're going to shoot someone, finish the job.
 The human tongue is the most elastic muscle in the body.
 In Japan, everyone carries a katana.
 ...even on airplanes.
 If you ever happen to lose a limb, don't worry.  The human body contains only 6 quarts of blood.  You can lose up to 6 _gallons_ without loss of consciousness or death.


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## Tarrasque Wrangler (Oct 12, 2003)

drnuncheon said:
			
		

> *Everything I Needed to Know, I Learned from Kill Bill, Vol 1:*



ROTFLMAO!

Hopefully I'll get to see it today.  Sounds like a blast.


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## Nightfall (Oct 12, 2003)

Nice Doc!


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## Hand of Evil (Oct 13, 2003)

Okay, I went to the movie feeling so-so about it, came out of the movie loving it, it was a good story and presentation was everything.  It was interesting how much QT took from anime and interacted with the western but then Hong Kong has been doing that for some time now.  Yes, there is a lot of blood, yes there is a lot of limbs being cut off but it is the the background preversions that are shocking, 



Spoiler



the information that the character was raped while in a coma, the mad japaneese school girl, Lucy's character,


 because the way the volience was shown those moments of evil were more pronounced.


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## TheAntiSummit (Oct 13, 2003)

*Kill Bill Volume 1*

I saw the movie when it opened Friday and I was completely smitten.  I am just posting this here because I thought that I ought to recommend something that gave me so much pleasure to everyone else.  Kill Bill Vol. 1 takes a huge leap away from Quentin Tarantino's other three movies in that it really has no semblance of realism nor is it meant to, and unlike the other three movies the quality is not in the characters or the dialogue (not that they are lacking in any way, they just weren't the centerpiece for me) but simply in the film itself.  The film has so much flavor, character, and style, that Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman do such a good job of bringing to life that some of the things i normally despise (such as the bleeping out of names) in films because they take you out of the film and suspend suspension of disbelief were not only tolerable but even enjoyable.  Every minute of the movie held my interest and just bred pure enjoyment, and i can count on one hand the number of movies i can say that about.  I don't want to go over it with a critical eye here and talk about the different cinematic elements Tarantino uses, I just want to reccommend it to everyone and say that i think it will be thoroughly enjoyed, and even if you don't think it as great as I do, you will not regret the expenditure of the 9 bucks because you will at least recognize that it is a unique movie going experience.  I saw it friday night when it opened, and again today. I am wearing my ticket stub around my neck, and yeah that might be a little wierd, and it either says something about me, or the movie. I like to think it's the movie.  Go see Kill Bill.


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## EricNoah (Oct 13, 2003)

Thanks for the review!  I'm sliding this over to our extra-nifty Movies & Books forum.


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## BiggusGeekus (Oct 13, 2003)

I'm wondering if they're going to be teaching this one in film schools.

My wife loved it.  I loved it.


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## Oni (Oct 13, 2003)

Just came back from the movie.  

It is the culmination of every (bad?) old action movie I've ever seen, and I loved it.  

My brain hurts now, but in a good way.


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## Agamon (Oct 13, 2003)

That was great, right from the "Old Klingon Proverb" to the end.  Yeah, it was pretty wack, but you have to expect that from Tarantino.  Two thumbs up, looking forward to Vol. 2.


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## Moleculo (Oct 13, 2003)

uv23 said:
			
		

> Don't kid yourselves. The only reason this movie was split into two parts was money. Big thumbs down to the studio and Tarantino for asking us to pay $30 to see one movie.




I've heard theories that the reason that it was split into two movies is because if it was one movie it would have garnered an NC-17 rating, which would have been a pretty poor business descision.


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## kkoie (Oct 13, 2003)

It was a butt kicking movie!  I had such a blast I went and saw it again the very next day.  Great flick.  I'm also glad (before I saw the film I was rather annoyed) that they split it.  Seeing 4 hours of that kind of carnage and violence would get a tad exhausting.


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## Shadowdancer (Oct 13, 2003)

jdavis said:
			
		

> One thing that did get me going was a guy who brought his 2 very young kids to see it (I'm talking 4 to 6 range). I don't know if I thought he was more of a idiot for bringing the kids or that he sat there for 15 minutes before he realized he should get them out of there. This is not a movie for children in any way shape or form, of course who takes a couple of 4 year olds to a R rated movie to start with. I was so glad when they left, I felt bad with them in the theater, what a idiot.



I see this all the time. I'm guessing the parents can't afford a babysitter, but you know what? If they can't afford a babysitter, maybe they can't afford to be going to movies, either. Reminds me of when I went to see "Natural Born Killers," there were parents who brought along a child who was 3-5 years old. And they stayed for the whole movie. If they take that kid to alot of ultra-violent movies, I wonder how messed up that kid is going to be?


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## Shadowdancer (Oct 13, 2003)

Vocenoctum said:
			
		

> Chitchatting with someone, we both remarked about the total lack of any mention of it being Part 1 of 2 in the previews and such. Very misleading I think . . .



The first previews were made and released before the decision had been made to turn it into two movies.


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## Hand of Evil (Oct 13, 2003)

Moleculo said:
			
		

> I've heard theories that the reason that it was split into two movies is because if it was one movie it would have garnered an NC-17 rating, which would have been a pretty poor business descision.




I do think money had an issue to play in it being broke down into two movies but after seeing it, I have no problem paying it!  This was not 90 mins of the normal Hollywood action movie, this was 120 of some of the best action, music, setting, story this year.  Yes, I was the person who predicted movies to go to volumes after LotRs but *Kill Bill* fits multi volumes!


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## Henry (Oct 13, 2003)

My wife and I saw it Saturday, and had the "numb" reaction as described above. Good God the Gore!  But it was highly captivating, no doubt about it. My wife didn't like it on the whole, she told me later, yet I watched her reaction, and she stayed hooked in that movie every scene of the way. Overall, I may wind up renting the second half, because I didn't see anything that absolutely made me proclaim, "I'm SO glad I saw this on the big screen!"

But I agree - It was the bloodiest anti-violence movie I've ever seen.

My favorite line:



Spoiler



"That really WAS a Hattori Hanzo Sword."


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## TracerBullet42 (Oct 13, 2003)

Great movie.  Everything about it just looked way cool.

And I'm stunned nobody's referred to the greatest line in the movie (paraphrased, cuz I don't remember it exactly....

"Those of you who are still alive should leave and consider yourselves lucky to take your lives with you.  But leave your limbs, for those are mine..."

That's some cool stuff, there...


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## Quasqueton (Oct 13, 2003)

The only QT film I've seen from beginning to end was Pulp Fiction. I liked it. I started watching Resevoir Dogs, but I turned it off during the torture scene. "Action violence" is one thing, it's usually quick, and the bad guys die, but I could not stomach watching the extended torture and mutilation of a random cop.

Does this movie have such a scene? I'll skip this flick if it expects me to suck up and watch an extended torture or rape scene.

Quasqueton


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## jdavis (Oct 13, 2003)

Vocenoctum said:
			
		

> Actually, I've never seen Kill Bill volume 1
> 
> Only looking around on the web have I since seen the addition "oct 10th, volume 1"
> 
> ...



Everything I have seen or read talks about it being split into two, it's not like they are trying to hide the fact or trick people, every interview I have read with him or the actors talked aobut it being split. They are not trying to mislead anyone that would be foolish on their part, they want people to know there is a part two because they want people to go to part two, they are telling everyone who will listen the movie is split into two parts. Here is a article from Feb 25th talking about the split:


> *Tarantino's Double Dose of 'Kill Bill'?*
> 
> 
> 
> ...



 It wasn't a secret they were spliting it, if it was it was a pretty lousy secret because they kept telling people for the last 6 months there would be two movies. It wasn't done for the money, it was done because Tarantino kept adding new scenes during production and the movie got too long. 3 hour movies are very risky and tend not to do well, not to mention this movie was a little too intense for 3 hours straight. 

Other trivia about the movie:http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0266697/trivia


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## KenM (Oct 13, 2003)

Just saw it, loved it. A thought: 



Spoiler



I think the kid that was in the first chapter is Uma's Kid. She said She was 4. Vivacca's(SP?) character would have had to been very pregnent when she when on the hit to take out the wedding party. Did not look like she was. Also we never see the groom that was taken out.


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## Vocenoctum (Oct 14, 2003)

jdavis said:
			
		

> Everything I have seen or read talks about it being split into two, it's not like they are trying to hide the fact or trick people, every interview I have read with him or the actors talked aobut it being split. They are not trying to mislead anyone that would be foolish on their part, they want people to know there is a part two because they want people to go to part two, they are telling everyone who will listen the movie is split into two parts.




As I mentioned, I knew before hand. However I still don't see the commercials on TV proclaiming it's half a movie. What will draw people to the second movie is thie first movie, not advertising for the first movie. While I'm sure the QT fans have kept up on such things, I'd say quite a few people didn't.

But, aside for surveying people at the theater to see if they knew ahead of time, there's really not much else to add.


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## Shadowdancer (Oct 14, 2003)

KenM said:
			
		

> Just saw it, loved it. A thought:
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Don't think that will work: 



Spoiler



The Bride told Bill, right as he was shooting her in the head, that he was the father of her child. Bill's not black, so that kid couldn't have been Bill's. Unless The Bride was lying. Also, we see that kid four years and six months after the shooting. Copperhead could have been three months pregnant at the wedding and not shown much.


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## ascendance (Oct 14, 2003)

*Wanted: Native Japanese Speaker*

I want a native Japanese speaker to tell me how bad Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu's Japanese was


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## Jeremy (Oct 14, 2003)

Just wanted to add my friends and I absolutely loved every second of this movie.  We spent much of it laughing, pointing, wincing, and laughing some more.

Loved the style, action, sounds, music, choreography, dialogue, way it was shot, and fun of it.    Mish-mash of a whole bunch of genres I love.


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## Welverin (Oct 14, 2003)

jdavis said:
			
		

> One thing that did get me going was a guy who brought his 2 very young kids to see it (I'm talking 4 to 6 range).




Reminds me of a mother who was going to buy her son (6-8) a South Park video game.


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## Pielorinho (Oct 14, 2003)

Saw it last night, and my main reaction was to the ultraviolence.  I watch some pretty violent movies without being fazed, but this one -- hoo boy!  I'm still not sure whether I'm glad I saw it.  My wife, I think, regrets having seen it.

That said, it was brilliantly done.  QT knows what he's doing, and is a master at it.  When it was funny, it was very funny; several of the scenes were very beautiful.  And it wouldn't have been the same movie at all without the huge level of violence.

I realized what made the violence so terrible was that Tarantino seems obsessed with destroying the body.  Most movie violence involves stabbing or shooting:  a person gets a surprised look on their face, maybe a bloodstain on their shirt, and falls over.  Their body remains essentially intact.  Tarantino isn't satisfied with this:  when people get hurt in his movie, their bodies are radically altered.  Limbs are gone, sides of heads are staved in, eyes are removed.  It's much harder to watch.

Daniel


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## kengar (Oct 14, 2003)

Saw it yesterday. It was shocking, uber-violent and grisly, but you can't deny the talent behind pulling that vision together. The unapologetic mayhem left you wondering whether or not to laugh. As a result, half the time I was staring in amazement at the gore and the other half I was giggling. I've seen better fight choreography, but even that seemed a kind of homage to the 70's films _Kill Bill_ has its roots in.

The audience was quiet as they left. Like someone else said earlier, it wasn't a piece that you left hooting about. Even teenagers -whom I expected to be animatedly replaying the more outrageous scenes- were subdued. 

..and the ROTK trailer rocked majorly


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## drnuncheon (Oct 14, 2003)

_*grumble rassin frassin no ROTK trailer when I saw it dern kids these days*_


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## Tyler Do'Urden (Oct 14, 2003)

My god in hell... I don't know if I should love or hate that movie.

I felt like I was watching _A Clockwork Orange_ again for the first time, only on speed.  My mouth hung open through the whole thing- I couldn't believe I was laughing at it.  It's sick and wrong- yet so ridiculously funny that I couldn't resist but be sucked in.  This is a black comedy that makes _Fight Club_ look like a nice movie about male bonding.

It felt so wrong... yet... so right.  This is the apotheosis of violent films.  The perfect kicker would be to have someone come out at the end of part two and go on a schpeel about how sick and ashamed we should be to enjoy this movie, John Galt style- but it won't happen.

I rate movies on a scale of one to five.  I'm giving it both a one and a five, because I don't know how else to react.  Tarantino is the most twisted cinematic genius since Kubrick, undoubtably.


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## barsoomcore (Oct 14, 2003)

drnuncheon said:
			
		

> 3. In Japan, everyone carries a katana.
> 4.  ...even on airplanes.




What I loved was the second time she was on the plane, where not only is there a katana next to her seat, there's one next to some other seat across the aisle!

Hee.

Of course, I did have an experience in Thailand where the baggage handlers asked if I wouldn't prefer to take my katana on the plane with me. I demurred, reckoning that however laid-back the Thai officials might be, things might get a little dicey explaining it to the Japanese officials when I landed.


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## Bass Puppet (Oct 15, 2003)

Saw the movie on Sunday with some friends. Then ran into 4 of my good friends standing in line to see the movie, and while I'm standing in line with my girlfriend, her friends and 4 of my friends we ran into my roomate coming out of an earlier show. She gave me a couple of nods of enjoyment and some a little insight just to get me even MORE excited to see this move. So we go in, see it, and walk out. I thought the movie was excellent, not perfect, or the Best, but excellent. I look forward seeing it one more time before Vol II. 

Did anyone else notice the sound of a fly in the Church, it circled the theatre in a surround effect. It also did it at one other point in the movie but I don't remember when. I thought it was a bit clever to add that small bit of detail.

-Cain


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## gregweller (Oct 15, 2003)

I saw it twice last weekend, and am seriously considering seeing again this weekend ...of course there is the Texas Chainsaw Massacre opening, so I might see that ...but this looks like one I'll buy on DVD and watch every week for a couple of months. But Quentin does that to me. I've watched True Romance so many times I practically know the screenplay by heart (Q. didn't direct but did the screenplay for that). When my wife and I saw Pulp Fiction we were laughing out loud when the kid gets his head blown off in the back seat of the car, then paused and realized NO One else was laughing in the whole theatre. There were a few moments like that in this one. This isn't close to the most violent thing I've seen on screen, though. That would have to go to Peter Jackson's Dead Alive. Although I've also heard good things about 'Ischi the Killer' which I've been trying to track down.

But when all is said and done, I think the whole thing is a love letter from Quentin to Uma. 



