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Articles: Second ‘Bill’ revels in grindhouse glory

Posted by admin on Friday, April 16, 2004 - 07:40 AM

When last we saw Uma Thurman as the Bride — living proof that hell hath no fury like a woman killed — she had scratched another name off her “to die” list, another member of the elite hit squad that left her for dead when she left it for good.
Now there are two names to go before that of her ex-mentor and lover Bill, No. 1 with a bullet on her personal hit parade. And now, of course, we are talking about “Kill Bill Vol. 2,” the conclusion of Quentin Tarantino’s remembrance of triple-bills past. It’s a fever-dream epic to conjure the kind of cinematic melange available in the grindhouses of old — in Portland, think the Blue Mouse — with Robert Richardson’s sizzling cinematography like the daze of sunlight when you leave a matinee. Previously heard but not seen, Bill gets a grand entrance as part of an ingenious setup enabling even those who didn’t see “Vol. 1” to get their bearings quickly. It sets the tone for “Vol. 2” as a variation on the brilliant opening of Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” and Leone’s way of ritualizing the approach of violence. There’s a sly sense of the ceremonial throughout, and the seductively mythic presence of David Carradine as Bill is crucial to this feeling (Carradine is shaping up as one of the most regal wrecks since Peter O’Toole). As before, Tarantino’s eclectic and splashy musical cues include spaghetti Western themes for scenes of samurai-style action, establishing the latter genre’s inspiration of the former. He also captures comic-book dynamism more accurately than most films actually based on comic books, while proving a very apt pupil of Japan’s mad crime-film stylist Kinji Fukasaku. There are plenty more obscure references too, such as a significant tombstone with a name seemingly taken from a 1968 comedy starring blond sex bomb Elke Sommer and most of the cast of “Hogan’s Heroes.” Cementing the film’s debt to Chinese martial arts movies, Tarantino includes a spot-on takeoff of the obligatory training sequence, complete with whiplash zoom shots and degraded color to match the way these films looked when they were grindhouse staples in the ’70s (at the Avalon on Southeast Belmont, for example). But with Carradine’s wry, Zen-like menace playing off Thurman’s ferocity, “Vol. 2” becomes, above all, a twisted, gripping love story in which character trumps carnage. In the weaker sequences — such as those with Michael Madsen as Bill’s brother Budd — Tarantino proves too much in love with the sound of his own dialogue. But there’s always something to snap you back, such as a trailer-trashing fight between the Bride and Daryl Hannah’s Elle Driver. It would be fascinating to see if Tarantino could cut the four hours of the two “Kill Bill” films into a more exploitation-friendly 100 minutes or so (hey, it’s a chance to sell an extra DVD). But what we have is certainly a sight for popped eyes. And you have to respect a film that observes the age-old rule of stage and screen craft: Never introduce the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique unless you intend to use it.

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