Oh, that's good, Nils. Touche, as they would say in La France (the very small town in backwoods South Carolina).
It's been a while since my flights of fancy took me into the blogging world. Perhaps I needed a fall break.
I must admit that I cannot take the high road as Mark can. I succombed. I went out Friday night, me and my wifie, and watched, gasp!, Kill Bill.
It's as violent as you think.
Before I can get into that, I need to address something else, however. Mark said a while ago that the point of this blog was not to debate, and I must debate that. Darn, that's good. How can I help but debate Mark's assertions when he claims to be "really counter-cultural"? It's a great argument, one that I'm all for: does watching Terms of Endearment make one counter-cultural? Probably so, seeing as no one else watches that movie, certainly not the snobbishly theory-driven, Procrustean bed-making cultural elite (of which I hope to one day be a part). It's a funny thing when the counter-culture becomes non-culture.
So no, Kill Bill isn't really counter-cultural. It all seems like old hat by now. Pulp Fiction and Resevoir Dogs already did it and did it better. Kill Bill will not be a cult favorite, at least not in the same way that Pulp Fiction was. Kill Bill will not revolutionize anything.
I want to talk about two things the movie did well, though.
First, it combined live-action with animation. A fifteen-minute episode chronicling a villain's life is all animation.
Second, that animation sequence was full of horrifying violence, the likes of which I had never seen. I had heard that Kill Bill was Monty Python-esque in its blood-spattering, and indeed it was. But it wasn't flippant about it. It relished in its gore, but it was never funny, at least not to me. Where we laughed when the black kid got shot in Pulp Fiction, we don't laugh at the violence in this movie. It's truly horrifying. I may have laughed because the blood seemed a bit over-the-top, but it was a nervous laughter, one that refused to recognize the extreme violence Tarantino was showing us.
The violence is coupled with that seventies-ish feel, though, as if it were Charlie's Angels on mind-altering and deadly snake bite. What the heck was Tarantino doing with that? Why include the stop-shot that announced Lucy Liu was a member of the hilariously-named "Deadly Viper Assassination Squad"? Because it's absurd. It isn't funny. Nope. It's an assassination squad, for Pete's sake. And the whole plot of the movie shows how their deeds, well, let's just say haunt them.
Yep. I have to go. Bye.
