the 'KILL BILL was fucking stupid' thread

this isnt as much a topic for discussion as it is a makeshift
gallup poll. your reply counts as a vote. go!

Don't care, has Uma Thurman in it.


So you can bite my crank.

Delicately of course,
mister jesus is sensitive

[Edited on Oct 10, 2003 by japhyryder]

didnt like it =/

i could see, campy, or contrived, or even predictable... but fucking stupid?

i for one am anxious to see it, and i hope it isn't really, really lame, or puts me to sleep.

-bobby

[Edited on Oct 13, 2003 by cornelius]

What Bobby said.

so anyone who saw it...did you think it was stupid? I want to hear why.

...and save your praise for the other thread!!! That's why there are two, geniousheads.

i found kill bill to be pretty disappointing.

while i found a lot of the style elements interesting, there seemed to be little logic or justification for their inclusion.

e.g.--turning off the lights in the restaurant--for only 3 minutes? to no strategic purpose.

e.g.--putting things out of order: i liked this in pulp fiction because the non-chronological nature of the film permitted a different sort of chronology--a thematic/moral timeline. in p.f., we learn to look at life not as a series of events, but as a jumble of incidents of varying import, the importance of which are seen in retrospect, rearranged.

e.g.--the anime origin story of lucy liu's character. first of all, why does she get an origin, when vivica fox doesn't? (and not just liu, but her bodyguard gets backstory??) second of all, why is this the only animated portion of the movie? is this meant to evoke the asian landscape? is this why fox didn't get any anime?
e.g.--the buckets and buckets of blood. yeah, it seemed cute and funny in evil dead 1 & 2. here, i just felt like tarantino was seeing how many surfaces he could coat in red. i thought that, aesthetically, we were getting past the camp/kitsch factor in art. (i make this last statement because tarantino is often heralded as avant garde--at the foreground of art.)


the story was vapid. just vapid.

e.g.--as i asked before, why would liu get an origin, but not fox? maybe this will be more clear in part 2 (which i will likely not shell out to see), when we will see the other 3 assassins: perhaps each assassin will be treated in a unique manner, and it will make more sense that liu had 2/3 of the screen time and fox had 1/24.

e.g.--how can a woman with atrophied muscles have near-full power over her upper body, and a paralyzed lower body? (is this medically supported?)

e.g.--how can that woman kill 2 men, then spend 13 hours in a dead man's truck, w/o being found or even looked for?

e.g.--the flashback to post-murder with the cops was redundant. it's already been established that the killers are professionals. it's already been stated that thurman was pregnant. we already know she survived. do we need all these things restated by cops? just sloppy storytelling.

e.g.--does it take 10 minutes to find out hannah won't kill thurman? i admit that scene had great tension, but in retrospect it's a waste of screen time. just another signature tarantino move that had no justification within the story. ooh, a light-hearted song during a murder. ooh, split-screen action. ooh, a red cross on the eyepatch. but almost nothing happened. pacing, sir, pacing.

e.g.--why show the little girl witnessing her mother's death? this would have made sense in the world of reservoir dogs or pulp fiction, because those were worlds of morality and consequence. this is just a world of slap-happy mayhem. i thought putting the girl there was horrible, confusing, manipulative. tarantino didn't make a world in which that girl fit, and i don't feel she should have been jammed in.


acting

e.g.--why does everyone look like they're about to break out in laughter?

e.g.--emotion was exaggerated to comic levels, which annoyed me to begin with (see remarks on camp/kitsch). but even allowing an exaggerated, comic book like landscape, the emotion seemed inconsistent and unbelievable.
i really didn't buy lucy liu tip-toeing across the table, slicing someone's head off, then 'saying in english' her ultimatums (complete with the word "fuck" a couple times!) as if she's dainty and malevolent, prim and foul-mouthed at the same time.
the same goes for fox. the first fight scene, when it became coffee and the "i'm different now" speeches, was a devolution into ham-fisted delivery.



so, yeah. disappointed. remarkably so.

edited to add that the last minute "does she know her daughter is still alive is fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fucking bullshit.
what a stupid, stupid, primitive narrative move.

[Edited on Oct 13, 2003 by relethed]

if u don't like hong kong kung fu action films there is a pretty good chance you won't like this film either "kill bill".

its a over the top action film much like "desperado" "black mask" "rumble in the bronx" etc.

haven't seen it thou so you are sayin it is worse than "once upon time in mexico"?

im pretty glad that they didnt take the time to flesh out fox's character. she was really irritating. her 'knife fight' line is right up there with 'youre the man now, dog' and 'theres a bomb in his ribcage' in my book

Holy crap! I didn't know Billy Corgan was in this movie!

hilarious!

An absolute waste of time and talent.
Thanks for starting this thread. If you hadn't, I would've had to.

Did you at all notice how long and elaborate the showdown with Liu's charater was? If there hadn't been a backstory, you'd be bitching about how you have no idea why she was so important and protected. In that respect with regards to Fox's character, it's not too difficult or elaborate to kill a housewife, and it doesn't deserve a big boring story about how she became to be who she was when the Bride faced off with her.

Hahaha, that line made me cringe pretty hard too. How about The Postman where his lady says something like "You give people hope as though it were candy."?

they took ABARENBO SHOGUN and ass-raped it.

How dare they . . .infidels!

My impatience with QT is legendary. And he has fallen another notch. Not because of Kill Bill, which I have not seen yet (but I'll give it a chance since he's not in it) but because I just got finished watching "city of fire," the chinese movie that Tarantino blatantly ripped off for Resevoir Dogs -- certain scenes almost shot for shot. The shot with the gun-to-head standoff in the hide out, the double handed firing into windshield -- in other words, the BEST parts of resevoir dogs were all ripped (I won't give him credit by saying "inspired") off this movie.
What a little self important fucker. If it was college, he'd get expelled for plagierism.

