Kill Bill: Volume Two

[Kal]

The new trailer is up

http://www.apple.com/trailers/miramax/kill_bill/volume_II/trailer/

and its awsome!

[cine]

The new trailer is up

http://www.apple.com/trailers/miramax/kill_bill/volume_II/trailer/

and its awsome!

And it's already been posted too. But that's fine. This one seems to be better quality (unless I'm crazy).

[mutinyco]

Um, okay. First I wondered, considering that there were already 22 pages and the film wasn't out yet, how everybody's girlfriends felt about the blisters on their dicks. Then a few people, including Mac, joked at the idea of anybody here having a girlfriend. So then I suggested Mr. Jordan's fun family site, since the girls there would have no problems or knowledge of their shaft abrasions.

Hope that helped.

[cine]

So then I suggested Mr. Jordan's fun family site, since the girls there would have no problems or knowledge of their shaft abrasions.

When I laugh at something you say, I'll get back to you pronto.

[SHAFTR]

how everybody's girlfriends felt about the blisters on their dicks. Then a few people, including Mac, joked at the idea of anybody here having a girlfriend.

After that said...I really hope you have a girlfriend.

[ElPandaRoyal]

And now one of you says "I overreacted" and the other "YOU OVERREACTED?" and then you kill each other...

[cron]

Spoilers free.

Found: where Tarantino gets his ideas

With his latest release, the director 'borrows' from other films more heavily than ever. Steve Rose has seen them

Tuesday April 6, 2004
The Guardian
 
It is almost easier to list the films that haven't influenced Quentin Tarantino than those that have. The voluble director never seems to tire of pointing out all the movies he's referenced, paid tribute to, been inspired by or simply ripped off wholesale. With his latest release, Kill Bill Vol 2, Tarantino's "borrowing" has reached unprecedented proportions. The film is made almost entirely from elements of other films, mainly what Tarantino refers to as "grindhouse cinema": a catch-all term for movies that played in cheap US cinemas in the 1970s - Hong Kong martial arts flicks, Japanese samurai movies, blaxploitation films and spaghetti westerns.

It would take a cinephile as nerdy as Tarantino himself to account for the exact details of what's being referenced when and how - and, of course, there are plenty of those. The Quentin Tarantino Archives fansite (tarantino.info) identifies some 80 movies that inspired Kill Bill, from Hitchcock's Marnie ("has the exact same nurse-walking-down-corridor scene") to Japanese retro-horror Goke: Bodysnatcher From Hell ("for the orange sunset sky behind the plane").

Four key films playing at the ICA's Kill Bill Connection (alongside parts one and two of Kill Bill itself) are more revealing. All were made between 1972 and 1974, and the only American one is The Doll Squad, a kitsch low-budget B-movie prioritising costume and soundtrack over dramatic rigour. It was directed by the prolific Ted V Mikels, who later claimed that the TV series Charlie's Angels was directly influenced by his vision of voluptuous female agents equally versed in combat and seduction. The Doll Squad was itself indebted to Bond-like spy thrillers and the works of Russ Meyer, and it's an obvious template for Kill Bill's own female agent team, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad.

More interesting in their own right are the three foreign films: Lady Snowblood and Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, both from Japan, and the aptly titled Thriller: En Grym Film, from Sweden. All three prefigure Kill Bill's central theme of wronged women seeking revenge. Lady Snowblood is a 19th-century swordswoman going after the men who killed her mother's husband; Scorpion is an escaped convict gunning for the cruel warden who locked her up. The harder-hitting Thriller (so hardcore it was banned in Sweden) follows an innocent girl who is turned into a mutilated, heroin-addicted sex slave, and turns the tables on her captors. Tarantino particularly pointed Daryl Hannah toward it; her character's eye patch is a tribute to Thriller's heroine.

It's striking just how much Tarantino has lifted from these films. Lady Snowblood, in particular, is practically a template for the whole of Kill Bill Vol 1, right down to a climactic fight at a masked party. On this basis it would be easy to dismiss him as an unoriginal film-maker, stealing from better films that nobody else is likely to see - but Tarantino wouldn't be the first person to make a film without formulating a brand new cinematic language. In a recent interview, he compared Kill Bill's relationship with 1970s grindhouse cinema to that which Raiders of the Lost Ark had with movie serials of the 1930s and 40s. But he could have picked more recent targets. The makers of the Matrix movies, for example, mined similar areas of Asian action cinema, but concealed it beneath a patina of Hollywood glitz. Tarantino leaves his references on the surface for all to see, or obsessively list and put on a fansite, if they're so inclined.

