Everybody was Kung-fu fighting



As part of my rolling week-off movie fest I went to see Tarantino’s Kill Bill (volume 1 since he chopped it in two). Totally excellent flick, choc-full of all sorts of pop-culture, music and movie references, as you’d expect from Tarantino. Also, as you’d expect, a non-linear narrative that moves around chronologically - as he always does - shot in an extremely stylish manner (although the heavy stylism doesn’t get in the way of the story in the way Luc Besson or Tony Scott sometimes let it) with fantastic, almost cartoon-like characters.



In fact at one point the comic-book violence and characterisation is taken literally when we get origin tale for Lucy Lui’s character told in anime (which will please Alex no doubt). Although that did raise one niggling, nit-picking point for me - animated Lucy Lui quite clearly has blue eyes. Surely someone in the animation team should have noticed a mistake like that?



Again there are gallons of blood and violence - the blood literally fountains from severed heads and limbs during the Samurai fight sequences as the Bride (Uma Thurman) wields her Katanna to deadly effect. As with QT’s other films though the violence is, as I said cartoon-like and stylised and not just a simple blood-bath for the hell of it. It’s also fun! I’m certainly looking forward to the second instalment of Kill Bill with more gusto than I am the third Matrix movie next week. I’ll certainly be toddling along to see it and review it, but the second one, although not terrible was certainly below par. But as I said in my review of Reloaded, it’s hard to judge it because it comes with the baggage of expectation and hype, while the first film was a surprise virtual head-fuck. Of course you could say that of The Two Towers and yet it was magnificent. Well, we’ll see soon enough.