[Edited on Oct 14, 2003 by kingbugs]

But it's not college, it's Hollywood. Therefore, he's fucking rich. Good for him.

i liked kill bill a whole lot. i wanna see it again. i felt the ending was great too. it wasn't some huge stupid cliffhanger. QT did a good job.

Welcome to modern filmmaking. Everything brilliant has already been done, the best you can do is recreate it in a way that is still exciting and entertaining. Q gives credit to everyone he takes his ideas from. To complain about Kill Bill, or any other Tarantino movie because it's been taken from something else, is not only pointless, but it should be a given expectation before you even see one of his movies that you've more than likely seen something like it somewhere before. It doesn't make me enjoy it anyless.

Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but you'd sound much more justified in saying you simply just didn't like it than to give the reason you didn't like it because it was a "rip off".

You think so? On one hand I know exactly what you're talking about. Like the "Battleship Potemkin" baby carriage falling down steps seen in god knows how many movies (Untouchables springs to mind first) but The Matrix produced some new shit with the bullet-time shots. I had never seen that before.

I've noticed how The Matrix, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Moulin Rouge, and Tarantino are bringing stuff to Hollywood that are standard in other cinematic...cultures?.....conventions?.........and bringing them to American audiences to whom they seem fresh and innovative.


[Edited on Oct 15, 2003 by stockula]

Well, generally speaking, I do think so.

Obviously in the realm of special effects (which I think is where the Matrix bullet-time shots would fall), filmaking is constantly going to be evolving and trying to bring something more complex that the audience has never seen before.

Absolutely agree.

I think that QT stealing stuff from other movies is the good part of what he's doing. Stealing images and recreating them in a fresh way, or for a new audience, is part of what art should do.

My problem with this film is that it has no real characters, no interesting dialog, and no real story - all things that QT has been very good at doing in the past. In Kill Bill, he's let all that go - supposedly in the service of honoring the film genres he's copying - and ended up just making a diamond-encrusted B movie that is 1-dimensional, pointless, and fundamentally heartless.

Given his talent, he could have taken this same story and images and infused them with character and drama. Brought them up to 3-D complexity with some emotional granularity. But he didn't bother, and so the film is a zillion-dollar throw away. What a waste.

Trust me, there will be much more depth and dimension revealed about these characters in the second half. You can't judge total character development on the first 2 hours of a near 5 hour long movie with a large ensemble cast. Plus you should know by now, Q picks his own chronology for his films, some aspects of the beginning aren't supposed to make sense until the end.

Ok, this is the "complaint" thread. All you people who thought it was fucking fantastic, you have your own thread. I liked the movie, but have some points about the defense of it, as presented here:

The movie uses many tricks and stunts and flat-out scenes from other movies. Tarantino stole them. As he did not get sued, he was right to do so. As he is making a lot of money and not claiming that he was the only one responsible for the ideas presented in the movie, he is justified.

To argue against the complaint that Kill Bill is nothing but a diamond-encrusted B-movie: That's what he intended to make, if you believe what he says in interviews. He says he was making a movie that was almost the exact opposite of all the movies he'd made before. If you went into Kill Bill with the hope and expectation of seeing a pop-culture, ten-minute-monologue-laden masterpiece, of course you're going to be disappointed. But it's your own damn fault; don't blame the film-maker.

That said, Kill Bill wasn't a masterpiece of any kind. The movie was interesting and, at times, intense, but there were several flaws.

For one, the blood spurts. Those were supposed to be, what, an inside joke about how movies used to portray fatal wounds? An indication of just how sharp The Bride's sword was? What they were was stupid to the point of distraction. I would cheer when Uma cut into someone, and then find myself disappointed by the unbelievable spray pattern of blood from their wound. I understand wanting to make some things funny, or ironic, or even campy, but it was none of those things. And I'm not complaining about the amount of blood, just the way it sprayed out of people's bodies.

The coma: Putting someone in a coma is a bad idea in a movie. Why? Well, for one, muscles atrophy. I understand that Tarantino was trying to show the amazing will of The Bride, that twelve hours after awaking from a four-year coma she was able to walk. But it's not just a matter of will. It's a matter of muscles not working any more. Even with the occasional exercise the nurses put coma patients through (and judging by her male night aide, the help in that hospital wasn't too concerned with her health anyway), it still takes even the strongest person several months to regain control of their muscles. In a believable scenario of an unbelievable woman, she would have been in the Pussy Wagon for a few days, at least, before her toes wiggled.

Also, in a coma, when you're not moving your muscles constantly as you are when you're awake, your tendons shrink. It's documented, and it would mean that The Bride wouldn't even be able to stand up straight.

Which brings me to my next point: Why did her arms work if her legs didn't? Were we supposed to infer that she was paraplegic and re-taught herself to use her legs? Maybe. But her arms would still be really weak after four years in a coma. She probably wouldn't even be able to raise her head, much less kill two men. All-in-all, even in a campy movie with unbelievable feats of will and strength, I could have swallowed all that coma crap much easier if she had only been in the coma for a year.

Well, I guess my complaints about the movie today only amount to two items. All this is not to say that I didn't like the movie. I enjoyed it very much, and plan wholeheartedly on not only seeing the sequel but buying the Two-Disc Special Edition when it comes out, probably in the summer. Now, whether this is because I love bad movies and this is kind of a bad movie, or because I like good movies and this is a good movie, I don't know. And I, for one, hope we never get more character exposition, aside from minimal back-story that will make the remaining assassins' falls from grace that much more interesting. If at the end of Vol 2 all I know is that some woman killed a three other women and two men, that will be good enough for me.


[Edited on Oct 15, 2003 by themadking]