Spoiler



There's the line at the beginning of the credits -- 'The Bride is based on a character brought to you by Q. and U. It's almost like something out of a high school yearbook, and it just charmed the heck out of me.


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## Particle_Man (Oct 15, 2003)

Sweet!  I loved it!

The last bit where she said 



Spoiler



"how did you find me?" and we hear a male voice "I'm a man" could mean she heard Bill, or her  Groom, or the other male assassin on her list.  I am thinking the groom.  Maybe she left Bill for the groom and the groom was meant to be a target or something?



Anyhow, I felt rejuvenated after seeing that movie.


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## KenM (Oct 15, 2003)

gregweller said:
			
		

> When my wife and I saw Pulp Fiction we were laughing out loud when the kid gets his head blown off in the back seat of the car, then paused and realized NO One else was laughing in the whole theatre.





  I laughed for like 10 minutes first time I saw that as well. But I was the only one laughing. My girlfriend at the time hated that movie. I was the only one in theatre laughing, but I did not care.


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## Shadowdancer (Oct 15, 2003)

gregweller said:
			
		

> But when all is said and done, I think the whole thing is a love letter from Quentin to Uma.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Uma and Quentin started working on the idea for "Kill Bill" back when they were making "Pulp Fiction." They started kicking around ideas late at night while drinking in a bar after shooting had finished for the day.

Uma reminded Quentin about it when she saw him at an Oscar party three years ago. He had been working on the script for "Inglorious Bastards," a WWII movie, but dropped it to start working on "Kill Bill" again. Of course, he wrote the role of The Bride especially for Uma. And the female members of the Deadly Vipers Assassin Squad are loosely based on the characters from the fictional TV pilot Uma's character made in "Pulp Fiction."


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## Felix (Oct 15, 2003)

Too much blood and violence is too much.

WAY too much blood and violence is just right.

The movie gives you an interesting (if simple) Spaghetti Western story (quite a bit of the soundtrack sounds like an Ennio Moriccone score) that satirizes action movies these days. 

Remember how everyone was so upset at South Park in its infancy because they thought it was endorsing awful behavior? Some folks understood that Stone + Parker had a problem with it by taking the language to the extreme. Then they moved onto satirizing other subjects. Might this film not be satirizing the usual Hollywood crap that gets shoveled our way every Summer in the form of the "Summer Blockbusters!"?

Kill Bill: V1[/i] is a good movie.
It is a topical movie. 
It is a kewl movie. 
It is a movie you should never, ever consider taking a girlfriend to go see.


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## Rugger (Oct 15, 2003)

Felix said:
			
		

> It is a movie you should never, ever consider taking a girlfriend to go see.




Heheh! I had the opposite reaction.

My GF is a real trooper...always going to the flicks I wanna see...but I was worried about Kill Bill being not her kinda film.

She never once squirmed or seemed uncomfortable or distracted the whole time, and at the end, she looked at me with a PO'd look and said:
"What the hell! The movie felt like it was 20 minutes long! I want more!"

It was in that moment I realized that I will marry her someday.   

-Rugger
"I KilledBill!"


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## Pielorinho (Oct 15, 2003)

Felix said:
			
		

> It is a movie you should never, ever consider taking a girlfriend to go see.



  Only if you want to be with a shrinking violet. Me, I prefer my women asskicking and strong.

I also want to note that when I talk about the extreme violence in the movie and how I found it gutwrenching, I'm simply talking about my experience at the theater, not suggesting it's a flaw in the movie.  I know some people found that its cartoonish nature made it non-disturbing; that wasn't the effect it had on me at all.

Daniel


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## Henry (Oct 15, 2003)

Rugger said:
			
		

> She never once squirmed or seemed uncomfortable or distracted the whole time, and at the end, she looked at me with a PO'd look and said:
> "What the hell! The movie felt like it was 20 minutes long! I want more!"




In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, you should hang on to her like Grim Death.


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## jdavis (Oct 15, 2003)

I didn't take the wife because she thought it looked stupid, of course it was her idea to go see Cabin Fever (I've already talked about that one). I really don't think the violence would of bothered her at all, we left Cabin Fever and went to eat. The limb chopping off effects were intentionally done to look like bad kung fu movies, heck they went out of their way to make them look that way. It was something that never even registered to me as real. It's not like I have a high tolerance for that kind of stuff, I barely made it through my EMT class and I never got my license because I couldn't make it through working in the emergency room. I tend to pass out at the sight of blood. My brain never connected this violence with real violence unlike Saving Private Ryan which got to me (not that I didn't really like that movie too). The connection I made to this movie was with Commander USA's groovy movies from the "80's. It was supposed to look bad, they worked hard at making it look bad, that was the whole point, they weren't supposed to look like they knew what they were doing they were supposed to look like they were in a old Kung Fu movie, they used a old Godzilla set in the movie for pete's sake.


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## Particle_Man (Oct 15, 2003)

Anyone else notice that 



Spoiler



the man with katana that kill's the dad of Lucy Liu's character has rings on his fingers?  I think that this was Bill!  It would explain why the sword-maker that trained him was ashamed of him, and the timing would be right.

Also, I stat Bill as being Lawful Evil.  Elle Driver is NE or possibly CE (but controlled by Bill).  The others are probably LE, but some may have drifted to LN or N (Budd saying "She deserves revenge; and we deserve to die")



Anyhow, I felt like Kill Bill was a cathartic experience.  I feel less stressed after seeing it.  Loved the movie!


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## Rugger (Oct 15, 2003)

Henry said:
			
		

> In the words of Jerry Seinfeld, you should hang on to her like Grim Death.




LOL! 

Now if only I can get her into RPG's...she still hasn't realized that that Buffy Board Game she loves is a mini-rpg...

-Rugger
"I ROFL!"


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## barsoomcore (Oct 15, 2003)

Felix said:
			
		

> It is a movie you should never, ever consider taking a girlfriend to go see.



I'm married to the woman who insisted we go see "Underworld" because of the cool gun sound effects in the trailer. Who broke her wrist after seeing Charlie's Angels because she was drunk and karate-chopping a steel railing. Who when we went as Scully and Mulder for Hallowe'en demanded she get the great big honking replica Glock because "Scully always kills the bad guys." Who does better Transformer gun sound effects than anybody I know.

She can't decide if we should see _Kill Bill_ again or go see _The Rundown_.

I am blessed.


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## Felix (Oct 15, 2003)

Ok, let me qualify my statement:

......*thinking*.......

There's no way to qualify that statement properly. Ok, how bout this: Only take girlfriends to this movie who also liked The Fifth Element. That should be about right.


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## ErichDragon (Oct 15, 2003)

2 Things.

Thing the first:  I didn't copy the quote but someone posted something to the effect of "thumbs down to Tarantino and Miramax for making us pay to see two movies".  

First of all, no one is making you see the movie.  If you don't want to pay twice then don't.  No one will care.  Who or what are you that you are entitled to receive a product or service for less than someone is willing to sell it for?  

Thing the second:  The movie was awesome.  The plot was good, characters good, fight scenes creative etc.  Everything I have to say has already been mentioned but it deserves another vote.  When I left I knew I liked it, but I have thought about the movie every day since I saw it (5 days and counting).  Very, very few movies have made me feel that way.  I can't wait to see how the plot develops in volume 2.

One more thing...



> It felt so wrong... yet... so right. This is the apotheosis of violent films. The perfect kicker would be to have someone come out at the end of part two and go on a schpeel about how sick and ashamed we should be to enjoy this movie, John Galt style- but it won't happen.




Who's John Galt?


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## DerianCypher (Oct 15, 2003)

Oh my.. 

I really shouldn't have watched this movie... I'm one of the few people left not desensitized to violence and this movie honestly made me sick.. not to mention I couldn't sleep last night after seeing it.

I guess it'd be alright... but not for those who are light of stomache..

like I told my friends.. I might have been able to handle all the blood and gore, but the screams of the dying were what pushed me over the edge.

DC


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## DerianCypher (Oct 15, 2003)

Oh my.. 

I really shouldn't have watched this movie... I'm one of the few people left not desensitized to violence and this movie honestly made me sick.. not to mention I couldn't sleep last night after seeing it.

I guess it'd be alright... but not for those who are light of stomache..

like I told my friends.. I might have been able to handle all the blood and gore, but the screams of the dying were what pushed me over the edge.

DC


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## barsoomcore (Oct 15, 2003)

Felix said:
			
		

> Ok, let me qualify my statement:
> 
> ......*thinking*.......
> 
> There's no way to qualify that statement properly. Ok, how bout this: Only take girlfriends to this movie who also liked The Fifth Element. That should be about right.



 That'll do it. Hee.


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## jdavis (Oct 15, 2003)

a couple of things I noticed looking at IMDb:
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0266697/goofs



> *Incorrectly regarded as goofs:* The many continuity lapses and other apparent technical errors are a matter of deliberate stylistic choice in this pastiche of 1970s "B" action movies.



http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0266697/trivia



> In order to achieve the specific look of Chinese "wuxia" (martial arts) film of the 1970s, Tarantino gave director of photography, Robert Richardson, an extensive list of genre films as a crash-course in the visual style they used. The list included films by genre-pioneers Cheh Chang and the Shaw Brothers. Tarantino also forbade the use of digital effects and "professional" gags and squibs. As such, he insisted that bloody spurts be done in the fashion made popular by Chang Cheh: Chinese condoms full of fake blood that would splatter on impact


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## Shadowdancer (Oct 15, 2003)

Chinese condoms that splatter on impact? No wonder China has such a large population.


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## Viking Bastard (Oct 16, 2003)

_BADDABUMBAMTISH!_


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## KChagga (Oct 16, 2003)

Wow!  This movie gave me exactly the same feeling that I got the first time I saw Fist of the NorthStar.  If you've seen that anime movie then you know what I mean.
I dug the 70's feel to it, I think that is what pushes this movie over the edge to greatness.

I just realized that I had seen GoGo somewhere else before.  She is the same actress who played the balls stabbing Chigusa in Battle Royale.  I knew she looked familiar. Crazy girl.


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## shilsen (Oct 16, 2003)

ErichDragon said:
			
		

> One more thing...
> 
> Who's John Galt?




One of the lead characters in Ayn Rand's novel _Atlas Shrugged_.


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## DM_Matt (Oct 16, 2003)

shilsen said:
			
		

> One of the lead characters in Ayn Rand's novel _Atlas Shrugged_.




Sigh.  What kind of person goes around answering rhetorical questions?


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## WayneLigon (Oct 16, 2003)

Just came back from it. 

Fantastic.


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## Kai Lord (Oct 16, 2003)

jdavis said:
			
		

> 3 hour movies are very risky and tend not to do well,]



When has a movie _ever_ underperformed because of its length?  



			
				jdavis said:
			
		

> not to mention this movie was a little too intense for 3 hours straight.



Not to pick on you, but this amuses me and I've seen a number of people say this.  Did everyone really crap their pants over one twenty minute fight sequence in an almost two hour long movie?

Watch Braveheart.  A lot more fighting, and save for Sophie's arm and the Yakuza dude's head, a lot more gore.  And it was three hours long.

Saving Private Ryan ran about two and a half hours and had _two_ twenty plus minute gorefests that were so authentic they triggered traumatic flashbacks for many WWII veterans who saw them.  Did Spielberg cut Private Ryan in two?  Or Schindler's List?

If people who _actually suffered_ such horrendous acts can sit through two and half to three hours of shocking re-enactments I think we can handle a three hour movie with a tongue in cheek Uma Thurman swordfight in the middle.

Volume I was mostly a snooze fest.

Or did the overlong Okinawa sequence have you hyperventilating in your box of popcorn?  I'm going to go out on a limb and guess it didn't.  Ditto for the toe wiggling and anime.

The film was cut to double the profits.  Plain and simple.


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## Welverin (Oct 16, 2003)

jdavis said:
			
		

> Good grief I went to the early show and it cost me $4.50, the late show was only $6.25. If I go to the movies before 6 pm here it's actually nearly as cheap as renting them at Hollywood video (which is $3.99 plus tax). People here were complaining that they went up to $6.25. To see both movies will cost me $9, I ain't sweating that.




I hate you Kentucky! An early show costs me $6 and that's only for the first showing of the day for that screen, which doesn't seem to apply if the first showing starts after three or four.



			
				Tyler Do'Urden said:
			
		

> This is a black comedy that makes _Fight Club_ look like a nice movie about male bonding.




But it *is* a nice movie about male bonding. Sure there's quite a bit of violence and disturbing content, but still!


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## jdavis (Oct 16, 2003)

Welverin said:
			
		

> I hate you Kentucky! An early show costs me $6 and that's only for the first showing of the day for that screen, which doesn't seem to apply if the first showing starts after three or four.



Well the really early show was only $3.75 but who goes to the movies at 2 in the afternoon?
http://www.cinemark.com/THEATER_SHOWTIMES.ASP?THEATER_ID=327


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## jdavis (Oct 16, 2003)

Kai Lord said:
			
		

> When has a movie _ever_ underperformed because of its length?



http://us.imdb.com/WN?20030721#4


> Quentin Tarantino split new movie Kill Bill in two to stop studio bosses at Miramax from forcing him to cut it. The Pulp Fiction movie maker shocked Hollywood this week by announcing the eagerly-awaited film - which stars Uma Thurman out for revenge against a fellow assassin - will be released in two parts. Part one will debut October 10, a date for the second installment has yet to be announced, although it could come two to six months later, according Miramax co-founder Harvey Weinstein. The move allows writer-director Tarantino to get his full story before audiences and avoid potential cuts to get it down to a more viewer-friendly length. Miramax has feuded with directors in the past on film edits, including Martin Scorsese on Gangs Of New York and Billy Bob Thornton on All The Pretty Horses. Meanwhile, Miramax claim they are happy to be accommodating with Tarantino. Miramax spokesman Paul Pflug says, "We believe in him. He's somebody we have a great track record with. He's one of the key factors why Miramax has become who it is."



 Well it's common knowledge that movie company executives don't like movies over 2 hours long because their research tells them they don't do as well. I'm not a movie executive or a focus group so you would have to ask one of them about it. If their research tells them long movies don't do as good who am I to question them?



> Not to pick on you, but this amuses me and I've seen a number of people say this. Did everyone really crap their pants over one twenty minute fight sequence in an almost two hour long movie?
> 
> Watch Braveheart. A lot more fighting, and save for Sophie's arm and the Yakuza dude's head, a lot more gore. And it was three hours long.
> 
> ...



