kurt

Kill Bill Vol. 1

I am still thinking about this movie.

I saw it twice in the theaters and it continues to haunt me. A discussion about the merits of the film emerged in CTIN 532 with Perry Hoberman when I compared the visceral pleasures to the performances Survival Research Laboratories. I believe that there is much more to the film than the kinetic hyper-violence/gore and the ultra-hip stylistic posturing that composes its superficial aesthetic. But regardless of the critical analyses that we throw at pop culture, we ultimately have a binary emotional attitude: we either love it or hate it.

I personally love it.

Listening to the soundtrack, a song called "The Lonely Shepherd" came on, I remembered it clearly from the movie, it's the last song played during the final montage and it encapsulates the coolness of kitsch when infused with production value, it deftly references the archetypal structures of the genre flick without succumbing to them, and it uses the forelorn pan piping of Zamfir. Zamfir! Seriously. I laugh at the same time as I am totally engaged by it.

I found this entry when searching for "zamfir kill bill":
Kill Bill and the Wave of Globalization

Even if you hate the film. This is an interesting reading of it. The animated flashback alone, by the justly venerated Japanese studio, Production I.G., is a brilliant collaboration that could easily have overwhelmed any other film, but here, it is wholly appropriate to the genre-savvy nature of Kill Bill Vol. 1 and simply destroys any interpretation of the movie as singularly "American".

Lastly, if QT films have staying power in the cultural consciousness, then it is not in the clever dialogue (that some critics and fans have lamented is lacking in Kill Bill Vol. 1... and admittedly it is, but the movie is not about that style of dialogue! It's too bad that expectations can cause such resistance.) but in the indelible fusing of the soundtrack and the images that is only paralleled in my opinion by the work of Stanley Kubrick. Just as Blue Danube Waltz and Singing in the Rain were transformed by 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange, QT's films absorb the soundtrack so effectively that I can no longer hear Misirlou or Stuck in the Middle with You without thinking of their associated scenes in Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs.

That is all.