Your Favorite Movie is Lame: Kill Bill Vol. 1

Since someone had the gall to suggest Kill Bill as One of the 10 Best Movies of a Certain Year, the gauntlet has been laid down. We won't bother too much with Vol. 2 which is so bad, it makes Andrew Dice Clay look like Monty Python. But they were supposed to be one bad movie rather than 2, so let's treat it like a bad movie with a long intermission. The intermission was good - in between watching these two awful movies I watched a little sports, got some Popeye's Chicken and a job, bought a car, did some Madlibs, went on a trip or two. This movie had probably the best intermission of any bad movie I've ever seen.

Before we apply the cardinal sins of pretension, let's begin with what's just plain bad:

- DIALOGUE!!! Despite the lauds for Tarantino's dialogue, all the supposedly tough guy (girl) lines fall flat. They're all delivered as if they're crushing blows...but they aren't.

- CASTING!!! The key to action picks is that the actors actually look like they can kick butt, or are casually violent, or whatever fits their character. Jet Li looks like he's spent a lot of time fighting and training. Jackie Chan looks like he has a lot of fun while fighting and training. That's why they play those roles.

Uma Thurman looks like a stick figure model who buys shoes on Sunset Blvd. She is well-trained and well-choreographed, but we just never believe she's that tough because, frankly, she isn't. Vivica Fox is ok for her part, which is just poorly written, so much so that it kind of verges on Opie offensive. Lucy Liu is the worst. She seems like she'd have trouble taking apart a fruit roll-up let alone the daring likes of Laura Flynn Boyle, Ally McBeal. But oh wait, no, she freaking runs the Japanese Yakuza! Much of her action sequences rely on long shot and dynamic cutting because she has no physical presence. And most of the part where she takes over the Yakuza is done in anime because she can't pull that off either. Why not just use CGI? Claymation? A manakin? The only character who really works is the Japanese school girl assassin, who despite her diminuitive size emanates casual violence.

Ok, so now what's really wrong with the movie: It's less than the sum of its parts. It's got cool action, a very long suffering hero, and it's full of Tarantino's broad array of film techniques. But non of these things are put to use properly - they're just thrown in to fit whatever seems cool.

The main character has no character. Her tone shifts radically and Thurman cannot pull it together - in some scenes she's angry, in some comical, in some she's honorable, in other's brutal. Whatever happens to be cool at the time. The movie has no consistent tone, which is a big error.

All of the cinematic references have no point. They're simply to prove that, yes, Quentin Tarantino knows more about movies than you do. The first 'movie about movies', Once Upon a Time in the West, used cinematic references which altered the outcome of well-known Western scenes in order to make a comment not only about the West, but about the genre of the Western. Tarantino seems to think that it's enough to be cool by putting in references to other movies.

Then there's the revenge theme. Again in the superior Once Upon a Time in the West, the mystery is why the main character wants revenge. That drives the watcher's curiousity. Kill Bill is driven by the mystery not of why she wants revenge, which is very clear, but why she was wronged in the first place. Of course, that question is completely not dealt with in Vol. 1 leaving the viewing experience almost completely hollow.

More importantly, it puts the honus of the movie not on the main character, who is no mystery, but her enemies, who are. And nothing is done to explain them in Vol.1. What makes Vol. 2 so lame is that the explanation for why all these girls betrayed her is...NOTHING! You know what would have been cooler than nothing? ANYTHING! This took me 3 seconds to come up with: Why not have the bad girls betray Uma as a part of their own revenge paths? We are given no reason why Liu went from seeking vengeance on one Yakuza boss to taking them over. Vivica Fox has no backstory. We could imagine a brilliant device whereby they themselves were somehow fulfilling their own revenge. Then Vol. 2 could have turned their burden from Vol. 1 upside down by delving into Darryl Hannah and Bill. Instead, this film simply doesn't stand alone because the burden of the film is unfulfilled. And in Vol. 2 it is catastrophically ignored. Instead we get the stupidest finishing move ever - so lame in its attempt to be cool by being lame that it is...lame.

Of course none of this matters because Tarantino has nothing to say and never will. He just wants to make cool stuff. So he makes a movie where he thinks up all the cool stuff he can and then throws them together. Some of it works, some of it doesn't. Owen Wilson is cool. James Bond is cool. Punk Rock is cool. Owen Wilson cast as James Bond playing the Punk Rock scene probably wouldn't be that cool. In fact, it would probably be pretty lame. So Tarantino sits down and says, "Ok, chicks are cool, chopsake is cool, samurai stuff is cool, yakuza is cool, anime is cool, tough talking black girls are cool, this music is cool" and he makes a movie. But Quentin Tarantino isn't cool, and so we have to sit there watching an uncool guy's coolness fantasy.

If Tarantino would make a movie about trying to be cool, then he might actually make something that speaks to the viewer since most of us who aren't Ted Tyler are trying desparately hard to be cool. Instead, Tarantino tries to make movies about revenge, which he clearly knows nothing about - apparently revenge is flippant, occasionally comical or ridiculous, and occasionally obsessed with style.

In the end, you will only like this movie if you dig Tarantino's style. I don't.

Now then, let's go to the Cardinal Sins:
1) Preachy - No
2) Political - No
3) Psychosexual - Yes
4) Too Long - Yes, in fact so much so that they had to make it 2 movies
5) Whiny Hero - No

So why is this movie so lame? More to the point, why is it still so pretentious? Well, for that, we have to give credit to Tarantino - he's invented his own category of lame. You see, rather than rely on traditional methods of pretention, putting one's message before entertainment value, Tarantino puts himself before all previous. And Tarantino isn't a political snob with weighty messages to oppress with, no. Tarantino is an art snob who thinks he knows what art is and so he has to lord it over us - look at me, aren't I artistic? Don't I defy your conventions by paying tribute to them and mocking them at the same time? Aren't I clever?

Maybe a little. But you need a stern cock-punch.