I'm not the general public, I can sit through hour on end of mindless violence (of course I have severe back problems and I cannot sit in one place for very long so a 3 hour movie would require a pain pill and would still be a torture test for me). The problem here is that they are not worried about die hard fans they are worried about the general public, can Joe Average off the street sit through 3 hours of this? It was Tarantino who said nobody would sit through three hours of this type of movie not me. It was the Miramax who decided to split the movie and that was one of the reason they gave. I was going by what Tarantino and others said about why they cut it in two.

http://us.imdb.com/WN?20030605#9


> Stunner Lucy Liu is warning sensitive fans to avoid her new movie Kill Bill - because the dramatic violence will make them physically ill. The Charlie's Angels babe stars alongside Uma Thurman in cult director Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited fourth film, and predicts audiences will either flee from the cinema or vomit in their seats when they watch the extreme action - even if she thinks the violence is artistic. She says, "It's so violent. People will leave the movie theatre or get sick in the movie theatre. But there's so much violence that it becomes not numbing, but almost comedic. There's a scene where there's so much violence that the color of the film goes into black and white, so that the blood looks like oil. It's cinematic, it's art. You can take it to a different level, and show what violence is, in such a heightened manner that you don't think of it as violence anymore, you think of it as a language. If you go to _Kill Bill_, you know there's going to be violence - that's your option."



Me I wasn't phased at all by the movie, but I'm not a average viewer either. I've already pointed out that the movie didn't bother me at all and that I didn't think it was that bad, but we would have to poll people coming out of the theater to get a good idea of what the general movie going public thought. 


> The film was cut to double the profits. Plain and simple



for the record Kill Bill vol 1 was 111 minutes long, if it was cut in exact half that would make the whole thing 3 hours 42 minutes long. How many 4 hour movies have there been?
http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0266697/trivia



> During production, Tarantino wrote new scenes as he shot thus compiling massive amounts of footage.



& 







> At one point it was suggested that the film would be broken into two films, with the first one ending in a cliff hanger and the second being released two weeks after the first. This idea was shelved for a while and then revived by Miramax, although the gap between the films is to be somewhere between five weeks and three months (sources vary).



http://us.imdb.com/WN?20030225#7


> Quentin Tarantino's new movie Kill Bill is so long, the filmmaker now plans to turn it into two separate films. The film, starring Uma Thurman, Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox and Lucy Liu, was originally scheduled to hit American cinemas screens in October, and now it is expected that the second part will be released just weeks later. David Carradine, who stars in the drama says, "Shooting has been going on so long - with Quentin continuing to write scenes, that plans are afoot to turn _Kill Bill_ into two 90-minute features that would be released within five weeks of each other. I probably shouldn't be saying this, but what the hell - they can't fire me." He adds, "It's a brilliant marketing plan. The first film would end with a cliffhanger, so that everyone would want to see the second half." Carradine, who landed his role in the flick after Warren Beatty dropped out, is expecting to go before cameras again to shoot extra scenes for the movies.



http://us.imdb.com/SB?20030716#2


> Instead of releasing Quentin Tarantino's latest film Kill Bill, starring Uma Thurman, in its current three-hour-plus length or asking the director to cut it, Miramax is now planning to release it in two parts, published reports said today (Wednesday). The first part is due to be released on Oct. 10. _Daily Variety_ commented: "Cutting _Kill Bill_ into two seems to be an elegant solution since Tarantino gets to release all of his three-hour pic, while (Harvey) Weinstein gets a 90-minute movie (albeit two of them)." Today's _New York Times_ pointed out that the story is told in chapters and therefore lends itself to a serial approach. "I've always designed the movie, thought about the film, as malleable in any number of versions," Tarantino told the newspaper in a statement. He suggested that there may be different versions for Asia and Europe.



http://us.imdb.com/WN?20030902#5


> Maverick director Quentin Tarantino's upcoming two-part movie _Kill Bill_ will be eligible for awards in two separate Oscar years - effectively meaning the film could win two best picture gongs. The marital arts revenge saga starring Uma Thurman and Lucy Liu was originally planned as a single movie, but because of its length, Tarantino and Miramax Films decided to split it in two, and open the first part in America this October. Originally studio insiders believed the second installment would follow soon after, qualifying it for the same Academy Awards ceremony next March. However, Miramax have confirmed the second volume will be released on 20 February, meaning it can only be considered for nomination at the Oscars in 2005. The decision to split the film has angered American critics, who argue the decision is just a money-making ploy to earn twice as much in ticket sales. Miramax has hit back, insisting the movie was too long to remain a single entity.


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## Shadowdancer (Oct 16, 2003)

Kai Lord said:
			
		

> When has a movie _ever_ underperformed because of its length?



Well, to name three: "Gettysburg," "Gods and Generals" and "Renaldo and Clara." Those are just off the top of my head -- I'm sure there are others.


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## drnuncheon (Oct 16, 2003)

Funny, I don't remember this much ill-will generated towards Matrix: Reloaded/Revolutions, even though it's doing the exact same thing:


 One story, split across two movies
 "overly long" scenes that "pad the film"
 20-minute action sequence
 Ends the first part on a cliffhanger

...hmm.

J


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## jdavis (Oct 16, 2003)

Well here are some more things about the movie being cut into two parts. Obviously this wasn't just something they did to get more money out of this. The movie was planned and shot as one movie and split later when they realized it was just too long. He filmed for 155 days in 6 different locations, that's just insane (well not Apocalypse Now insane, it filmed for 274 days).

http://filmforce.ign.com/killbill/articles/429/429127p1.html?fromint=1



> *July 16, 2003* - When director Quentin Tarantino first pitched _Kill Bill_ to Miramax films, he attached the condition that he be allowed to film his entire 200-page script. Miramax executive Harvey Weinstein agreed to Tarantino's terms and invested the necessary cash.
> 
> Principal photography on the film, which was done in Japan, China, Mexico, and other exotic locations, recently finished after 155 days of shooting – quite a bit more than most Hollywood films take. Although only one film had been agreed to, Tarantino maintained that he was going to consider turing the project into two or three films. And now, according to _The New York Times_, he's decided to split the original project into two films.



http://filmforce.ign.com/articles/454/454145p3.html


> The biggest controversy over _Kill Bill_ besides its violence surrounds the decision to split this film into two parts. As a final question, we ask Tarantino whether this will change the dramatic structure of the film. "Yeah, I guess that it did, actually, as opposed to a movie where the whole first half is just complete viscera and eye-popping action and just meant to blow you away, all right...? The resonance comes in the second half... with more of the depth and resonance coming in, I guess that it did. Because this (_Volume 1_) is just about the good time, fun movie, movie aspect of the movie. And the second one will be the deeper exploration of it."



This is a pretty good 4 page interview (I just posted the last paragraph).

http://www.cinemareview.com/production.asp?prodid=2224


> Originally planned as a single film, the movie will be presented in two installments, Kill Bill- Vol. 1 and Kill Bill-Vol. 2.
> 
> “If I had thought while I was writing it,” Tarantino says, “that [Miramax co-chairman] Harvey Weinstein would be willing to release it in two parts, I would have suggested it then. But I frankly never thought he would. Later on, when he himself said he didn’t want to cut a thing and would we consider releasing it as two movies, I said, ‘What an interesting idea!’ Within an hour, I had figured out exactly how to do it.”
> 
> ...



 another pretty good article (which I just grabbed the part about the split from)


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## Kai Lord (Oct 16, 2003)

jdavis said:
			
		

> another pretty good article (which I just grabbed the part about the split from)



Okay, so as far as Quentin's motivation, I can see it not being solely about money.  Not so sure with Harvey Weinstein.

Note that neither of them stated it was cut because "it was too intense" which was the amusing assertion that I originally countered.  Lucy Liu says she thinks it'll make people puke and suddenly Richard Roeper and dozens of people on the internet are jumping on the wagon and making claims like the one in your previous post.

The violence isn't why it was split in half.  Lucy Liu didn't direct or edit the picture, and she certainly doesn't have final cut.  What she thinks about the violence is irrelevant.

I do believe the other articles you linked paint a better picture of why it was divided.  Quentin wanted to make it long for the sake of making it long and "epic", and Weinstein will do anything to make him happy, especially if it means doubling the studios profits, regardless of how blatantly tacky it is to the ticket buying audience.


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## Kai Lord (Oct 16, 2003)

Shadowdancer said:
			
		

> Well, to name three: "Gettysburg," "Gods and Generals" and "Renaldo and Clara." Those are just off the top of my head -- I'm sure there are others.



Okay let me rephrase:  When has a three or slightly longer than three hour movie ever underperformed due solely to its length?


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## Oni (Oct 16, 2003)

Personally I'm glad the movie was cut in two.  

I didn't know that it was going to be when I went and saw it, since I generally don't follow such things since I think it take some of the fun out of the final experience.  I have to tell you that I was absolutely glued to the screen for the duration of the movie, toe wiggling, okinawa, anime and all.  Because of how intensely I was involved with the movie though when the ending came it was like a rush of relief just because of the intensity of the experience for me.  It was fun but tiring, like a few other things I can think of.  I left the movie theatre fully sated, even though I generally dislike such endings.  

On the other hand I watched Matrix: Reloaded last night and the result wasn't nearly the same, meh.  

Even though there may have been other circumstances influencing the decision to split Kill Bill into two seperate movies, it was Tarantino's understanding of story telling that sets apart his cliffhanger ending from others I've seen.  Definately leaving me at that fine point of feeling satisfied with what I've see, but still wanting to finish the story.  I will happily shell out the money to see the next part without blinking an eye.


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## KChagga (Oct 16, 2003)

I actually enjoyed the Okinawa scene.  It was fun how she felt him out to make sure that this was the Hattori Hanzo(who happened the greatest ninja not swordmaker, but oh well).  She played a little diplomatic game with him.
I also enjoyed the ritual with the blades and the respect of the master craftsman toward his ultimate work.
You can't discount the great line,"If you come across God, he will be cut."
What seemed like padding to others I enjoyed just as much as some of the rest of the film.


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## KChagga (Oct 16, 2003)

I actually enjoyed the Okinawa scene.  It was fun how she felt him out to make sure that this was the Hattori Hanzo(who happened the greatest ninja not swordmaker, but oh well).  She played a little diplomatic game with him.
I also enjoyed the ritual with the blades and the respect of the master craftsman toward his ultimate work.
You can't discount the great line,"If you come across God, he will be cut."
What seemed like padding to others I enjoyed just as much as some of the rest of the film.


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## barsoomcore (Oct 16, 2003)

Kai Lord said:
			
		

> Okay let me rephrase:  When has a three or slightly longer than three hour movie ever underperformed due solely to its length?



 Well, how is anybody supposed to answer that question? Presumably you're suggesting that there were other reasons why the films named performed poorly -- I'd like to see your evidence on that.

If there was a way to determine exactly why films failed, then Hollywood would only make films that didn't fail.

The best you can say is that not many really long films do very well. One of the problems is that it can be difficult to convince theatre owners to take really long films since long films usually mean less showings per day -- translating into less revenue per day. That can be overcome by high attendance numbers per screening, but it's one layer of resistance shorter films don't have to deal with.


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## Kai Lord (Oct 17, 2003)

barsoomcore said:
			
		

> Well, how is anybody supposed to answer that question? Presumably you're suggesting that there were other reasons why the films named performed poorly -- I'd like to see your evidence on that.



The films mentioned were 4 to 4.5 hours long, and not related to the point that Kill Bill would have been fine as a 3 hour movie.  So I rephrased the question to more accurately reflect my point.


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## Darrin Drader (Oct 17, 2003)

drnuncheon said:
			
		

> Funny, I don't remember this much ill-will generated towards Matrix: Reloaded/Revolutions, even though it's doing the exact same thing:
> 
> 
> One story, split across two movies
> ...




The Matrix Reloaded has a run-time of 138 minutes. That's 2 hours and 18 minutes. I'm assuming that Revolutions will have a similar run-time. I think that's the reason it hasn't generated the same type of controversy. 3 1/2 hours is much different that 4 3/4 hours. There's also the fact that the Matrix, Empire Strikes Back/Return of the Jedi were originally planned to be separate movies with a continued storyline.

Kill Bill is either 2 movies at an 1 1/2 hour each, or one move at 3 1/2 hours. Personally, I think that run-time is a part of this debate that really hasn't been addressed. In my opinion, one and a half hours is a little under what I want to pay to go see for any movie. 3 1/2 hours is slightly over, but I can deal with it. The Lord of the Rings movies seem to be doing just fine in the theaters with long run-times. To me, this is clearly about corporate greed (like I'm one to comment on that), and if this does well at the box office, this sends a clear message to the movie studios that people are willing to pay twice to see one movie. I would normally give Tarantino some slack, but this sets a precendent and pretty soon we could start seeing marginal quality movies split in two. Ultimately it comes down to a case of _caveat emptor_, but I'm not overly fond of what this could potentially mean to the future of movies in general.

I don't want to pay twice to see one movie, so I'm skipping Kill Bill until it hits DVD.


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## barsoomcore (Oct 17, 2003)

Kai Lord said:
			
		

> The films mentioned were 4 to 4.5 hours long, and not related to the point that Kill Bill would have been fine as a 3 hour movie.  So I rephrased the question to more accurately reflect my point.



 My question still stands -- how are you going to prove that any given movie failed solely due to one cause or another? Lots of films fail.

It's straightforward enough to go through film releases of, say, the last ten years, pick out all the ones that exceed three hours in length, and compare their box office performance with that of films that are shorter. What I have heard is that if you do that you will find that longer films generally haven't performed as well. This may have changed with the recent successes of LotR and the Matrix, and James Bond movies were always pretty long as I recall, but I haven't done the research myself so I can't say. I do know that every time a movie turns out to be longer than anticipated, studio executives worry about its performance.

But even doing the research won't give you answer to your question. All it will do is provide you with what the past has been like for long movies -- it won't explain WHY any of those films failed.

If Harvey Weinstein thinks that three hours is too long and that by splitting the movie he will make more money, well, he's probably examined the issue more closely than either of us has, with better access to the relevant data. Time will tell if he's making a smart business decision or not.

Certainly I have no complaint with him making decisions in order to maximise the profits of his company. That's his job, and everybody who works for Miramax is probably glad he's good at it.


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## Pants (Oct 17, 2003)

Kai Lord said:
			
		

> The films mentioned were 4 to 4.5 hours long, and not related to the point that Kill Bill would have been fine as a 3 hour movie.  So I rephrased the question to more accurately reflect my point.



So Kill Bill Vol 2 is going to only be an hour long?  Kill Bill clocked in at 2 hours long, so if that's true, then he is ripping us off.


