October 12, 2003
I saw "Kill Bill: Volume I" today
I saw "Kill Bill: Volume I" today, and it was utterly, fucking astonishing. I was prepared to be impressed - and I was - but I wasn't prepared for all the little surprises along the way, e.g. Sonny Chiba as "Hattori Hanzo", a wonderful name for his character, if you're at all familiar with both actual Warring States samurai history as well as some of the outrageous fictionalizations of Hanzo in Japanese cimema. Lucy Liu warms to her role very well. I won't spoil the scene for you, but she really gets to go over the top in a scene involving a convocation of Yakuza bosses. It's obvious that she worked hard with a dialect coach over the course of shooting, because her Japanese gets dramatically better as the film goes on... which says something about the sequence in which the scenes were shot. By the way, Lucy Liu fanboys, I do know she majored in Asian studies in college. Her pronunciation and conversational fluency was noticably slightly off (to these former expat gaijin's ears) in the beginning, but rapidly improved.
Be warned: while this film is a complete fantasy, and a very good one at that, it is an extremely violent fantasy. There's more gut-wrenching brutality in this flick than I've seen in recent years.
I'm looking forward to Volume II.
Posted by Russell Whitaker at October 12, 2003 11:02 PM | TrackBackI admit to being interested in anything where a katana is used, even Highlander. The previews made this movie look exceedingly silly.
Thanks, Russell, for the vote of confidence. I was going to see it anyway, now I'm looking forward to it. I'll wait until it's for rent, though, since movie theaters have 1:Their volume set far too high; 2:Not much chance of making Athena happy.
Violence doesn't make/break a movie for me, it's a matter of context. Football is quite violent, yet that is considered family fare.
Curt-
Posted by: Curt Howland on October 13, 2003 07:41 PM