In this respect, Tarantino could be seen to be serving a valuable function: bringing otherwise marginal films back into the mainstream. Since the remake of zombie movie Dawn of the Dead recently topped the US box office, some have argued that "cult" cinema is the mainstream. But how many of us would have known films like those showing at the ICA existed without Quentin?

Beyond the name-checking, Tarantino has worked to bring his favourite forgotten movies to light. At his instigation, Hollywood studio Miramax formed the now-defunct Rolling Thunder Pictures to distribute and re-release specialty movies of the type Tarantino would describe as "cool", such as Chungking Express and Takeshi Kitano's Sonatine. "Cool" is a word Tarantino uses a great deal. It's the adjective of choice for his characters, and most of the films Tarantino references in his movies he would describe as cool - particularly those in Kill Bill (which is brought to you by his production company, Super Cool Manchu).

It might be reasonable to ask what exactly Tarantino finds so cool about these movies. Most of them are from the time when impressionable young Quentin was probably at his most movie-obsessed - he was born in 1963, and has often claimed that his mother took him to movies most parents would have considered him too young to see. The theme of powerful and violent women is perhaps one for the psychoanalysts, but with many of the foreign films, a recurring theme is the way they reflect American culture. The samurai and kung-fu films rehashed western (both western hemisphere and cowboy western) themes in the postwar years. Or else they borrowed from Hollywood as barefacedly as Kill Bill borrows from them.

Similarly, films like Female Convict Scorpion and Lady Snowblood were inspired by popular exploitation genres such as the "women's prison" movie and the "rape-revenge" drama. These stock settings were redeployed to the point of exhaustion in low-budget American movies of the 1970s, but many of the Japanese variations were fresher and more accomplished, or else amusingly ignorant of the conventions they were borrowing. They were just as cheaply made, but were far more adventurous formally, and ingeniously economical in their storytelling. Lady Snowblood, for example, uses stills and illustration for parts of the narrative that were too expensive to film, just as Kill Bill uses Japanese-style animation to break up the narrative. Tarantino's film returns the compliment these foreign movies paid to US cinema, even to the extent of being woefully ignorant: Japanese audiences found Uma Thurman's pronunciation of their language hilariously inaccurate.

One problem with Kill Bill's quotation of all these "cool" movies, though, is that when the films are divorced from their original contexts, they are drained of all meaning. Beyond their aesthetic attributes, the movies playing at the ICA's Kill Bill season are remarkable for their political purpose: Lady Snowblood addresses Japan's postwar purification and reintegration. One of the victims in Female Convict Scorpion boasts of raping Chinese women during the second world war, while Thriller, for all its sex and violence, is a scathing attack on patriarchal 1970s society. What does Kill Bill represent? Is it about anything other than being cool?

On the one hand, Tarantino could be compared to those trend-spotters hired by lifestyle corporations, finding obscure and forgotten tributaries of cinema and channelling them into the mainstream. On the other hand, he is the insecure nerd who would rather reassemble other "cool" movies than put anything of his own up on the screen. But perhaps the forthcoming volume two of Kill Bill will reveal a hidden depth to Tarantino.

And if not, there's still plenty of time for him to make amends. As much as being a film about other films, Kill Bill is a film about the love of film. Nobody could accuse Tarantino of being insincere in his love of movies, even if it does afford him the occasional chance to act out his fantasy of living in one.

[mutinyco]

Ci-ne-phi-le...must be Italian...

[brockly]

*checks watch*

[mutinyco]

What time have you got?

[Jeremy Blackman]

[silence]

[mutinyco]

Must be digital then.

[brockly]

..... if you had said analogue instead of digital that would have been a great post and I would have felt like fool. but you didn't. fuck man!

[cine]

Way to screw up, mutinyco.

[mutinyco]

How's that again? If there's silence it's probably digital. Most analog clocks I can think of make some type of ticking sound.

tick-tock...