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## Kai Lord (Oct 17, 2003)

Pants said:
			
		

> So Kill Bill Vol 2 is going to only be an hour long?  Kill Bill clocked in at 2 hours long, so if that's true, then he is ripping us off.



The script was reported at 200 pages, which equates to a 3 hour and 20 minute film, easily trimmable by 10-15 minutes to hit closer to the 180 minute mark.

The fact that Volume 1 was 1 hour and 51 minutes suggests one of two things, that Volume 2 will be extremely short, or Quentin is using the double movie stunt to pad each chapter with additional fluff above and beyond the original script submitted to Miramax.


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## Pants (Oct 17, 2003)

Kai Lord said:
			
		

> The fact that Volume 1 was 1 hour and 51 minutes suggests one of two things, that Volume 2 will be extremely short, or Quentin is using the double movie stunt to pad each chapter with additional fluff above and beyond the original script submitted to Miramax.



Well most of it was fighting and there was that whole Uma fights 88 guys part, which lasted quite a while (and I enjoyed every second of it   ).


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## Oni (Oct 17, 2003)

The runtime for volume two is supposed to be 1hr 34min.


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## jdavis (Oct 17, 2003)

Kai Lord said:
			
		

> The script was reported at 200 pages, which equates to a 3 hour and 20 minute film, easily trimmable by 10-15 minutes to hit closer to the 180 minute mark.
> 
> The fact that Volume 1 was 1 hour and 51 minutes suggests one of two things, that Volume 2 will be extremely short, or Quentin is using the double movie stunt to pad each chapter with additional fluff above and beyond the original script submitted to Miramax.



The script was 200 pages when shooting started but:







> During production, Tarantino wrote new scenes as he shot thus compiling massive amounts of footage.



 (I've linked to this quote already at least twice)

Here is another one straight from the horses mouth so to speak:http://www.cinemareview.com/production.asp?prodid=2224


> There was also a much simpler practical consideration, Tarantino says, for dolling out Kill Bill in smaller, measured doses:
> 
> After all, the final fight sequence in Vol 1., “The Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves,” is a 20-minute samurai sword battle between The Bride and the minions of killer-turned-yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii (Liu), that took a full eight weeks to shoot, on a soundstage at the Beijing Film Studio— only two weeks less than the entire production schedule of Pulp Fiction. “When you get to the end of Vol. 1,” Tarantino says, “you’re exhausted. You’re ready to take a break.”
> 
> On a more philosophical level, Tarantino suggests, “This is supposed to be my version of a grindhouse movie, and the very idea of a three hour grindhouse movie is a contradiction in terms. It seemed pretentious, whereas two 90-minute grind house movies seems more app.”



He isn't making a epic here he's making a homage to 70's B movies, this isn't Gone With The Wind it's The Master Killer or Lone Wolf and Cub 2: Baby Cart at the River Styx. He's not doing Dances With Wolves here it's not meant to be of epic scope, why make it epic length?


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## Kai Lord (Oct 17, 2003)

jdavis said:
			
		

> He's not doing Dances With Wolves here it's not meant to be of epic scope, why make it epic length?



Ask the guy who wrote the 200 page script.


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## Mathew_Freeman (Oct 17, 2003)

What's confusing me here is why do people keep on and on saying that this film was split purely on money decisions? We've got quote after quote from Tarantino about why he split it...do you just not believe him? If you don't believe him, can you just drop it? A bunch of other people have gone and seen the film, rated it pretty well, mostly, so why keep dragging this up?


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## Desdichado (Oct 17, 2003)

OK, I finally saw the film.  I'm not a Tarantino fan or anything, in fact now that I've seen this, that brings my total of Tarantino movies I've seen up to a whopping... one.

Here's the deal, though.  I expected it to be innovative, unique, artistic or something, based on what I've always heard about Tarantino and what I've heard about this movie.

This movie had a toilet paper thin plot, wooden characters, stilted and often poorly delivered dialogue, lots of standing around posing, exaggerated goofy gore and violence (I didn't know the human body was a fire hydrant of blood)...  in short, it was an anime movie with real people.  Except for that part in the middle when it just was an anime movie.  It even had some of the same lame "comic relief" (the lazy assistant of Hattori Hanzo who just wants to watch soap operas all day).  And it certainly had the same sense of style.

In short, I felt like I was watching an anime movie.  It wasn't innovative, unique or artistic, unless you consider the fact that he used real actors instead of animation, or a spaghetti western soundtrack to be innovative, unique or artistic.

I dunno, maybe I'm just not enough of a Japanophile to "get it" but at the end of the day I disliked it for the same reasons I dislike most anime; it just wasn't very good.


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## drnuncheon (Oct 17, 2003)

Baraendur said:
			
		

> The Matrix Reloaded has a run-time of 138 minutes. That's 2 hours and 18 minutes. I'm assuming that Revolutions will have a similar run-time. I think that's the reason it hasn't generated the same type of controversy.




No, the reason it hasn't generated the same type of controversy is very simple: they never said at any point that it was going to be one movie.  That's all.  The entire furor over Kill Bill isn't because it's two movies - it's because it was initially presented as one movie.  It's the change that's upsetting people.

If it had been described to the public as two movies from the get-go, 95% of the people saying "I don't want to pay twice to see one movie" would instead be saying "I can't wait until the sequel comes out."

J


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## Jeremy (Oct 17, 2003)

Further commentary from the peanut gallery:

Loved the Okinawa chapter.  Had fun with the guy who wouldn't bring the tea.  Had fun with the verbal swordplay.  Had fun with respect they granted the crafting of those swords and I love it when the good guy gets an ultimate weapon that the bad guys know and fear.

Loved the anime sequence.  Favorite fight in the movie was the Chinese-American soldier brutally dealing with the mooks before being cut down.

I've always loved the anime thin red line followed by the gout of blood.  So has Tarantino, that's why it's all over the place.

This movie is very much targetted at people who like this genre.  I'm very glad it was split into two because that means that all the other gags and in-jokes that Tarantino wants to throw in don't get thrown on the cutting room floor along with good scenes because the execs want a specific running time.

I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and now have an entire other movie session to look forward to for more gags.  Wuxia, Anime, bad Kung Fu, legendary katana, righteous painful vengeance, respect for the warrior way between opponents, and utter disregard for over done hollywood conventions.  Yay Kill Bill!


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## Krug (Oct 17, 2003)

Watched it today. Kinda liked it, but prefered _Twilight Samurai_ which I watched recently. I guess the gore was part of the aesthetics of the movie, and it was fun tracking some of the homages, but ultimately an empty exercise. 

Of course, it wasn't the most painful thing I watched today, since I was viewing game 7 of sox-yankees... ;p


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## Henry (Oct 17, 2003)

One note of import - had this movie been 3 hours long, my wife, an average movie-goer by anyone's definition, would have walked out. She told me so herself. Any movie over 2 1/2 hours is too long for most movie goers, except for fans of a director/story, or if the movie is absolutely gripping. By the two hour mark, you've had quite enough of The Bride, and the fountains of blood.

Regarding the fountains of blood: They were silly, but not totally unrealistic, considering a decapitated individual would not fountain, so much as spurt. The heart, pressurizing the blood flow as it does, can shoot blood at LEAST thirty to forty feet, easily.


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## Desdichado (Oct 17, 2003)

Henry said:
			
		

> Regarding the fountains of blood: They were silly, but not totally unrealistic, considering a decapitated individual would not fountain, so much as spurt. The heart, pressurizing the blood flow as it does, can shoot blood at LEAST thirty to forty feet, easily.



Of course it is, unless the human body now contains 30-40 gallons of blood.


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## barsoomcore (Oct 17, 2003)

JD: Sorry to hear you didn't enjoy it. I AM being careful in how I recommend the film -- I think it's important to see, though I don't think that everyone will like it.

I don't think it depends on liking anime, or anything very Japonesque. I have liked some anime (_Akira_ is very cool, as is the first twenty minutes of _Ninja Scroll_, and I think Miyazaki's a genius, stomp down), but there's tons of crappy anime, and I approach any new product with great trepidation.

Here's a couple of reasons why I thought _Kill Bill_ was brilliant:

Uma's performance. I know you thought it was wooden and stiff, but to me she succeeded in creating something simultaneously perposterous and realistic. I think there are moments in that film where she pulls off some incredibly precise transitions that in lesser hands would have flailed.

The lack of sympathy or identification with any of the characters. None of these people are likeable -- they're not even believable. These people don't live in our world, and I don't think for a second that QT is pretending they do (katana on airplanes, for example). Contrary to popular thought, I don't think that sympathetic characters or characters one can identify with are important parts of story-telling -- I think they're crutches bad story-tellers fall back on because they don't know any other way to engage their audience.

I loved the hard-core, balls-to-the-walls attitude of the film. Nothing was too shocking, nothing was held back. It was fun to see just how far he was going to go -- pretty far, it turns out. It made the story more gripping for me because I knew ANYTHING could happen.

Finally, I thought it created a world that was complete in itself. Not realistic, but absolutely convincing in its details. That for me is the ultimate task of a film director. All cinema takes place in an imaginary landscape that exists only in the union of the mind of the director and the mind of the audience. Mediocre directors think they have to reproduce "reality" in order to be convincing. Great directors create their own reality and bring it to the screen with such razor-sharp focus that their audiences are sucked right in and never even notice.

Pretentious? Me?


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## Pielorinho (Oct 17, 2003)

barsoomcore said:
			
		

> Contrary to popular thought, I don't think that sympathetic characters or characters one can identify with are important parts of story-telling -- I think they're crutches bad story-tellers fall back on because they don't know any other way to engage their audience.



That's a pretty bold statement, bordering on bizarre.  I dare say you'll fnd just about every storyteller from the late 1500s through the early 1950s had some sympathetic characters; were they all bad storytellers using crutches?

I agree that sympathetic characters aren't necessary, but that's a fairly recent phenomenon in Western storytelling; Shakespeare, for example, generally had heroes in his stories, and if they were flawed heroes in true Aristotelian fashion, they were generally sympathetic but for their one flaw (which may be patricide, suicide, etc.).  Indeed, if your list of good storytellers contains more than half a dozen well-known names, you'll find that the list includes storytellers who have sympathetic characters.

Daniel


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## Desdichado (Oct 17, 2003)

barsoomcore said:
			
		

> JD: Sorry to hear you didn't enjoy it. I AM being careful in how I recommend the film -- I think it's important to see, though I don't think that everyone will like it.



I should clarify...  I didn't _not_ enjoy it, I just didn't enjoy it very much and I thought it was over-rated.  I don't see it as innovative, unique or particularly noteworthy or important, except maybe that he's a big name and he may very well bring this type of style to a more mainstream audience.


			
				barsoomcore said:
			
		

> I don't think it depends on liking anime, or anything very Japonesque. I have liked some anime (_Akira_ is very cool, as is the first twenty minutes of _Ninja Scroll_, and I think Miyazaki's a genius, stomp down), but there's tons of crappy anime, and I approach any new product with great trepidation.



No, and Roger Ebert liked it a lot, even though I doubt he's even seen _Fist of the North Star_ for instance, which _Kill Bill_ reminded me of strongly.


			
				barsoomcore said:
			
		

> Uma's performance. I know you thought it was wooden and stiff, but to me she succeeded in creating something simultaneously perposterous and realistic. I think there are moments in that film where she pulls off some incredibly precise transitions that in lesser hands would have flailed.



I should clarify again: many of the performances were wooden or stilted, however, her's typically were not.  She (and Lucy Liu) did an admirable job or making a good performance out of an awkward screenplay.


			
				barsoomcore said:
			
		

> The lack of sympathy or identification with any of the characters. None of these people are likeable -- they're not even believable. These people don't live in our world, and I don't think for a second that QT is pretending they do (katana on airplanes, for example). Contrary to popular thought, I don't think that sympathetic characters or characters one can identify with are important parts of story-telling -- I think they're crutches bad story-tellers fall back on because they don't know any other way to engage their audience.



Perhaps.  After all, even Stephen R. Donaldson has a fairly large following with the most unlikeable protagonist I've ever seen.  To me, though, the movie would have been much better _had_ the characters been somehow more engaging in some way or another.  And even if I had really liked the movie, I think it would have been even better for engaging characters.


			
				barsoomcore said:
			
		

> I loved the hard-core, balls-to-the-walls attitude of the film. Nothing was too shocking, nothing was held back. It was fun to see just how far he was going to go -- pretty far, it turns out. It made the story more gripping for me because I knew ANYTHING could happen.



Apparently the new Texas Chainsaw Massacre has that same attitude.  And maybe it's because I was prepped, but I actually didn't find the violence to be all that shocking.  It was way too cartoony, way to anime, for me to take it seriously and be shocked by arm removals, feet flying through the air unattached to legs, 



Spoiler



Lucy Liu being scalped


 or any of that.  If the violence had been even a little bit realistic in terms of the the effects on the characters, it might have been shocking.


			
				barsoomcore said:
			
		

> Finally, I thought it created a world that was complete in itself. Not realistic, but absolutely convincing in its details. That for me is the ultimate task of a film director. All cinema takes place in an imaginary landscape that exists only in the union of the mind of the director and the mind of the audience. Mediocre directors think they have to reproduce "reality" in order to be convincing. Great directors create their own reality and bring it to the screen with such razor-sharp focus that their audiences are sucked right in and never even notice.
> 
> Pretentious? Me?



  I'll grant, QT did create a purposefully unrealistic movie and made the audience (at least some of them) accept it without a problem.  Then again, so do most action movie directors.  So much so, in fact, that movies that go out of their way to be realistic, such as _The Hunted_ or _S.W.A.T._ are particularly noteworthy, and come across as radical stylistic expressions of the genre.


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## barsoomcore (Oct 17, 2003)

Pielorinho said:
			
		

> That's a pretty bold statement, bordering on bizarre.



You betcha.


> I dare say you'll fnd just about every storyteller from the late 1500s through the early 1950s had some sympathetic characters; were they all bad storytellers using crutches?



Yeah, pretty much.  

Look, nobody's going to tell me that William Shakespeare ISN'T the greatest writer in human history. My admiration of the man's ability knows no bounds, pretty much.

But look at his greatest stories. Let's pick three that you could make a reasonable case for being the best Shakespeare plays:
_Hamlet_, _King Lear_ and _The Tempest_. With heroes Hamlet, Lear and Prospero.

These are not sympathetic people. Now, Shakespeare's a genius, so he can do things us mere mortals cannot. He can create unsympathetic people (really look at those three characters -- they don't have single flaws, they're just BAD people. Hamlet lets Ophelia suffer and die rather than give up his pretense of kookiness. He cuts down Polonius for no reason and never even thinks twice about it. He casually sends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to their deaths. He dances around in graves. And all the pain and suffering of _Hamlet_ could have been avoided if he'd either A) told the ghost to get lost, or B) just up and killed Claudius from the get-go.

