Movie Review: Kill Bill Volumes I & II

Quinton Tarantino works more in the art of magic than in filmmaking. Kill Bill Volumes I and II is a majestic and beautifully surreal tale woven together in a patchwork of retro stylistic queues and a supreme understanding of what people want to see in a character. All the flaws in the movie are simultaneously its strengths. The story is entirely predictable, we all know Bill is going to die and a lot of people are going down with him. The characters are all shallow caricatures of Good bad asses and Evil bad asses. You want more though when the credits start rolling.

Even though you know all this, and every aspect of the movies are over the top, Tarantino makes it work. He builds an entire mythology surrounding the story, complete with Kung Fu masters teaching a lost martial art move and the Japanese Samurai sword maker ever to have lived, that are first dropped in as subtle hints in conversation that turn into entire stories within themselves as the plot thickens. Part of the mythology he builds is woven into the soundtrack, where every punch from The Bride makes a whisping noise and sword blades slice the air itself by being unsheathed. Magically, you forget how outlandish this is twenty minutes into the film because they are applied to perfect effect.

Furthermore, Tarantino is pop culture genius. More then knowing what the audience expects, he knows what his audience wants. Everything that we like is applied in the right amount, with the right music playing, just the right actors playing the parts, and just enough twist in the storyline to make it all so interesting that we don’t care that this story is just as fanciful as anything Tolkien wrote. It takes mad skill to let viewers who are generally wary of unrealistic plots to delve into this kind of movie. Tarantino gets back to the basics of why we go to the movies – to escape and be entertained. Subsequently, he takes us far away from our own lives to a place where we can comfortably put down the intellectual fences guarding against fantasy and succumb to the joy of watching and thoroughly enjoying a glorified Kung Fu movie.

Treyopia Kill Bill Movie Reviews

Rwanda, Ten Years On

I was twelve years old when I started following the news. My mother kept all our TIME magazines in a bin by the fireplace in our living room, so I used to go through old issues and read about the great battles in the desert of the Gulf War when I was done with the new issue. At that point, all the flags and parades and the pride of victory was still actively in my memory. As I was really getting into it, I learned that a plane had gone down over some African country and a President died. One ethnic group blamed the other for the accident. The magazine started having horrific pictures in them of dead women and children, hacked up by machetes. By that August, the cover had a few adults standing in a field of dead children’s bodies. I don’t remember if I read about it or if I saw it, but I still see in my minds eye some river turned blood red with corpses. That started ten years ago this month.

The experience changed me deeply. I was angered when Clinton responded years later by saying that he didn’t know the depth of the horror while defending his inaction. I was 12 and I knew, how could the President have not known? Though I understand now that the US response had more to do with Somalia than anything else did (the events that were dramatized in “Black Hawk Down” happened a few months earlier), I have always felt a deep conviction that we can and must stop such horror in the future.

After the events in Somalia, Haiti, and now in Iraq, Americans seem more reluctant than ever to commit forces anywhere where our national interests are not immediately evident. Some even argue that it’s none of our business. I retort that just as an adult has a moral obligation to break up a fight between children who are fighting with sticks, America has the moral obligation to use its superior firepower and logistical reach to prevent atrocities from happening in places where no one is in a position to stop it. With power comes responsibility. With democracy, comes a more ethically guided foreign policy. I feel there is no greater calling for a country than to prevent the demons of human nature like genocide from going unchecked again. We must also learn from our past mistakes, and take simple but effective steps to stop the bloodshed when troops leave, like ensuring a balance of power amongst rivals. This, my friends, is a moral necessity in a brutal world.


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