But then, perhaps his subtlest joke is how he makes all this “borrowed” material finally, irrevocably his. To complain that he borrows-from Hark, from Fukasaku, from De Palma, from Leone is to miss out on the possibilities of a moment, this moment-where everything just may be up for grabs and the concepts of ownership and authorship need to be revised, and just how fucking great this could be. Questioning the seeming lack of editorial on said violence? It’s there, look again (hint: a child’s glance at a killer over her mother’s dead body, a later echo in anime eyes witnessing even more horrifying carnage). It is this beyond itself that characterizes our present condition. To call him out for excessive violence is to forget that ours is a world of violent excess. As it is, 2003 is still not quite there yet.Ĭan it really be claimed that Kill Bill’s all-out assault on the boundary between high and low culture isn’t anything less than essential? Would it be too bold to state that it is this very threshold which the art of cinema needs to address to maintain its vitality into the 21st century? Quentin has made a film that absorbs world changes large and small: culture clash, file sharing, satellite dishes, DVD commentary, chat rooms, global commerce-indeed it could not have been made in a world that wasn’t so fully saturated by them. Had it been made in Jackie Brown’s place in 1997, it would have seemed alien-no one would have been ready. Jackie Brown is a great film, but Kill Bill: Volume 1 is the logical forward step (no, leap) from Pulp Fiction. And let’s not forget that he remembered to entertain beyond the limits of anything produced within the mainstream studio system in recent memory. Why descend for honest combat wielding rigor and analysis when the lofty perch is so damn comfortable? Either way, it’s almost as if no one could-no, wanted-to believe that he, the prodigal son, could return after so long, after so much, and show us exactly who we are, where we are, where we’re heading, and with such ghastly style and horrible grace. At worst, facile gimp-masked moralism was woken again from its slumber and trotted out to fuck Bill, and hard. A shot to the heart of early 21st-century film culture garnered Quentin, at best, a slew of “that’s nice’s” followed by patronizing pats on the head as everyone rushed off to see something else. That it came, almost unheralded, during the drought of a, yes, “bad year” for movies makes its essential importance stand out even more, and will forever mark 2003, if nothing else, as the year that it happened. Kill Bill: Volume 1, more than any film released in 2003 screams “now.” Its mere existence quickly eradicates questions of “good” and “bad” years for cinema-Tarantino’s gift would irrevocably change any year that it was released. “More,” and for this filmgoer, pretty damn close to enough. If Kill Bill’s genius is in delivering us our “now” it achieves it by bringing the “more”-images, sounds, scenes, styles, pop-culture references. Sooner or later the scale is going to tip in our favor. This hyper-capitalist landscape has us locked into cycles of desire and want spinning ever more quickly out of control and though it’s easy to complain that we can never be satiated amongst the flood of sameness we’re being offered, we shouldn’t ignore that we’re also starting to demand much more. It is in this milieu that Kill Bill firmly situates itself, virtually breathes it from every frame. The onset of digital has made earlier claims that never before has so much been so close and so bewildering and so exhilarating all at once seem like the naive words of children, and we’re far from the point of knowing how even the most unassuming of new possibilities could turn revolutionary. Digital projection systems that will eclipse our world of platters, splices, bulbs and sprockets offer promise for choices in the theaters that would make the change ‘em up ethos of classic repertory cinema seem staid. Go to your living room and make a choice from thousands of stations. ![]() Click again, and turn corporate-friendly news reporting into alternative voices from around the globe. One more click to any music from anywhere that you’d like to hear (albeit illegally, for now). Burmese, Ethiopian, Argentinean, or Korean for dinner? Forget choosing between a panoply of local restaurants and ethnic enclaves-click twice, find a recipe and make it yourself. 1 should be the standard-bearer for the first decade of the 21st century. If ever there was a movement to locate it firmly, Kill Bill: Vol. Each new decade lays its own claims to surrogacy over the global village.
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