06 October 2009

Skandies: Best Films of the Decade, #13



Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003, Quentin Tarantino)
originally placed: #2, 2003.

14 comments:

Mike Maguire said...

Woow. And I'd been lead to believe the majority of critics (then again, ya'll aren't critics FTMP) had written this off as pure Tarantino trifle in the years since its release.

Glad to see some are still recognizing its formal pleasures and ridiculous replay value (for me, anyway).

Eric Freeman said...

Does this recognize both films as one, or just the first one?

md'a said...

Strictly Vol. 1. Many people wanted to vote for the whole thing, but I wouldn't allow it—if Tarantino agreed to make it two films (which I still think was a mistake), then by god they're two separate films. You could vote for either or both. (In fact only one person voted for Vol. 2, which is not forthcoming; that individual did vote for both parts.)

Gilidor said...

For my decade Top Ten, I'll be counting it as one film. I'll also count The Lord of the Rings as a single entity, so there. :)

Brian said...

I thought pretty much everyone agreed that Vol 2 was superior...oh well. I still know it is.

Andrew said...

Volume 1 is WAY superior. It's just fun, kinetic nonsense, Tarantino fast food. Volume 2 is when the whole idea begins to sag under the weight of QT's pretensions. A four-hour exploitation romp that ends with a lengthy, overwritten conversation? No thanks.

Skander said...

Where is the joshroth snarky comment.

Josh said...

[biting tongue]

Nictate said...

Eh.

Robert Fuller said...

That's more like it.

See, Mike, it didn't take long for a movie I agree with to come along. I have a feeling there are more to come.

Victor said...

Well, I'll provide one if joshroth won't.

KILL BILL VOLUME 1 is the only QT movie I'm not an upper-case PRO on. While the action scenes are all well-executed and two masterful (Vivica, the history of O-Ren), there's hardly any real point to them *in Vol. 1* and since you know there's a Vol. 2, the outcome is as preordained as professional wrestling. The joint effect, worst in the Uma-vs.-300-swordsmen scene, is to grind you down in the monotony of inevitability (though I was perked up by the brilliant punchline to that scene). But by the time you get to Lucy Liu, I was just waiting for the movie to be over (though again I will admit the end-of-film cliffhanger is fawesome).

msic said...

Victor's right. Cleaving this film in half, rather than (say) showing it with an intermission or whatever, really robbed it of its potential greatness. (And sure, I *could* go back and watch them back-to-back now, but you know what? Not to get all Kaelian or anything, but I simply don't have the time to invest.)

(By the way, I'm Sicinski. I've just been lazy about entering my info.)

Robert Fuller said...

I think it's Tarantino's best. I really don't see how the outcome of the fight scenes is any more preordained this way than it would have been had it been one long movie. Even if you went into it not knowing it was four hours, would you really be sitting there thinking, "You know, I really don't know if she's going to get out of this alive and thus be able to kill Bill"?

bentclouds said...

"The joint effect, worst in the Uma-vs.-300-swordsmen scene, is to grind you down in the monotony of inevitability"

But you know this from the beginning of Volume 1, since she already has O-Ren crossed off on her revenge list after the Vernita fight. I think this is one of the ways that Tarantino intentionally devalues the narrative importance of the Crazy 88 fight in order to concentrate instead on allowing the audience to focus on the artistry of the fight choreography (see also the use of B&W to mute the violence and the eventual stylized silhouetting of the action). This is, after all, a film that opens with a Shaw Scope logo and is working within that tradition as much as it's subverting it.