Ray Pride

More and more, I'm thinking of the megamegalo Quentin Tarantino as an advertising man, and not just one with a single client who dubs himself "Q."

Most ads appropriate. They delve into imagery in order to sell. To pick your pocket while picking the pockets of the history of visual imagery. Years ago, I was a bad guest at a dinner party after an admission by my hostess that she had seen, loved and stolen visual notions from one of my favorite movies, Bernardo Bertolucci's "The Conformist" (1971). Had she seen the subtitled version, which is washed out, or the better-looking but badly dubbed one? "I don't know," she said, "We watched it in fast forward."

"Kill Bill Vol. 2" reminded me of that uncomfortable evening: a magpie's stockpile of purportedly cool and shiny stuff from days and nights of greedy accumulation, put together with a vocabulary purloined from many cultures but suggestive of none of its own. (There is even a scene where a little girl watches a cartoon in which two magpies sing a song about how the magpie is the farmer's best friend.) In articles leading up to the release of the second portion of "Kill Bill," Tarantino's four-hour slab of exploitation movies, he's taken great glee in citing sources for almost every frame of the film. Not extended, adapted, elaborated upon, or infused with the whiff of life, but piled up like a big front window diorama at a one-man toy store "Q `R' Us."

I wish Tarantino mattered to me. But I don't get it. The style of "Vol. 2" is calmer. Plodding, even. Conversations drag on. And on. The cutting pings. The cutting pongs. The opening scene between Bill (David Carradine) and The Bride (Uma Thurman), whose name is soon revealed to be "Beatrix Kiddo," is paced to abuse. (And yep, Tarantino persists in his near-Bressonian reverence for shots of feet, particularly Thurman's.) The sound mix is strange throughout, a barren track that makes dialogue as crisp as dry cornflakes. And unlike the first portion, Tarantino's alternately baroque and tin-eared verbal expectorations are rife: "I don't dodge guilt and I don't Jew out of my comeuppance," Michael Madsen says with all the conviction of a table reading.

At least David Carradine is memorably sly when he says lines like "He never teaches anyone the five-point-palm exploding-heart technique!" Thurman's feral performance remains the most compelling element of the movies, with her sweaty, beat-down, lithe mongrel singularity, such as in a scene with her face, tilted slightly, camera in close, sitting by cinematographer Robert Richardson's pumpkin-golden firelight smiling familiarly at a length of Bill's Chinese-myth jumbo-sized mumbo.

The movie never took on a life for me. It seems a matter of mistaking obsession for vision, fixation for iconography. He's got an entire mythology in his head, he's told various reporters. "I consider myself a Method writer. I am the Bride, and I started taking on little feminine tendencies during the writing process, and just like an actor you go with it," he told Entertainment Weekly. "It was great to look at the world for [over a] year with that perspective."

While I appreciate movies that draw from the greats who came before, the game of spot-the-reference in "Kill Bill Vol. 2" is more aggravating than in lesser Scorsese efforts like "Casino": the iconic John Ford-at-the-front-door frame, the Michael Madsen character named Budd being like one of director Budd Boetticher's mournful creations. I want a movie to come alive on its own, not drown under the cumulative weight of its footnotes. (Compare "Kill Bill"'s leaden self-importance to Takeshi Kitano's furiously brilliant exploration of the storied "Zatoichi" blind swordsman series, coming soon.)

I read the early reviews from those allowed to weigh in early--raves from Ebert and Roeper and from trade papers Variety and Hollywood Reporter, whose usually goofy Kirk Honeycutt pours on the goof, saying that it is "a brilliant, invigorating work, one to muse over for years to come... rigorously explores its pulp fiction for visceral truths that link culture and cinema... a movie that both academics bundled in film theories and teenagers on hot dates will find supercool." That anyone might believe that, truly believe that, is more annoying than anything in Tarantino's opus. Still, my experience is nowhere near the New Yorker's David Denby, who wants to leave scorched earth: "Tarantino's ambition, however, is unmistakable: he wants to impress his obsessions on the succeeding generations. The pop encyclopedist and video-store genius has become a megalomaniac, and the exhilarating filmmaker he might have been is disappearing fast."

Artists can't help but be a summary of their influences. But ideally, something new is brought to bear, something that informs life rather than a decadent kind of cinephilia. I've always blanched at words like "buff," "flick," jargon that suggests that a love of movies is somehow inferior to a study of literature or painting. "Kill Bill" is a buff's flick through-and-through.

Tarantino also avers that this movie is a love letter to his mother and to Thurman, to strong women in general. But there's so much sexual hostility even when he embraces his female characters that one fears for both his yin and his yang. The whole enterprise eventually revolves around little girls. In interviews, he makes an intricate case for what the vengeful child symbolizes at the start and finish of "Kill Bill" and at the end. Nice analysis. Lame, lame movie.

The most lasting image for me is the curtain line given Bill, the wizened vulture who gets to sign off by calling Ms. Kiddo a particularly powerful word that has seldom sounded more pathetic: "You're my favorite person, but once in a while, you can be a real cunt."

Back atcha, QT.

"Kill Bill Vol. 2" opens Friday.

(2004-04-14)

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(2004-03-18)

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