Lear, likewise, is weak and petty and selfish and costs everyone around him massively. Prospero is a manipulative, cold-hearted SOB who, far from learning any big lesson, really just gets rewarded for being so. (wait, I was in the middle of a sentence here. How did that go? Oh, yeah, "He can creat unsympathetic people")) and tell stories about them that drive us to care about what happens. Even get emotionally involved.

Every time I read _Lear_ I get to the end when he comes out carrying Cordelia and I start to cry. Every bleedin time. It's amazing. Here's this old shrivelled up whiner of a man, and by the end I'm crying over him. I don't like him any better, but there I am, suffering his pain right along with him.

But all that aside, I'm NOT saying (or didn't MEAN to say) that a story with sympathetic characters is bad. What I MEANT to say was that creating a compelling story WITHOUT using sympathetic characters was a mark of real genius. Of greater genius, let us say, than doing the same thing with sympathetic, likeable characters.

And that's different than taking an unsympathetic character and MAKING them sympathetic. What I love about _Kill Bill_ is how QT refuses to give us even that. The Bride is no more likeable than any of the bad guys -- less so, to some degree. And yet, she's what we watch the film for. To see what she'll do next. To find out how she'll overcome this next challenge.

THAT'S storytelling.

Did that make sense?


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## Desdichado (Oct 17, 2003)

barsoomcore said:
			
		

> Did that make sense?



Absolutely.  In fact, that was a big gripe I had with the recent _Count of Monte Criso_ remake -- they just couldn't end the movie with the protagonist as a revenge-obsessed bad-guy, like Dumas did in the book.


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## Pielorinho (Oct 17, 2003)

*Barsoomcore*, I confess that I'm not familiar with The Tempest or with King Lear.  A personal failing, I know.

That said, I personally find Hamlet sympathetic, and I think that's part of the point:  he's a young guy in an untenable situation, and he flips out.  Starting sympathetic, he lets his lust for revenge overtake everything else in his life.  If I didn't sympathize with him in the beginning, his descent into madness/psychotic murderousness wouldn't be nearly so tragic.

And in Midsummer Night's Dream, even as you mock the whiny, self-absorbed lovers, you're rooting for them.  Bottom's an ass, but aren't you happy when everything works out?

Sure, the lovers in Romeo & Juliet are full of themselves.  They're *teenagers*, that's how they're *supposed* to be.  I sympathize with them.

I don't think using unsympathetic characters is a mark of genius or a mark against a storyteller.  It's simply one technique among many.

Daniel


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## Desdichado (Oct 17, 2003)

I'd also agree with you, Daniel, and was actually logging back on to say as much -- although the characters mentioned certainly aren't "good" guys, they are at least sympathetic -- at some level, at least, we can identify with them.


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## Pielorinho (Oct 17, 2003)

Looks like it's time for a group hug, then!
Daniel


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## jdavis (Oct 17, 2003)

Still don't get the anime references (I'm a big anime fan too, I just wasn't all that reminded of anime when I watched it). Even the anime scene in the movie didn't remind me of anime it reminded me of 70's action movies. My like for this movie probably stems from the fact that I grew up watching the same movies he got this movie from. Papaer thin characters and intentional plot holes didn't bother me, cheesy dialog was a must and long walkingscenes where everybody tries to look cool are a staple of this kind of movie. He made a B movie with a real budget and good actors, it's all about style and cool scenes because that's what those movies were about, and it's not just martial arts films, heck get a old Eastwood movie and tell me who the hero was? Most of his characters didn't even have a name (just like "The Bride") or any kind of background, Heck get a copy of a old Charles Bronson movie, he was just mean and violent in them even if he was the good guy, and it's not like he portrayed deep characters he was always the same in every film. These are not character driven plots with lots of in depth development, these are shoot 'em up and make people go "Dirty Harry is so cool" movies. Tarantino intentionally left holes in the plot and included mistakes because that's how those movies were, he didn't write in deep character progressions because that's not what this was about, watch Enter the Dragon, Bruce Lee's character is lucky to even have one paper thin dimension to him and the dialog was so outlandish it was almost too silly to actually sit through, people call it a masterpiece. It's his mimicing of the movies I watched when I was 10 that makes me like this movie so much, it's a bad movie, but it's supposed to be a bad movie it goes way out of it's way to be a bad movie, it's got that throwback cult classic type feel to it. It's made in a old style with old tools and old plots in the same places where the old movies were made (part two takes us to Mexico and includes a master of the 5 animal styles of Kung Fu, the Japanese part is basically over). This is a movie made in the movie world, it basically is a movie about a bad movie, your not supposed to suspend disbelief  that this could happen in the real world your supposed to watch it as if it is in some cool movie world. It's all about style and movie history. Pulp Fiction was the same, heck the title of that movie was "Pulp Fiction" which is a term used for crap literature. 

If you don't like this type of movie then you will not like this movie, If he made a homage to old Hammer horror films and you hated those films whould you like the homage? If you don't like cheesy action movies then you probably won't like Tarantino's salute to cheesy action films. They used a Godzilla set for pete's sake, it was a model of a air liner flying over a obviously fake Godzilla set, it was intended to look fake and cheap, that was the point. They had places to put your sword on the airplane and the bad guys were evil high school kids in Kano mask. Heck she wore the same costume as Bruce Lee wore in Game of Death. There was nothing original or innovative here it was a stylistic throwback to 70's B movies, if you don't like those then this is not the movie for you. Heck even if you do like those movies there is no garantee you will like his take on them but if you don't like those then I can pretty much say you won't get this movie. I liked it because it made me remeber when I was young watching Commander USA's groovy movies on Sunday afternoons in the early '80's, it made me remember staying up late to catch A Fistfull of Dollars or sneaking around my mothers back to watch Deathwish, it was action and violence and people looking cool while doing it. I love 40 foot blood sprays and people overacting their death scenes, I love people who walk cool in movies, I love movies that are so shallow I don't have to think at all to figure out what is going on. That's not to say I don't like long winded movies aimed at winning oscars or John Grisham inspired thrillers it's just that sometimes I want to see somebody cut somebody elses head off then say something off the wall, sometimes I want to see a world where everybody owns a samurai sword and people name their assassination squads after snakes, sometimes I want outlandish and silly and this movie delivered in spades.


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## barsoomcore (Oct 18, 2003)

Pielorinho: What is the untenable situation that Hamlet finds himself in? That a ghost has appeared to him and claimed that his uncle murdered his father? That his uncle is now married to his mother? Oh, boo hoo. Cry me a river, Danish boy.

Hamlet's situation is untenable because Hamlet is a mean-spirited coward. The fact that we find him compelling (and I continue to submit that only by not paying attention (or through unsophisticated performances) can we truly find him SYMPATHETIC) is a tribute to the genius of Mr. Shakespeare.

It seems to me that we're basically in agreement here, possibly using different terminology. I have a very complicated and not-very-well-thought-out-at-this-time theory on the differences between sympathy, identification and the lack of neither, but I'll spare you that for now...


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## barsoomcore (Oct 18, 2003)

What you COULD do to further mock me and my poorly-thought-out-theories is GO READ MY STORY HOUR!

But only if you wanted to.

Am I getting annoying yet?


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## Pants (Oct 18, 2003)

Joshua Dyal said:
			
		

> No, and Roger Ebert liked it a lot, even though I doubt he's even seen _Fist of the North Star_ for instance, which _Kill Bill_ reminded me of strongly.



Actually, Roger Ebert is one of the biggest proponents of anime in the states, so I wouldn't be surprised if he's seen it.


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## Darrin Drader (Oct 18, 2003)

Pants said:
			
		

> Actually, Roger Ebert is one of the biggest proponents of anime in the states, so I wouldn't be surprised if he's seen it.




Yes, but what would Gene Siskel have to say about it?


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## Pants (Oct 18, 2003)

Baraendur said:
			
		

> Yes, but what would Gene Siskel have to say about it?



"Shut your hole Ebert, you wouldn't know a good movie from a can of baked crap!'
'We must Kung Fu fight!'
*Gene and Roger duke it out*


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## Vocenoctum (Oct 18, 2003)

Joshua Dyal said:
			
		

> Absolutely.  In fact, that was a big gripe I had with the recent _Count of Monte Criso_ remake -- they just couldn't end the movie with the protagonist as a revenge-obsessed bad-guy, like Dumas did in the book.




I watched the movie (which isn't really bad..) while chatting with someone and told them the same thing. "If you liked the book, the movie is a little weak" "why?" "well.... it has a happy ending."


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## Desdichado (Oct 18, 2003)

Right!  I still liked the movie quite a bit, but the ending was a little hard to swallow.


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## Desdichado (Oct 18, 2003)

Sympathetic and identification are two different things.  We can identify with characters we dislike, to a certain extent, if we can understand how they got to be the way they are, and can say "I could have been there, under the right (or wrong) circumstances."  That's a far cry from being sympathetic, though.  Sure, Hamlet himself is a sissy-boy that we grow to dislike strongly, but at the same time, we can see his descent into jerkhood, so we can identify even as he hate him.


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## Nightfall (Oct 19, 2003)

I guess I see the anime references more clearly because I've read a few and also compared US produced anime (not to be confused with created. I merely talking about dubbed Anime), I see a lot of influence. Take the sword fight in the snow in the House of the Blue Leaves.

That reminded me strongly of some of the fights in Samurai X/Kenshin. Difference was, they cut out a lot of dialogue there. That plus 88 guys she fought off, reminded me of Trigun as well as a few others. Believe me, I could see that as well as the spagetti western parts (the whole nameless chick avenging herself was definately a homage in some ways to Clint Eastwood's style of acting/directing). Plus the whole lines with the stuff about God, reminded me strongly of the old Kung-fu movies as well. 

Kill Bill for me as a piece of cinamatic greatness. It's not about the characters, the story or even the fighting. It's about watching something that unfolds like a train wreck or a sharp scream...and seeing it turn into something else. Something wonderous. Something awesome. Something that while you migh abhore, doesn't stop you from feeling the mood, the music, the scenes. Yes you'll find the violence a little childish. But so what? I will say this. Compared to the Maxtrix and it's counterpart, Matrix Reloaded, I felt MORE involved in Kill Bill than either of those two.


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## jdavis (Oct 19, 2003)

I see the anime link it just doesn't click for me. Yea the movie does have similarities to some anime shows but it really isn't similar to anime in general. Heck most anime has more in common with Three's Company than it does with Kill Bill (we just get all the violent ones in America because those are the ones that sell here  ). The couple of anime shows that have been mentioned were influenced by the same types of shows Kill Bill was, it's not a anime style, those shows are immulating those type of action movies. Even the anime scene in Kill Bill really didn't make me think anime at all, it made me think John Woo movie. Tarantino is a anime fan and he probably did get some ideas from certain shows but to say Kill Bill is like anime is the same as saying all American movies are like Star Wars. I doubt you will find any similarities between Kill Bill and Love Hina or Kill Bill and Evangelion, heck aside from the mass amounts of violence you probably couldn't find that much similar between Kill Bill and Berserk. There would be a lot of similarities with shows like Crying Freeman and The Profesional Golgo 13 which are shows heavily influenced by Hong Kong action movies or with shows like Ninja Scroll which is a show heavily influenced by the old Ninja and Samurai movies. It's just not a anime style thing (like say if everybody had huge eyes and a little mouth or that they were tall and skinny with wild colored hair).


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## Nightfall (Oct 19, 2003)

Jdavis,

Okay fair enough. I guess though I saw it in a different light than you. Even so, I do like your insights on the movie. Some really good stuff there.


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## barsoomcore (Oct 19, 2003)

jdavis said:
			
		

> The couple of anime shows that have been mentioned were influenced by the same types of shows Kill Bill was, it's not a anime style, those shows are immulating those type of action movies.



If I ever get to meet Mr. Tarantino, I'm going to ask him if the black and white portion of the House of Falling Leaves fight was meant to make me remember the end of _Sword of Doom_ -- especially since the moment it turns back into colour felt like the moment right at the end, where they finally corner the guy and kill him -- so it goes into colour to tell us this time, the crazy one's not going down.


> It's just not a anime style thing (like say if everybody had huge eyes and a little mouth or that they were tall and skinny with wild colored hair).



You know, it's crazy but Uma Thurman's legs are not long enough for her to emulate an anime character.

And that's just messed up.

It's hard not to laugh when you go to Japan if you're at all familiar with anime character drawing -- because 99% of the people in Japan are about as far from the typical anime character as the human body can get. Talk about your cultural sub-consciousness! Oh and the other funny thing is that while all the Japanese characters have big round eyes, the Chinese and Korean characters always have slanted eyes. Nice.


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## Shadowdancer (Oct 20, 2003)

Joshua Dyal said:
			
		

> Sympathetic and identification are two different things. We can identify with characters we dislike, to a certain extent, if we can understand how they got to be the way they are, and can say "I could have been there, under the right (or wrong) circumstances." That's a far cry from being sympathetic, though. Sure, Hamlet himself is a sissy-boy that we grow to dislike strongly, but at the same time, we can see his descent into jerkhood, so we can identify even as he hate him.



I think the concepts you are looking for are "sympathy" and "empathy."

Man, you guys must have studied a different version of "Hamlet" than I did. I think he's a very sympathetic character, I never thought he was a jerk, and never grew to hate him.


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## shilsen (Oct 20, 2003)

Shadowdancer said:
			
		

> I think the concepts you are looking for are "sympathy" and "empathy."
> 
> Man, you guys must have studied a different version of "Hamlet" than I did. I think he's a very sympathetic character, I never thought he was a jerk, and never grew to hate him.




I hadn't bothered to reply to the point the earlier posters made about "Hamlet", but I agree with you. One of the few ways to think Hamlet is a jerk is to totally ignore the context of the play (historical, religious, and literary) and apply 20th-21st century perspectives to it.

As for him being a sissy-boy (to use Joshua Dyal's term), nobody who kicks the ass of the best swordsman in the kingdom (Laertes) and singlehandedly leaps alone onto the deck of a pirate ship to attack its crew (I need to make a "Dread Pirate Hamlet" movie someday) should be described that way.


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## Desdichado (Oct 20, 2003)

Yes, but he's a whiner.  I can see him referred to as a sissy-boy (although that's really more barsoomcore's opinion than mine, even if I did coin the phrase.)  And he doesn't stand up and do the right thing; he let's his fiance, or whatever they're actual relationship is, die and doesn't care.


