Ray Pride

One glorious note to extract from the gaudy wreckage of "The 4th Film From Quentin Tarantino": ace cinematographer Robert Richardson understands how to light Lucy Liu's freckles.

"Kill Bill Vol. I" is a peculiar parallel to one of the most beautiful movies of 2002, and when Miramax decides to finally release Zhang Yimou's long-delayed "Hero," (lusciously shot by Wong Kar-Wai colleague Christopher Doyle) a story of assassins and revenge told with dreamy grace and layered allusions, you'll see an epic by filmmakers who understand the cinematic form, not just the plotting and punch of schlock. (DVDs of "Hero" have been in most Chinatowns for months.)

In the unnecessarily splintered time frame of Tarantino's maniacal spaghetti Eastern, Uma Thurman plays a professional assassin whose wedding party was slaughtered, and she's left in a coma. Waking several years later, she seeks revenge against those who wronged her, including sister assassins Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox and Daryl Hannah, along with dozens of Kato-masked samurai-styled killers and the never-seen, only-heard "Bill" (David Carradine). "Vol. 2," Tarantino says, will churn and burn with all of "Vol. I"'s mislaid exposition.

"Kill Bill Vol. I"--when have you heard a clumsier, uglier title?--zooms along with the conviction of the true believer, but also suggests the hermetic world view of the truly foolish. Tarantino wields ADD like a deadly weapon. He brags on his babes-kicking-ass world as a prototype of "girl power," but its obsessive character is more fragrant of niche kink: such as magazines devoted to photographs of half-naked women smoking, but with the cigarette between their toes. He worships the lithe, stark, starry anomaly at the center of his story, calling Thurman his Marlene Dietrich. (Still, if memory serves, Josef von Sternberg never served up minutes-long widescreen close-ups of La Dietrich's battered feet.) Thurman's game. She's great to watch, if you don't think about the succession of indignities thrust upon her character. It's an approach that matches the adolescent heart of the grueling sadism of many of the "grindhouse" standards Tarantino loves to provocatively cite as influences.

The misspent verve of "Kill Bill" stumbles off the screen with the hazy grace of a hashish-espresso speedball. Over-the-top is just a way of saying "good morning, all" for Tarantino, or "Quentin," as he calls himself in interviews. In a 1997 interview for "Jackie Brown," he told me of fans wondering what he does with all those years between movies: "'What's Quentin doing, what's Quentin doing, when's Quentin gonna do something else?' Well, Quentin was writing, OK? Quentin was doing what Quentin does, all right?" Chrissy Iler, a journalist for Canada's Globe & Mail, described her recent audience with the man this way: "Tarantino goes on, unstoppable, and it's kind of embarrassing to listen to, like walking in on your parents having sex."

It's usually a mistake to base one's appreciation of an artistic enterprise by the private life of the maker, but the repellent swagger of this truncated chapter of his three-hour opus, combined with the manic bluster and seething vulgarity Tarantino has displayed in recent interviews, including an apparent drunken stupor on the Tonight Show, makes one wonder what he thinks he's up to. It's not a question to even fret about when work is memorable, but "Kill Bill" is a colossal bore. Self-regarding and near autistic, it's also easily the nastiest piece of work ever financed by Disney. Tarantino seems to enjoy his payback, indulging a kind of self-congratulatory pleasuring: OK, I've done a decent job of loving you up with "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown," now sit back and watch me jerk off for 109 minutes.

Not to be a Philistine amid presumably discerning cinephiles, but while prettily shot and sometimes nicely edited, Tarantino's paper-thin revenge-and-blood opera is a deeply distasteful and even deranged piece of work, shoving his substantial yet skewed film appreciation into a blender. It's a viscera smoothie. (Forget the footnotes, if you've been living life, show your cards, Mr. T.) His shiny-shiny wannabe hipster sensory overload could have been the dread secret product the characters in Olivier Assayas' "demonlover" were obsessing upon. Tarantino delights in snickering sadism. His worldview isn't as nuanced or profound as Sam Peckinpah's disgust at the animalistic impulse that still resides within humans, but stunted glee at meanness and strangeness for its own sake. I'd put in that category the revelation that Thurman's character has been repeatedly raped in her hospital bed while in her four-year coma.

Surprisingly, for a writer-director whose reputation was made on a knack for yak and gab, there's relatively little dialogue, mostly blunt instruments like "This tall drink of cocksucker ain't dead," as a Texas sheriff (Michael Parks) observes of bloodied Uma on her wedding day. Later, before she wakes from her big sleep, the hospital employee who's sold her out for repeated rape, observes, "This little cunt's a spitter." (I love the smell of empowerment in the morning.) There are only a few anemic pop-culture references, to Star Trek, Charlie Brown, Trix cereal. This is the man who was going to reinvent the storytelling pleasure of American cinema?

The twenty-plus minute samurai slaughter scene abruptly goes to black and white at one point, a transparent ploy to get an "R" rating: the graveyard of severed limbs and gushing torsos is somehow more tasteful to the MPAA's secretive ratings board if you don't see the strawberry geysers of stage blood in all their gory.

Amid the emphatic gibberish, the sleekest scenes are variations on his trademark "Reservoir Dogs" march, shots of figures proceeding on their way to a task or a battle. He repeats it several times here, and my favorite is a sequence depicting motorcycle sentries, gleaming black bikes and helmets, black-garbed, accompanying a black limousine through nighttime Tokyo. It's sheer kinetic bliss.

Of his working methods, Tarantino told one interviewer, "If you're not there on the adventure with me, then get the fuck out." Consider me gotten the fuck out.

"Kill Bill: Vol. 1" opens Friday. "Vol. 2" wreaks its havoc in February.

(2003-10-08)

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