Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by onetrick on August 21, 2009 at 20:47:29

In Reply to: RE: Kill Bill vol. 2 posted by patrickU on August 21, 2009 at 05:10:12

Just kiddin'. Your points are thoughtful and well taken.

I'd like to add a few of my own.

I hated the first volume, then found the whole exercise miraculously redeemed with the second. Maybe it was just that I finally came to realize what QT was actually up to in the second film.

Is it a rehash of past genre movies? No. It is more like a synthesis of many genres ... a mediation on the art of story telling itself, which we see in its most elemental form, when Bill recounts, by firelight, the legend of (what was it called, the Hiroshi heart attack [my apologies] ... to the tune of his flute playing -- a re-enactment of primitive story telling. It is an amalgam of the legend of this and the legend of that, and the pop cliche of this and the pop cliche of that, Western this and Eastern that ... all points on the continuum of story telling. It shamlessly borrows and exploits the venacular of others, popular conventions, and stereotypes -- the western, the revenge film, the kung fu film, the italian spaghetti western, the japanaese sumari film, the American 70's black mainstreaming movie, or Greek mythology ... all these forms, all these conventions, are subjected to high heat in the potboiler of Tarrantino's imagination. And what comes out is a heaping helping of penetrating, cross cultural observations of the human condition, to be taken seriously and rejected as conventional cliches at the same time, and which, in a kind of crucible, forces us to confront the charred remains of what this world of images, customs and conventions is really all about anyway.

Tarrantino only seems to be a juvenile shock-meister. He is several pay-grades above it.