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## Jeremy (Oct 20, 2003)

Just cause I haven't posted here in a while, I agree with JDavis on a lot of his points.  

I enjoyed the movie because it catered to me.  And I agree, I'm surprised he didn't put the dubbing out of sync as this would have lead even more people to get the joke of it.


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## barsoomcore (Oct 20, 2003)

shilsen said:
			
		

> One of the few ways to think Hamlet is a jerk is to totally ignore the context of the play (historical, religious, and literary) and apply 20th-21st century perspectives to it.



Or to say, "Hey, anybody who smacks the woman he claims to love and calls her a whore (which is what the comment "get thee to a nunnery" would imply to Shakespeare's audience of the time) is kind of a loser. I don't care what century this is."

Or possibly to say, "You know, a guy who stabs an innocent man to death and then never expresses the slightest remorse over it -- that's not exactly the coolest thing in the world."

But I agree, if you apply 20th-21st century perspectives to it, that'll work, too.


> As for him being a sissy-boy (to use Joshua Dyal's term), nobody who kicks the ass of the best swordsman in the kingdom (Laertes) and singlehandedly leaps alone onto the deck of a pirate ship to attack its crew should be described that way.



Okay, you haven't read the play very carefully. Hamlet's ship WASN'T attacked by pirates. He made that up to explain his return from what should have been certain death. What REALLY happened is that he snuck around, found the document his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were carrying (which, unknown to them, promised Hamlet immediate execution at the hands of the English king), altered the document so that his friends would be executed instead of him (hm, no mealy-mouthed cowardice there, no sir), then had a little holiday in England (presumably congratulating himself on his cleverness) before returning for Ophelia's funeral, so that he could pretend to be upset about a situation for which he himself was responsible.

And DID he kick the ass of the best swordsman? We don't know for sure that Laertes IS very dangerous -- he's claimed to be, but we never see him fight anyone else so who knows? And we don't get much information on the fight: Shakespeare's words on the subject are:

_They fight. Both are struck by the poisoned sword_

Not exactly a clear ass-kicking outcome, I'd say. Nothing like those poisoned swords to really level the playing field.


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## drnuncheon (Oct 20, 2003)

barsoomcore said:
			
		

> Okay, you haven't read the play very carefully. Hamlet's ship WASN'T attacked by pirates. He made that up to explain his return from what should have been certain death.




Er.  That's a very interesting interpretation - but if it's true, then why did he stick with the story when speaking alone, to his trusted friend Horatio - especially after he had just admitted to switching the documents?  There's no reason for it, and I'm not sure what support there is for the idea that there weren't really any pirates.



			
				barsoomcore said:
			
		

> What REALLY happened is that he snuck around, found the document his friends Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were carrying (which, unknown to them, promised Hamlet immediate execution at the hands of the English king), altered the document so that his friends would be executed instead of him (hm, no mealy-mouthed cowardice there, no sir)




Considering that they were basically working for the king to spy on him (and Halmet had figured it out), I don't think they qualify as his "friends".  Also, he had no way of knowing that they were ignorant of the letter's contents.  Confronting them would have been foolish, on a ship full of men he did not know he coulfd trust.  Cowardice or cunning?  I'd say the latter.



			
				barsoomcore said:
			
		

> And DID he kick the ass of the best swordsman? We don't know for sure that Laertes IS very dangerous -- he's claimed to be, but we never see him fight anyone else so who knows?




Well, if Shakespeare didn't mean us to think Laertes was a good fighter, then why even mention it in the play?  There are plenty of other ways for Claudius to butter him up - I doubt that flattering his swordplay was chosen at random.  Also, if Laertes didn't think he could beat Hamlet, he wouldn't have chosen the duel, he'd have sought another way.  So unless the King is setting him up (no reason to believe that) or the King and Laertes are both deluded idiots (again unlikely), we need to take Claudius' assesment of Laertes' skill at face value.

J


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## barsoomcore (Oct 21, 2003)

drnuncheon said:
			
		

> Er.  That's a very interesting interpretation - but if it's true, then why did he stick with the story when speaking alone, to his trusted friend Horatio - especially after he had just admitted to switching the documents?  There's no reason for it, and I'm not sure what support there is for the idea that there weren't really any pirates.



Okay, not much support, I'll go along with that. I don't trust the guy and can well imagine why he wouldn't tell Horatio -- his upright and stuffy friend would probably disapprove. But I'll agree there's not much support.


> Considering that they were basically working for the king to spy on him (and Halmet had figured it out), I don't think they qualify as his "friends".  Also, he had no way of knowing that they were ignorant of the letter's contents.  Confronting them would have been foolish, on a ship full of men he did not know he coulfd trust.  Cowardice or cunning?  I'd say the latter.



I say both. I'm not saying he's dumb. I'm saying he's a sneaky, untrustworthy eel.


> Well, if Shakespeare didn't mean us to think Laertes was a good fighter, then why even mention it in the play?  There are plenty of other ways for Claudius to butter him up - I doubt that flattering his swordplay was chosen at random.



Of course not -- since what Claudius wants is for Laertes to agree to swordfight Hamlet. With a poisoned sword.


> Also, if Laertes didn't think he could beat Hamlet, he wouldn't have chosen the duel, he'd have sought another way.



Or perhaps he would have coated his sword in poison...

And note that they aren't setting up a duel to the death. They're setting up a little gamble on who's the better swordsman -- Laertes or Hamlet. In theory, neither of them is in much danger since it's not meant to be a "real" duel. Laertes poisons the sword to make what ought to be a harmless contest into a deadly one.

So really, Laertes' skill with the sword is immaterial. It seems reasonable to think that they are of roughly equivalent skill, but you could easily stage the play with Laertes as a bumbling oaf who gets one hit on Hamlet and then loses control of his own sword.


> So unless the King is setting him up (no reason to believe that) or the King and Laertes are both deluded idiots (again unlikely), we need to take Claudius' assesment of Laertes' skill at face value.



And we would do this because... Claudius has turned out to be such an upstanding fellow so far? We don't NEED to do anything.

Indeed with a play like Hamlet, it's dangerous to think ANYTHING is clearly spelled out, or that any assumptions are beyond consideration. This is a play that admits to a million interpretations, and always manages to exceed any person's grasp.

What I've been getting at is that a big part of Shakespeare's mastery is how he takes a largely unlikable character like Hamlet and makes him compelling -- so compelling that we come to even like or admire him. Much like what Milton achieves with Satan in _Paradise Lost_, Shakespeare creates a character whose identity has exceeded the work that contains him.

My original comment was (or at least was meant to be) that it takes more skill and talent to create a compelling story out of unlikeable characters than it does to create an equally compelling story out of likeable characters. The notion being that one of the ways to make a story compelling is to people it with likeable characters, so if you take that away from the story, you have to work even harder to make it compelling.

Not that we are incapable of liking and admiring Hamlet. I do, certainly. And while I definitely think that the most common readings of Hamlet tend to gloss over his undeniably fouler qualities, I DON'T think he's just an unredeemable loser.

Now Macbeth, HE'S a whole other story....



edit: just fixed up a typo in "not much"


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## Pielorinho (Oct 21, 2003)

Here's my thinking:  he's a teenage boy who is visited by the ghost of his father -- an unassailable witness -- and finds out that his uncle and king has committed possibly the two worst crimes, fratricide and regicide.  Furthermore, his mother is betraying his father and his country in the most fundamental of ways, by wedding the murderer.

It drives him stark raving nutters.

He has proof either that he's insane (and hallucinating) or that he's sane (and has the highest moral duty to avenge his father and king).  Such vengeance would probably involve killing his mother, since she's giving comfort to the traitor/murderer.

It drives him bonkers.

His uncle persuades his best friends to conspire against him, to lead Hamlet to his death.  And Hamlet finds out.

He goes over the bend.

Given his situation -- he knows, without being able to prove it, that his mother is sleeping with the worst of all possible monstrous criminals, and he knows that that criminal is far more powerful and sophisticated than him -- yes, I say his situation is untenable.  Yes, he does some horrible things, including cruelly rejecting his fiancee, not caring about killing a man (a man that he suspects is spying on him for his uncle), and ultimately killing a lot of people.  

I still find him tragically sympathetic, a hero in his desire to do right by his country and his family, a hero brought down by his inability to find a noble solution to his terrible predicament.

Granted, I've not memorized the play -- I've seen three or four versions of it, on stage and on screen, however, and though the versions were all different from one another, I've always found him a basically sympathetic character, even as he committed atrocities.

Daniel


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## Nightfall (Oct 21, 2003)

This is why I love this forum.  If we go off topic, we go off in STYLE!  Not to mention the fact it's intelligent jabber.


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## Ankh-Morpork Guard (Oct 21, 2003)

Nightfall said:
			
		

> This is why I love this forum.  If we go off topic, we go off in STYLE!  Not to mention the fact it's intelligent jabber.



 What's worse is I haven't read Hamlet in at least three years...and I understand every word of this.

Ahh, the life of a Geek is filled with strange joy.


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## shilsen (Oct 21, 2003)

barsoomcore said:
			
		

> Okay, you haven't read the play very carefully.




Well, I'll admit it's only been half a dozen times and I only teach it once a couple years, so maybe you're right  

Facetiousness aside, I am with you on the fact that there's a whole lot of basis for different interpretations in the play. I was just commenting on Joshua's fairly simplistic reading of the character, just as I usually do when I encounter the wholly unvarnished "Hamlet is a great guy" readings. 

What makes the character and Shakespeare's treatment of it so cool is that he upturns all the normal categories which his audience would have recognized, not just once but multiple times. For example, Hamlet is a revenger who does not revenge (until the very end), possibly the only such character in the huge Elizabethan/Jacobean genre of revenge plays. He is dilatory according to himself, but not according to anyone else, so we never know for sure if he is or isn't. He is a middle-aged man who simultaneously acts as the oldest philosopher and a young lover (Pielorinho isn't the only person to miss that he's far from a teenager). He's a protestant hero, facing an at-least potentially Catholic ghost, faced with the choice of a classically acceptable and in Christian terms unacceptable act (revenge). And he simultaneously is son, prince, subject, lover, nephew, warrior, scholar, etc. and most importantly perhaps, an actor. He's a melancholic (which has a whole new set of meanings in the English Renaissance) but not a madman ("put my antic disposition on", remember?). It's a tough gig.


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## drnuncheon (Oct 21, 2003)

Pielorinho said:
			
		

> It drives him stark raving nutters.




*ROSENCRANTZ*: To sum up: Your father, whom you love, dies, you are his heir, you come back to find that hardly was the corpse cold before his young brother popped onto his throne and into his sheets, thereby offending both legal and natural practice. Now why exactly are you behaving in this extraordinary manner?

*GUILDENSTERN*: I can't imagine.

- Tom Stoppard, _Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead_


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## Nightfall (Oct 21, 2003)

Ankh-Morpork Guard said:
			
		

> What's worse is I haven't read Hamlet in at least three years...and I understand every word of this.
> 
> Ahh, the life of a Geek is filled with strange joy.



Yeah well the point is, its THESE kinds of postings I enjoy in En World more than anywhere else.


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## jdavis (Oct 21, 2003)

Ankh-Morpork Guard said:
			
		

> What's worse is I haven't read Hamlet in at least three years...and I understand every word of this.
> 
> Ahh, the life of a Geek is filled with strange joy.



I saw Hamlet when Mystery Science Theater made fun of it but that's about it, I read Julius Caesar in High School instead (and was glad I did). They used to make us do Shakespeare in acting class and I hated it but if I was to call him overated then this thread may really become a mess so I didn't say that, (unless somebody starts up a Shakespeare thread).


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## jdavis (Oct 21, 2003)

Nightfall said:
			
		

> Jdavis,
> 
> Okay fair enough. I guess though I saw it in a different light than you. Even so, I do like your insights on the movie. Some really good stuff there.



I hate to go all anime fan boy on anything (mainly because I am not one). I was just pointing out the misconception that all anime is the same (or good or bad or dirty or childish or pokemon or Dragon Ball Z or the same in any way; anime is a huge multi-genre industry in Japan, shows differ from each other in drastic ways depending on who made them and what they are about.)

The movie was most definatly influenced by some anime shows (Tarantino said he watched old movies and anime when he got stuck while writing the script), but it's just not a anime movie in any way shape or form, it's exactly what Tarantino said it was a homage to B action movies from the 70's. See here I go again; if anybody has any interest in seeing just how much anime is out there check out http://www.animenewsnetwork.com/index.php , their encyclopedia section is huge.


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## Nightfall (Oct 21, 2003)

Understood JD.


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## Welverin (Oct 21, 2003)

jdavis said:
			
		

> Well the really early show was only $3.75 but who goes to the movies at 2 in the afternoon?
> http://www.cinemark.com/THEATER_SHOWTIMES.ASP?THEATER_ID=327




Just keep rubbing it in why don't you. What I have to put up with

I finally saw it on Saturday and found the 'violence' to be ridiculously over the top and rather funny at the time. What did make me cringe was seeing N.D. Kalu set on Rich Seubert’s leg on Sunday, that I could stand watching more then once (and I didn’t).


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## Pielorinho (Oct 21, 2003)

shilsen said:
			
		

> He is a middle-aged man who simultaneously acts as the oldest philosopher and a young lover (Pielorinho isn't the only person to miss that he's far from a teenager).



Seriously?  I always thought he was supposed to be a teenager.  How do we know he's middle-aged?

Daniel
lovin' the detour from Tarantino to Shakespeare


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## barsoomcore (Oct 21, 2003)

shilsen said:
			
		

> Facetiousness aside, I am with you on the fact that there's a whole lot of basis for different interpretations in the play.



And saying-outrageous-things-just-to-stir-up-debate aside, I am with you on the infinite incarnations that Hamlet provides.

Harold Bloom has a great book on Shakespeare wherein he makes the comment that while everyone comes to Hamlet and tries to create a definitive version (okay, maybe not EVERYONE. Not sure I have, for example), they always fail. Hamlet's bigger than any of us. He is MORE than any of us, because he includes all of us.


> He is dilatory according to himself, but not according to anyone else, so we never know for sure if he is or isn't.



One of my favourite hobbies is doubting Shakespeare characters. They're a deceitful bunch, and you can have endless fun saying "Yeah, well we know that Macbeth SAYS he murdered Duncan, but how do we KNOW it's true? Maybe somebody beat him to it?"

And as one last note, Hamlet himself offers up the potential that the ghost he has seen may not be what it claimed to be. 

