Kill Bill Vol.1

Review - Quentin Tarentino's new magnum opus (if I can call it that) Kill

Bill, it a testament to all the cheesy, low budget, kung-fu action movies I used to watch as a kid.  A simple revenge movie.  Little on plot, BIG on action, and there's more to come.

I'll try to give you a simple breakdown.  Quentin wanted to make a movie that incorporated most of his film influences.  Kung-fu pictures, anime, spaghetti westerns, and the like.  He wanted to not only pay a sort of homage to this genres but wanted to create something modern.  So he spent a year on the word processor and knocked out Kill Bill.

His cast had been largely thought out prior to completion of the script,

David Carridine (as Bill), Uma Thurman (who helped with scripting her character), Vivaca A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, Julie Dreyfus, Lucy Liu, Sonny Chiba (as Hattori Hanz from the Shadow Warriors) and Michael Parks (who plays the same lawman he played in Tarantino's From Dusk Till

Dawn). The ensuing year and a half would be plagued by over budgeting, extended shooting (The Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves took 8 weeks alone to shoot), a pregnancy (Uma's of course), and a 4hour run-time.  All of these things usually spell disaster for a film, but not in this case.

The most notable and most appropriate topic is the film's length.  At just under 4 hours, a simple kung-fu revenge film can be a daunting experience. Quentin showed Harvey Weinstein (the Head of Miramax films) the rough cut of Vol. 1, claiming that this was the first half of the movie and Harvey demanded that Quentin "Not Cut" any of it.  They both agreed that the film ends on quite an exhausting note, a 20-minute battle royal full of severed limbs, lakes of blood, and copious amounts of carnage.  It was decided that they should break the film in half at this point.

-m-