Kill Bill Vol. 1
I saw Kill Bill: Vol. 1 today. I loved it. Adored it. A phenomenal film. I gave it ten stars at IMDB. I’ve only done this a couple of times before. Schindler’s List. The director’s cut of Das Boot. You get the idea.
You can learn all sorts of interesting information from the IMDB page. (Including that Chiaki Kuriyama is not really seventeen. She’s legal. Even when the film was made. Barely. Helps assuage some guilt feelings. What a difference a year makes. Anyway.*) The trivia page is especially fun, and while it doesn’t actually tell you the name, it tells you where and how The Bride’s name can be found in the film. (Lazy? Do a Google search. Or look here.)
But the most interesting thing comes on the goofs page. Under “Incorrectly regarded as goofs”, we find the following:
The many continuity lapses and other apparent technical errors are a matter of deliberate stylistic choice in this pastiche of 1970s “B” action movies.
Which is groovy and everything. Really. But isn’t it just a bit too convenient? I mean, don’t you think every film director would like to have this notation in his or her film’s goofs page? Or just shorten it to “The mistakes are intentional, deal with it?” The Big Stuff: I’m with you on that. Nobody bleeding on the snow, for instance, even when sporting massive gaping wounds. But the tiny stuff, like the mascara smudge under Go Go’s left eye disappearing during the fight scene. Are Tarantino worshippers really going to tell me that the makeup artist went in and painted a smudge just so we can have a continuity lapse to marvel at?
One thing especially unusual about this film is how quickly time seemed to pass. The movie was scheduled to start at 2:30, but I had forgotten to reset my watch for the return to PST. So as the previews started, I reset my watch from 3:30 to 2:30. Then, at a certain point in the film I glanced down at my watch to gauge where we were, and it read 4:30. But by this point I had forgotten I had fixed my watch (following this still?) So I thought, “Oh good, there’s an hour left.” Then the film cut to credits. No idea what happened to that extra hour.
If you haven’t seen this film, have a strong stomach when it comes to amputations, and trust my opinions at all: go see it. It’s fantastic.
(Note added 29 October 2003: “To my credit,” I told my wife, “I think I was supposed to find her sexy, and I think I was supposed to be uncomfortable about it.” “I’m sure,” she responded. “Ninety percent of a Tarantino film is making the viewer feel uncomfortable.”)
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