_The spirit that I have seen
May be a devil; and the devil hath power
T' assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps
Out of my weakness and my melancholy,
As he is very potent with such spirits,
Abuses me to damn me._

"Hm, might be the devil. Oh well, guess I'll kill him anyway."


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## Ankh-Morpork Guard (Oct 22, 2003)

barsoomcore said:
			
		

> "Hm, might be the devil. Oh well, guess I'll kill him anyway."




...I have the urge to take this line to my Literature Teacher.


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## Nightfall (Oct 22, 2003)

I have with mine when I took my Shakespearan class. Anyway while I adore Halmet on an exercise level, I find Julius Caeser and/or Henry the V a much better character study.


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## Tsyr (Oct 22, 2003)

Ok, just got back from seeing it.

To be honest?

Underawed. Very. Wasn't a bad movie, but wasn't what it could have been. Though the scene in Okinawa was great, from the comedy to the seriousness.

Though a comment...

Am I the only one who watches movies brought to America by "Tokyo Shock" and similar distributors? Movies like Fudoh: The New Generation, Dead or Alive, and similar movies? To be honest, Kill Bill reminded me more of Fudoh: The New Generation than any other movie I can name.


----------



## shilsen (Oct 22, 2003)

Pielorinho said:
			
		

> Seriously?  I always thought he was supposed to be a teenager.  How do we know he's middle-aged?
> 
> Daniel
> lovin' the detour from Tarantino to Shakespeare




He's thirty, which is middle-aged by Renaissance standards. In Act 5 Scene 1, the first grave-digger mentions that he became a gravedigger on the day that Hamlet was born, and a few lines later, mentions that he has been working there for 30 years.


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## jdavis (Oct 22, 2003)

Tsyr said:
			
		

> Ok, just got back from seeing it.
> 
> To be honest?
> 
> ...



A friend of mine collects those types of movies but he moved away a couple of years ago. He introduced me to a lot of these type of movies (and got me into anime too), I miss him because in a small town it's really hard to find this type of stuff (he'd drive 2 hours to buy a video). Do you have a web site address to order stuff?


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## Black Omega (Oct 23, 2003)

Chiaki Kuriyama  (Go Go Yubari) came to Tarentino's attention in the movie Battle Royale.  I finally got a chance to watch that today.  Very interesting.  A bit to my surprise, her role in the movie is rather small and she doesn't play the psycho killer of the group, but she does an excellent job with the role.

The movie itself is rather strange.  Japan is going downhill and a law is passed that evidently matches classfull of students against each other on a deserted island now and then.  The sole surviving student is the only one allowed off.  The why of this is never explained, which works for me.  I'd rather no explaination and a chance to use my imagination then a bad explanation that just annoys me.  In some places the movie reminds me of Evangelion, with it's general bleakness and the occasional use of blackscreen voice overs to make a philosophical point.  An interesting movie, well worth a look.


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## reapersaurus (Oct 31, 2003)

Joshua Dyal said:
			
		

> Absolutely.  In fact, that was a big gripe I had with the recent _Count of Monte Criso_ remake -- they just couldn't end the movie with the protagonist as a revenge-obsessed bad-guy, like Dumas did in the book.



Are you of the opinion that tCoMC was worse-off because of it?
I wholeheartedly disagree - CoMC was a wonderfully-scripted film, probably the best I've seen in over a decade.
The fact that the character was sympathetic is almost necessary to see him thru all the tortuous events that happen - he actually GREW thru the story, unlike so many other movies - the change from the book was welcome, and worked VERY, very well.
Similarly, the improvement over the book was when they 



Spoiler



had the boy be the Count's son


. It made everyting work SO well. I can't imagine it if he hadn't been.


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## kingpaul (Oct 31, 2003)

blackshirt5 said:
			
		

> Also nice that you don't even get to see Bill's face yet.



Just saw the movie last night.  I could've sworn that Bill's face was in that one picture that showed the...Death Vipers (I think that's the name of the group).

I thought the movie was interesting.  The cinematography and music was downright outstanding...though I have to admit that I didn't associate with any of the characters, which I'm used to doing in movies.  I'm going to see the 2nd movie to see how it wraps up.


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## Black Omega (Oct 31, 2003)

Actually, in the shot showing the Deadly Viper Assasinatin Squad you see Budd (Sidewinder) rather than Bill.  Of Bill we've only seen his hand, sword and boots.

Unless that was him with the sharp katana and rings in the anime that killed O-Ren's daddy.


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## Lurks-no-More (Oct 31, 2003)

Saw _Kill Bill_ on Monday.

I liked it; I liked it a lot.

It was horribly violent, but given the basic premise and who was directing it, that's a given. It was also over-the-top in many ways, but that, again, is just what it tries to be: an over-the-top revenge story.

The use of music was _awesome_, I found myself tapping my feet to the tune of the soundtrack at several places. The "Bang! Bang! My baby shot me down" tune at the beginning was just too appropriate...

Also, I loved the little things, like the swordholders on the Yakuza bikes _and_ on the Air Okinawa plane, or the "Red Apple" cigarette ads. (BTW, this must be the most movie-referential movie ever...).

Final comment: _Kill Bill_ is like an antimatter version of _Charlie's Angels_. Watching the two in succession would probably blow your brains out.


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## shilsen (Oct 31, 2003)

reapersaurus said:
			
		

> Are you of the opinion that tCoMC was worse-off because of it?
> I wholeheartedly disagree - CoMC was a wonderfully-scripted film, probably the best I've seen in over a decade.
> The fact that the character was sympathetic is almost necessary to see him thru all the tortuous events that happen - he actually GREW thru the story, unlike so many other movies - the change from the book was welcome, and worked VERY, very well.
> Similarly, the improvement over the book was when they
> ...




Ah, another opportunity to derail this thread in a literary direction 

I enjoyed the movie but definitely thought it would have been better sticking with the book. Throwing in unnecessary swordfights and having (IIRC) Mercedes jump back into bed with Edmond at the first opportunity just didn't work for me. Also, remember that the Count does grow quite consistently in the book and does not end as the "revenge-obsessed bad guy" that Joshua Dyal mentions. He learns that he can't just mete out punishment without there being repercussions, and even though the bad guys all get it in the end, at the conclusion of the book he is left alone. Remember his apologetic letter ending the book? Mercedes leaving (in the book) with her son makes so much more sense than the happy ending (of the movie), considering the portrayal of the character and the historical period. As for making the boy be his son, I saw it coming a mile away and have one word for it - blech!


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## Tanager (Oct 31, 2003)

Well, I saw it last night, went expecting to be disapointed, seeing as I think Tarantino is self worshipping dweeb. I was surprised by how much I actually enjoyed it. As for the violence and gore, I was expecting worse after all I'd read, was expecting more 'realism' but enjoyed the stylization more.

Now, that said, the standard Tarantino touches I could've lived without. Non sequential narrative has been done to death now, let it go already.
Music, for the most part, good and enjoyable, but still felt like the usual 'look at how retro cool and quirky I am' I've come to expect from Tarantino.

The upside, fabulous cinematography and art direction. I also think he did a great job of getting some stellar performances out of his cast. The dialogue between Uma and Lucy Liu was beautifully delivered, as was that of Vivica Fox (think I got her name right).

I also really appreciated hte fact that Uma actually looked like a real human being throughout most of the picture and wasn't overly prettyfied.

Looking forward to part 2.

Just my 1.44 cents worth


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## reapersaurus (Nov 1, 2003)

OK, I'll post my points about Kill Bill now. 

Liked the movie (gave it a 7), but not anything like many people have. I think QT is quite overrated - he gets away with stuff that fanboys roast other movies for. (example : gee, the movie was DESIGNED to not work perfectly - that's an homage to the bad kung-fu movies of - STOP. just stop rationalizing, when you crucify other movies for less.)

Questions/observations:
a) How could The Bride's voice be heard over the din of the club when she said "we have unfinished business"? I'd assumed she took the house mic, but I couldn't see any evidence of that when they showed her behind Sophie.

b) What Chapters did they show in Vol. 1?

c) Showing the movie out of order this time was a mistake, IMO.
The dramatic tension in the story was destroyed, since we knew she would 



Spoiler



kill O-Ren


. Bad move.

d) Her head would have been shaved when Daryl Hannah came in to kill her. 

e) When she woke up in the hospital, I think she said "4 years!" - I don't think she knew that 4 years had passed, at the time, but maybe I missed it.

f) The blood was laughably ridiculous.
It's analogous to a (spoiler'ed for safety) 



Spoiler



hentai director have a guy spew gallons of cum on a woman, it's that purile and undeserving of respect for the filmmaker. I doubt if anyone would jump to the defense of the hentai director, saying it was artful.


 

g) Why did he have to have her leave the hospital "13 hours later"? It would have worked just as well if it had been, say, 3 hours later, and they wouldn't have had the problem they did: that after 13 hours, the bodies and mess would have been found, and they would have searched for the guy's car in the parking lot by then.


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## John Crichton (Nov 1, 2003)

reapersaurus said:
			
		

> c) Showing the movie out of order this time was a mistake, IMO.
> The dramatic tension in the story was destroyed, since we knew she would
> 
> 
> ...





Spoiler



Considering that this was part 1 of a two-part movie, of course the main character is going to live.  Plus, it would have been terribly anti-climactic to do the fights in the correct chronological order.


 
Don't get me wrong, I'm not completely defending QT, here.  I just think that the movie worked better the way it was presented.  I do think that it would have been a little better to not have the "checklist" shown until the very end, just to add a little tension, tho.  The time-switching thing wasn't a big deal to me, especially compared to how QT has used it in the past.  This was rather tame and it worked with the flow of the film.



Spoiler



But, yes - I would have rather not known, for sure, what was going to happen at the end.


----------



## Kai Lord (Nov 1, 2003)

John Crichton said:
			
		

> Spoiler
> 
> 
> 
> Considering that this was part 1 of a two-part movie, of course the main character is going to live.  Plus, it would have been terribly anti-climactic to do the fights in the correct chronological order.



No, what they should have done was just have had Vivica A. Fox be the first on the list.


----------



## John Crichton (Nov 1, 2003)

Kai Lord said:
			
		

> No, what they should have done was just have had Vivica A. Fox be the first on the list.



That's one other thing they could have done, sure. 



Spoiler



But, The Bride got the info she needed about where the rest of the assassins were from her trip overseas, so that wouldn't have worked with the plot.


 But, point taken.


----------



## Kai Lord (Nov 1, 2003)

John Crichton said:
			
		

> That's one other thing they could have done, sure.
> 
> 
> 
> ...



Of course it would have worked.  How hard would it have been to have had



Spoiler



Uma find Vivica A. Fox through some simple means then have her go to Japan to kill Lucy and get the rest of the info on the others?


  As if they even needed to make it known how she finds out where everyone is.  Its not like any of the the story is actually grounded in a shred of reality to begin with.


----------



## John Crichton (Nov 1, 2003)

Kai Lord said:
			
		

> Of course it would have worked. How hard would it have been to have had
> 
> 
> 
> ...



It makes sense to me that she would have a hard time finding out where all her targets would be located.  I liked that she had to work for it.  And it did fit with the plot.  And yep, it could have been done how you mentioned it but it would have lessened the movie, to me.  It may not seem that any of the plot was important but there was a narrative flow and that was part of it.


----------



## jdavis (Nov 1, 2003)

reapersaurus said:
			
		

> OK, I'll post my points about Kill Bill now.
> 
> Liked the movie (gave it a 7), but not anything like many people have. I think QT is quite overrated - he gets away with stuff that fanboys roast other movies for. (example : gee, the movie was DESIGNED to not work perfectly - that's an homage to the bad kung-fu movies of - STOP. just stop rationalizing, when you crucify other movies for less.)



Well you see the whole point of not 'crucifying" the movie for those gaffes is that they are not gaffes. The movies it was throwing back to were notorius for their loopholes and gaffes, it had those loopholes in it intentionally for stylistic purposes. Now whether that is silly or not is another question entirely, but roasting the movie for it's mistakes would be sort of silly when those *weren't mistakes*. It's not people rationalizing the mistakes it's that it wasn't a mistake to start with. Nobody is letting him "get away with anything" it was a given that the movie would be like that to start with. I've already quoted and linked to this before but I will again:



> *Incorrectly regarded as goofs:* The many continuity lapses and other apparent technical errors are a matter of deliberate stylistic choice in this pastiche of 1970s "B" action movies



http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0266697/goofs 

THe whole bit in the hospital was a big example of this, why worry about her head being shaved or whether she knew how much time had passsed, after 4 years in a coma your arms aren't going to work either and there is no way to will back lost muscle tone, your talking about months of physical therapy to even be able to get out of the bed, yet she was killing 100's of people within a couple of months. So what are you going to complain about? She was shot in the head and lived with no brain damage? She willed atropied muscles back to full martial arts kick butt working order in 13 hours (or 3 hours or 4.62 hours......), that she flew to Japan and back and still drove around in the Truck who's name cannot be mentioned around here(gee you think maybe the cops would be looking for her and the guys missing truck? It's not like it doesn't stand out.) I could go on and on but it's hard to pick on stuff like that when the whole entire movie was like that. The movie wasn't set in the real world it was set in "movieland" (Tarantino's words not mine, I posted that link before already too) it's supposed to be that way, it being that way is the whole point of the movie, if it wasn't that way then it wouldn't be a homage to 70's action movies, it being that way is what makes (or breaks) the movie. It's hard to pick any scene in the movie that isn't outrageous and unrealistic (Vivica Fox keeps a gun in her cereal box?, Japan is full of killer high school ninja kids? They used a old Godzilla set for the shot of a plane landing when it would of been infinitly cheaper to just go to the airport and shoot footage of a plane landing?) that's the whole point of the movie. How can you "crucify" this movie for that kind of stuff when that kind of stuff is the whole point of the movie, it's supposed to be cheesy.

I can understand people not liking it, it's not for everyone, I can understand people not liking the non-linear storytelling that's not for everyone either, I can understand people not liking the goofy ass violence, and I can understand people not liking the fact that it's a intentional B quality movie, but why pick on it's goofs and continuity lapses when those were all written into the script that way, it's the whole point of the movie. If I thought for a split second that any part of that movie was supposed to be realistic or taken seriously then I would have to call it the most retarded movie ever (as Kai Lord does) the whole movie is one big unrealistic plot hole from beginning to end, that's the whole point. It sort of like coming out of Scary Movie 3 and griping that it wasn't scary.


