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A movie geek par excellence, he has created yet another homage to genre films, this time bringing martial arts—and spaghetti westerns—to our screens. If there's one film that symbolizes directors as grown-up kids who, thanks to expensive toys, can bring their fantasy world to life, it's certainly Kill Bill. Tarantino has thus created the ultimate martial art flick he would like to see, including scenes and gimmicks assimilated through years of intensely watching B-movie marathons into some kind of Hollywood-style best-of film. The extent to which you will enjoy this movie will mostly depend on whether you share Tarantino's taste for 70's martial art flicks and can appreciate the references. Others might be left untouched by this non-stop action extravaganza whose revenge plots can be summarized by its protagonist's—the Bride (Uma Thurman)—hit list. Does it really matter? No, because Tarantino not only succeeds in his egotistical cinematic trip, reaching those of us who are thirsty for Asian cinema, but just like in his buddy Robert Rodriguez's Once Upon a Time in Mexico, his film is self-aware of its derivative nature, which distances it from a pretentious variation—see Olivier Assayas' take on David Cronenberg's Videodrome in Demonlover. >Uman Thurman's face and body are long, sharp and cold, like the blade of her katana, perfectly embodying her role of action heroine where others have failed—Charlie's Angels & Lara Croft—because they looked like sexpots in kick mode instead of focusing on developing an aura of danger—Lucy Liu is the exception but her overuse in these kinds of roles has somewhat turned into a racial cliché. In terms of characterization, one aspect of the film that might be overlooked is how Tarantino actually fixes one major issue of action cinema in general: contrary to most productions of the genre, not only does he take time to develop a background—in the form of flashbacks—for each enemy of the Bride but he also avoids trapping them in an "evil-doer" stereotype by making them humans with flaws. Violent and orchestrated fight scenes follow each other, intertwined with flashbacks in the spaghetti western tradition, as well as borrowing from different genres and films, including animation. Interestingly, with this film one notices a new trend in contemporary action cinema: just like in The Matrix Reloaded, fight scenes incorporate different styles and nemesis are multiplied ad infinitum; a direct result of the emergence of video and PC games that replaced and made 80's action films outdated. These filmmakers have understood the necessity to recapture the action experience that had unexpectedly been stolen by our home computers and the only way is to take them at their own game and outdo them. The presence of blood, another element of Tarantino's work, is exacerbated here. One can see in these bloody effusions not the serious psycho inclinations of the auteur but rather a sexual and orgasmic expression born from the joy of watching violence, in a cartoonish and somewhat childish way. At the end of Volume 1, Tarantino leaves us hanging, waiting for the second and indissociable half of the film, in the spirit of a TV series rather than a story in chapters as in The Matrix or Star Wars. Only at the end of Volume 2 will we therefore be able to have a full understanding and opinion of Tarantino's work. To be continued.
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