KILL BILL (VOLUME 1)

Director: Quenton Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Resevoir Dogs, Jackie Brown)
Starring: Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Darryl Hannah, David Carradine

I'm pretty sure that I saw at least a few moments of sheer genius in Quenton Terrentino's 4th feature film. I'm under the impression that this film, as well as it's successor next spring, consists entirely of a series of homages to other movie styles. The plot, if you could call it that, is the story of a female samurai killing machine (Uma Thurman) gruesomely hunting down those who had wronged her. The genius lived in the moments, however, rather than in the arc of the story, or in thematic material. As I said, there really wasn't much of a story arc, and there definitely wasn't any thematic material. So this movie should have been awful, right? Well,no, not at all.

I will admit that there were parts of this movie (some of the early sequences) that did not impress me at all. However the latter half of the film (entirely set in Japan) was an immensely successful live-action anime (and yes, that is an oxymoron). Quenton simply took a very simple anime story and stylization and used actors instead of drawings - with the exception of one very impressive sequence in, of course, animation. The ways in which Quenton made this portion of the movie were astounding - the shots, and the styles and the colors. There were easily 10 shots where my inner voice gasped, and that's a rare feat for 10 movies, much less a single film. Despite the fact that this is a childish, nearly cartoonish story (intentionally, I'll add), it will still be one of the year's best simply for how incredibly well it was done. This was a visual spectacle that needs to be seen on the big screen.

Standouts: Visual and stylistic spectacle rarely matched.
Blowouts: Complete lack of anything resembling a story.

Grade: A