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## stevelabny (Nov 27, 2003)

is this still on?
hi my names steve
and i'm a month and half late to this party 

um, wait...let me get this straight. QT made a film with no humor , no dialogue, bad special effects, bad acting, gaping plot holes, and no interesting or sympathetic characters...and its OK because he MEANT to do that?

gee, i wonder how many other writers and directors will start saying they MEANT all their plot holes too.

i mean all my bad grammar and typos, i'm not really stupid and lazy, i'm just paying HOMAGE to all the other stupid and lazy people online.

just so you guys know.

NOTHING in this movie worked for me on any level. And to call it art and a sucess because it was supposed to be awful is why i dont believe in "art"
I once heard someone say that ANYTHING can be art if you look at it with an open-mind. To which I quickly replied, if ANYTHING can be art, then in reality, NOTHING is art. And that promptly ended all conversations between us.

Ok...I finally saw MAtrix Revolutions too...gonna go dig up that thread


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## Numion (Nov 27, 2003)

jdavis said:
			
		

> Well you see the whole point of not 'crucifying" the movie for those gaffes is that they are not gaffes. The movies it was throwing back to were notorius for their loopholes and gaffes, it had those loopholes in it intentionally for stylistic purposes. Now whether that is silly or not is another question entirely, but roasting the movie for it's mistakes would be sort of silly when those *weren't mistakes*. It's not people rationalizing the mistakes it's that it wasn't a mistake to start with. Nobody is letting him "get away with anything" it was a given that the movie would be like that to start with. I've already quoted and linked to this before but I will again:




Well, maybe people roast the movie because of the intentional 'mistakes' because they're normally called mistakes because they make a movie worse. Intentional or not, crap is crap.


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## John Crichton (Nov 27, 2003)

Numion said:
			
		

> Well, maybe people roast the movie because of the intentional 'mistakes' because they're normally called mistakes because they make a movie worse. Intentional or not, crap is crap.



I can agree with that.

However, I thoroughly enjoyed this film so it's certainly not crap to me.  

I find that these kinds of films fall into 4 categories:

1. People who got it and liked it.
2. People who got it and didn't like it.
3. People who didn't get it and liked it anyway, for whatever reason.
4. People who didn't get it and therefore didn't like it, for whatever reason.

The 4th one is not to say that this type of person is in any way flawed nor should they be put down.  Not all movies are made for everyone.  This one is a perfect example.


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## hong (Nov 27, 2003)

Scary Movie [1|2|3] is a parody. It's supposed to be funny.

AFAIK, Kill Bill is not meant to be a parody, and the laugh quotient is also rather low. Although there were definitely a number of funny bits. I'm thinking primarily of the kiddie yakuza getting his katana sliced to bits -- how blatant can the symbolism get?

But anyway, I don't have a problem with kitschy scenes, plot logic holes, and whatnot. I mean, you have this chyk taking on 88 ninja in a restaurant[*]. It may not be a parody but it's also clearly not meant to be completely realistic. Tarantino may have said that he didn't want any CGI involved, but that just makes Uma 10th level, rather than 20th. 

As for the blood: jeez guys, there's more to Japanese cinema than anime. The gallons o' blood is a staple of chambara films going back 50 years or more. See any one of the multiple Lone Wolf and Cub movies, for instance, and you'll get exactly the same fountains of gore, lopped-off limbs and so on. Not usually with as slick choreography and special effects, though.

As an aside, I saw _Hero_ for what must be the 10th time last night and the stylistic contrasts are striking. If Japanese people have 10,000 gallons of blood in them at 500 psi, Chinese people have a couple of cc's. Japanese people leave lots of disconnected body parts behind when they die, whereas Chinese people just disappear (the really high-level ones anyway). Personally I also prefer cinematic wushu swordfighting, aerial ballet and all, to kenjutsu duels, but that's just me.


[*] in a fight to the death, get your mind out of the gutter


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## barsoomcore (Nov 27, 2003)

Just to keep the conversation going (why? hong's showed up), I feel compelled to point out, in the wake of all this "It's okay that it sucks cause he MEANT it!" "No, it just sucks!" debate --

I didn't think it sucked, so I don't think he meant it to suck.

I thought it rocked. I thought I saw some of the best durn fight scenes put on film, some uber-chops from Uma and Lucy (and the rest of the crew), inventive film-making, funny sight gags and a relentless, merciless revenge story.

_Kill Bill Vol 1_ is a great film. It doesn't need to be justified or explained. If you didn't like it, you didn't like it. I didn't like any of the _The Matrix_ movies but lots of people did. For my money, _Kill Bill Vol 1_ was the most daring and exciting film I saw in a mainstream theatre all year. It was more outrageous and more idiosyncratic than anything I saw at the Vancouver Film Fest this year.

Nobody but Quentin Tarantino could have made that film. That alone makes it more interesting than just about anything else out of Hollywood. 

And I think he MEANT for it to rock.


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## Numion (Nov 27, 2003)

barsoomcore said:
			
		

> I thought it rocked. I thought I saw some of the best durn fight scenes put on film, some uber-chops from Uma and Lucy (and the rest of the crew), inventive film-making, funny sight gags and a relentless, merciless revenge story.




I think it sucked. I still think that QT knew what he was doing, at some level at least. 

The main problem was that it wasn't a movie. It was completely pointless. 1.5h TV-serie episode done with a huge budget. Except that those leave you wanting to see the next part, hopefully. 

Okay that last part was needless. But had it been a complete movie my views would be notably higher. All the ingredients for a tarantino hit were there: gross but somehow funny scenes (but those were worse than his previous movies), some funny dialogue (again, worse than before) and a nice soundtrack (or one that at least keeps playing in your head. Broken nerve. The chinese band .. aaargh.) 

So thats where I'm coming from. I saw a totally pointless 1.5h extravaganza of violence, but I didn't see what I paid 10 euros to see: a movie. I'll forgive part of this to QT, as it was the studios greed that split the movie. Well guess what, I won't see vol II! Nyah-nyah-nyah! (yeah, I know, nobody cares, and yeah, I actually will see it )

+ some of the intentional crap just didn't hit me. I'm not entertained by furious chinese talking, even if that was funny in HK films. Crap in your pants still feels like crap in your pants, even if you did it on purpose.


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## jdavis (Nov 28, 2003)

Well there are lots of movies I hate that may or may not be good, that's not at all the point here, you didn't like it well that's fine and dandy, to say it sucked because you didn't like it or get it is sort of presumptious. After all this time I really don't care if other people liked it or not that's everybodies right. Lets face it here all that stuff listed earlier was intentional, it's not a parody it's a homage, it's not making fun of the genre it's showing respect to the genre. You don't like that then obviously your not going to like the movie, it's no brainer, if you don't like shlocky films then you won't like this shlocky film, that's not rocket science. This movie is a happy little homage movie, it's exactly how it was meant to be. 

Since this thread just popped up from a long nap let me just summerize my points here: The movie was made exactly how it appears and for very good reasons, Taratino meant it to be exactly that way (links were provided to back everything up through this and the other thread on this movie). If you didn't like the movie then that's completly ok and fine, it's a movie that definatly wasn't made to have any type of universal appeal. This movie wasn't made for everybody to like it was made for a select group to worship as a cult movie. People who liked it tend to love it, for me it's the best movie this year so far it would be on my personal top ten list, but that's just me, for other people it could of made their eyes bleed and caused pregnant women to go into early labor. Oh well, no movie is ever universally liked, thats just how it goes.


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## Particle_Man (Nov 28, 2003)

Not only did I like it,

Not only did most critics like it,

But the Kill Bill ratings poll (1-10) gave, on average, a very high rating for that movie from posters to that thread.

WE WIN!!!!!!


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## Welverin (Nov 28, 2003)

Particle_Man said:
			
		

> WE WIN!!!!!!




YAY! WOO-HOO! GO TEAM!!


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## takyris (Nov 28, 2003)

Jdavis: Good point.  I don't like the brooding-trenchcoat-loner brand of anime -- I find it self-absorbed and whiny, and was permanently turned off by a former player who both loved that brand of anime and acted like that in person (and was then surprised when women failed to fall all over him).  As a result, I didn't like The Matrix.  I don't think it sucked, but it seems to be a faithful homage to a genre (and subgenre, since most anime people will tell me that not all anime is like that anime) that I personally dislike.  To expect otherwise would be silly.

For the record, as of late, I've been voting with my dollars.  Kill Bill just didn't interest me enough to see.  I can see it on Netflix, and if the fight scenes are good, I'll get to watch 'em again for free.  And if fast edits and good cinematography can't make Uma Thurman look like a good martial artist, I'm only out my usual Netflix price.


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## jdavis (Nov 28, 2003)

takyris said:
			
		

> Jdavis: Good point. I don't like the brooding-trenchcoat-loner brand of anime -- I find it self-absorbed and whiny, and was permanently turned off by a former player who both loved that brand of anime and acted like that in person (and was then surprised when women failed to fall all over him). As a result, I didn't like The Matrix. I don't think it sucked, but it seems to be a faithful homage to a genre (and subgenre, since most anime people will tell me that not all anime is like that anime) that I personally dislike. To expect otherwise would be silly.



So many of these "This movie sucks/rocks" threads with people arguing whether a movie is bad or not keep poping up. All you can actually do is say whether you liked it or not and why, it's much harder to judge whether it was a "good" movie or not, people just like different things in movies. My personal favorite movie is _Streets of Fire_, do you know how many wierd looks I get when I say that's my favorite movie of all time? I might be the only person in the world who thinks that is the best movie ever or that it is even a watchable movie. I don't expect people to agree with my opinion, it's just _my_ opinion. 

It doesn't bother me when people say they don't like this movie or that movie, but when they start saying "that movie was crap" that you get into a professional film critics area and it becomes a bit iffy. There is just a lot of personal preference that goes into liking a movie, I rather gouge my eyes out than set through Sophie's Choice or Steel Magnolias but that doesn't make them bad movies.


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## Tarrasque Wrangler (Nov 28, 2003)

jdavis said:
			
		

> It doesn't bother me when people say they don't like this movie or that movie, but when they start saying "that movie was crap" that you get into a professional film critics area and it becomes a bit iffy. There is just a lot of personal preference that goes into liking a movie, I rather gouge my eyes out than set through Sophie's Choice or Steel Magnolias but that doesn't make them bad movies.



 Thank you so much for saying that.  I've been waiting 8 pages for someone to say something that correct.  As someone who was a professional film critic once upon a time, I go absolutely bonkers when 
 A) people say "It wasn't my kind of movie, ergo it was a bad movie."  Sorry, taste is subjective, quality is not.
 or B) when people say to critics "Well, that's just your opinion."  There are standards and formulas you can apply to any film, work of art, musical piece, etc. to determine whether it is, in fact, good or not.  That doesn't have to mean that film or whatever is your cup of tea, it just means that it succeeded at what it set out to do.  

 Kill Bill was trying to be a mildly cheesy kung-fu revenge exploitation movie.  Now, there was a lot more going on in the movie than that that not everybody picked up on, but at the very least one has to admit that as a mildly cheesy kung-fu revenge exploitation movie it did the job nicely.


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## barsoomcore (Nov 28, 2003)

I just have to say

Best. Movie Title. Ever.


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## Tarrasque Wrangler (Nov 29, 2003)

barsoomcore said:
			
		

> I just have to say
> 
> Best. Movie Title. Ever.



  What, "Kill Bill"?

 Or the one in my .sig?

 [Captain Kirk] Must ... plug ... website ... [/Captain Kirk}


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## Welverin (Nov 29, 2003)

Tarrasque Wrangler said:
			
		

> Kill Bill was trying to be a mildly cheesy kung-fu revenge exploitation movie.




Just curious, but what was it exploiting?

Oh and can we all at least agree that Mortal Kombat Annihilation sucked?


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## hong (Nov 29, 2003)

Tarrasque Wrangler said:
			
		

> Kill Bill was trying to be a mildly cheesy kung-fu revenge exploitation movie.  Now, there was a lot more going on in the movie than that that not everybody picked up on, but at the very least one has to admit that as a mildly cheesy kung-fu revenge exploitation movie it did the job nicely.




On the other hand, being a mildly cheesy katana (not kung-fu) revenge exploitation movie is not exactly a stretch goal. Certainly not for someone who was also responsible for Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. And I think that's what's driving at least some of the criticism; the knowledge that Tarantino is capable of a lot more than what actually appeared.

Kill Bill was fun. Some bits were OTT (and I'm not talking about the 88 ninja), but overall, still fun. It's not the best movie I've seen in 2003, though.

Anyway, who wants to talk about Hero?


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## hong (Nov 29, 2003)

Welverin said:
			
		

> Just curious, but what was it exploiting?




The audience's desire for bloody violence, I'd say.


EDIT: To be precise, the _male_ audience's desire for hawt chyx0rs dishing out bloody violence. Which is why I'm going to be seeing Underworld when it comes out. Who's with me?


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## Welverin (Nov 29, 2003)

hong said:
			
		

> EDIT: To be precise, the _male_ audience's desire for hawt chyx0rs dishing out bloody violence. Which is why I'm going to be seeing Underworld when it comes out. Who's with me?




Well I would be, but I kind of already saw it.


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## Numion (Nov 29, 2003)

hong said:
			
		

> Anyway, who wants to talk about Hero?




Ok story IMO, nothing special. A little lacking in effects department. If you meant the 2002(?) movie.

(Or is this again some damn case were the effects were _supposed_ to look bad?  )


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## hong (Nov 29, 2003)

Numion said:
			
		

> Ok story IMO, nothing special. A little lacking in effects department. If you meant the 2002(?) movie.
> 
> (Or is this again some damn case were the effects were _supposed_ to look bad?  )



 My, aren't we a nattering little nabob of negativity today?


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## jdavis (Nov 30, 2003)

Welverin said:
			
		

> Just curious, but what was it exploiting?
> 
> Oh and can we all at least agree that Mortal Kombat Annihilation sucked?



It was feeding on Japanese Samurai Movie stereotypes, sort of like blacksploitation movies of the sixties fed on the prevailent ethnic stereotypes at the time, Kill Bill part 2 will feed off Hong Kong Kung Fu stereotypes. 

Mortal Kombat Annihilation made my head hurt, I know people who got up 15 minutes into it and left.

What is Hero?


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## Numion (Nov 30, 2003)

hong said:
			
		

> My, aren't we a nattering little nabob of negativity today?




Whats a nabob? 

I liked the ending though, it wasn't a normal hollywood happyhappy joyjoy ending. About the effects .. the zillion arrows scene was particularly bad. You disagree?


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## Tarrasque Wrangler (Dec 4, 2003)

*Come see the glory*

I've posted my Kill Bill parody up at my site.  It's a big movie file, so be forewarned.  I still haven't worked out the kinks to making small filesizes.


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