Kill Bill 2

Dir: Quentin Tarantino
2004
Forgot to post my thoughts on this here, as I had posted them over at a mailing list I’m on. Here’s pretty much what I said there.
On the Jackie Brown DVD, QT talks about how JB “proved” he could make an intelligent, mostly dialog-driven film. And he had done it as his third film, early in his career. He goes on to say that maybe the next film will just be a movie-movie, just stupid fun, but craaaaazy.
So that’s how I take KB. The trouble with QT is that we have to wait so bloody long between films that the expectations outweigh the eventual release.
A friend of mine made a comparison between 1 and 2 in that they reflect Kurosawa’s tactic with Yojimbo and Sanjuro. Yojimbo is all blood ‘n’ guts; Sanjuro has little of that, and when violence does arrive it doesn’t conform to our expectations. Big baddies are dispatched quickly and without flourishes, where we expect big set pieces.
Over on the P5 list, where the convo is about sampling, Paul’s Boutique has been mentioned a few times, and I feel that KB is a bit like that–QT has made a sampladelic movie, no more no less. He’s just throwing everything out there on the table–all the movies he loves, reconfiguring it, tweaking it.
I admit it’s light and superficial, but I had some laughs along the way: Sonny Chiba’s sushi chef scene, Gordon Liu’s segment, the massacre of the Crazy 88s.
Who knows what QT will do for a follow up? My sense is that it will be something more like Jackie Brown. There’s been this WWII movie that he’s been wanting to make. Maybe he’ll pull a David Mamet and do a drawing-room drama like The Winslow Boy. Really, it could be anything. Only by the next film will we really know how to see KBII.