Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

Is a movie shaped to look just like a 1970s martial arts exploitation film itself a 1970s-style martial arts exploitation film? If so, Kill Bill may be the best 1970s-style martial arts exploitation film ever made. If not, Kill Bill may be the best homage to 1970s-style martial arts exploitation films ever made. Regardless, it's an amazing, fun movie. The only negative is that it's an incomplete movie: Tarantino films, ignoring the winding dialog punctuated by terrible violence, are built around notions of loyalty, honor and betrayal. These notions were hinted at in Kill Bill Vol 1, but not yet shaped to their final forms. We'll have to wait until February until Volume 2 comes out.

Kill Bill is basically a revenge movie along the lines of a modern day Shogun Assassin [1]. Uma Thurman's character is a member of what may be described as an Evil Charlie's Angels, with Michael Masden as Bosley and the unseen Bill as Charlie (Lucy Liu is perhaps the Leonard Nimoy of these two universes, having been both Angel and DIVA all in the same year; she does not wear an evil goatee in Kill Bill, however.) For presently unknown reasons, she's targetted for assassination by Bill. Grievously wounded, Uma wakes up after four years from a coma and goes to seek vengence against her former associates.

This vengence is about as violent as any of 1970s movies, with scores of corpses, body parts and hacked off heads, but, yes, really, it was all in good fun. Gallons of fake blood are used in every violent scene, all of it gushing out in such vast arterial sprays that it can't be taken seriously. Arguably, the most disturbingly violent segment is not one of the live action fight scenes, but during a Japanese anime-styled segue into a character's past. The most disturbing live action segments are either Uma's dream-like attempted assassination at the beginning, or the sudden, unexpected betrayal by a former collegue. With the latter, the more horrific part is what happens shortly afterwards, in a moment later echoed and amplified by the anime segment as a genre-adhering origin myth for the continuation of vengence.

(As a side note, you can't get a sense of how much fake blood is in the movie from the trailers. In particular, during the course of her big fight with Lucy Liu's henchmen, Uma's jumpsuit gets covered in large splotches of vivid red blood. These large splotched actually don't appear in the trailers [2]. Because these sequences in the movie are in black and white, her jumpsuit only has black splotches during the color versions for the previews.)

The fight scenes are spectacular, done with relatively little wire-fu and zero amounts of Matrix bullet-time special effects. It's all about Uma (or at least her real-person stunt double) swinging steel, running up banisters, taking on gangs of sword-wielding Kato-masked thugs, all of it shot by the best film photographers money can buy. Despite it's self-consciousness, this really is a 1970s-style martial arts vengence flick -- complete with cheesy electronic sound effects when sworn adversaries meet eye-to-eye -- all amped up, with its essence reified by the modern Hollywood machine. What's on screen is simply spectacular.

Coincidentally (well, not really that coincidentally), I went to Shihan Berrios's kenjitsu class Saturday morning [3] and learned a bit more about our basic kata, and senior student did much more involved work. I was amused to see there were kenjitsu trainers and fight coordinators listed in the Kill Bill end credits. There was a point near the end of the fight between Uma and Lucy where they've crossed swords and have moved so that they're standing more or less side-by-side. This position was very much like one of things I watched during the class, where, during #3 in the kata, tori winds up next to uke; instead of continuing to trying to strike with the bokken, tori off-balances uke in a katana-nage, or takes uke's elbow in ikkyo. Sadly, Uma and Lucy didn't try for the alternative technique in the movie. They also crossed blades just before starting to fight, which is a bit of a no-no, because you've just gotten too close to your opponent. But it looked nice and dramatic.

[1] http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0081506/ [2] http://movies.yahoo.com/movies/feature/killbill.html [3] http://www.cjc.org/blog/index.php?p=128813&more=1&c=1

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