GLENN KENNY'S REVIEW (posted 10/08/03)



"All you need to make a film is a girl and a gun," Jean-Luc Godard once observed. Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Volume 1 is the 21st-century update of that pronouncement. All Tarantino needed to make this film was a girl—Uma Thurman—and a sword.

And a paper-walled Japanese nightclub, a kazillion black-clad kung-fu fighting stuntpersons, 500 gallons of fake blood, etc.

As you may have heard, this first installment of a two-part meta film is Tarantino's most wild-ass effort yet, one in which the director gives himself over to every possible excess ("fait les quatre-cent coups," as the French used to say). It's an incredible virtuoso tour de force, a demonstration that CG effects are going to have to come a much longer way than they have to create the excitement of real humans doing real fight moves (the film's climactic battle makes The Matrix Reloaded's so-called Burly Brawl look even more PlayStationish than it did to begin with), and a testimony to either 1) Tarantino's actual human crassness or 2) Tarantino's appreciation of the sick exhilaration that the crassness of the grindhouse movies he's paying homage to could create. I think it's 2) myself, but others, for various reasons, may be unconvinced. ("What's a grindhouse movie?" asked the editor-in-chief of a much-awarded weekly magazine—yes, that one—of his colleagues as he looked up from his pressbook at the screening I attended. He sound more ticked off than curious.) But I think there's more to this film than just cheap thrills—the way Tarantino modulates the violence, from the squirm-inducing, putatively realistic opening in which Thurman's Bride can't complete her last sentence before going into a four-year coma, to the ridiculous dismemberments out of a Monty Python parody of Peckinpah, suggests a larger, more troubling outline. We'll have to wait until Volume 2 to find out, although this installment is a beautiful stand-alone thang (check out how its chronology-juggling storyline creates a perfect circle, structure-wise).