20 years ago, Quentin Tarantino geeked out with Kill Bill

More than any film he had made before or any film made since, kill Bill Looks like an open window into the pleasure center of Quentin Tarantino’s brain – perhaps the closest he’s come to seeing the overlapping noises of genre noise in his head on screen. His talent has always been closely linked to his taste in films: Tarantino was a video-clerk scavenger from the beginning, scavenging from Hong Kong shoot-’em-ups, ’70s Hollywood crime pictures, or scraps of whatever else he could find at Miramax. Milestones constructed. Which nourished his hunger for sympathy. But the writer-director didn’t really disappear from his obsession until 20 years ago, when he re-emerged with the first part of a super-sized revenge opus that takes place not in the real world but in some exploitation- Was best described in the movie Twilight Zone. As in Tarantino Land.

For film lovers of a certain ideology, the release of Kill Bill: Volume 1 There was an incident in October 2003. It’s been six years since Tarantino’s last film, the funky, bittersweet Elmore Leonard adaptation, jackie brown, For what seemed an eternity, the famous Cutie style was used, abused, copied, imitated and almost parodied to death. It was sobering to see the genuine article again – to hear dialogue that actually snapped, to see a needle dropped altogether, to follow the zigzags of a swirling timeline with purpose and joy. Was. As Samuel L. Jackson said jackie brownDon’t accept any options.

kill Bill Immediately announces itself as a retro fetish object, beginning with a fake vanity card that bills the film as a “Showscope” production and promises a “feature presentation” of ’70s vintage. -The kind of effects Tarantino will play with in his next film, Double -Feature Package grindhouse, created with fellow B-movie enthusiast Robert Rodriguez. These pre-show oddities (in conjunction with the jokey ones). star trek epigraph) set a bizarre throwback tone, which Tarantino held for about five seconds, before the audience was slammed in close-up to the bloodied face of Uma Thurman, soon to be her vengeful ex-boyfriend, of the same name. He will be blown away by Bill’s bullet.

On paper, the plot is virtually a simple checklist. It follows Thurman’s bereaved bride as she awakens from a coma and is hunted down by her betrayers, codenamed assassins such as Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah and – as Bill himself – David Carradine. The role played. But of course, Tarantino doesn’t take such a direct path through the story. He jumps back and forth in time through flashbacks and digressions, arranging events not chronologically but viscerally or emotionally.

more than that pulp Fiction, Tarantino has structured his film like a mixtape – and not just because the soundtrack is typically killer, rolling surf rock into country western and favorite motifs from other films in an original RZA score. Spy movies, kung fu, samurai pictures, French New Wave, ultra-violent anime, Brian De Palma split-screen suspense – Tarantino directs like a one-man festival programmer, culled from his favorite personal library. At other times, he is a collector who displays his rarest memorabilia. How else can one classify the decision to dress Thurman in Bruce Lee’s helmet and iconic yellow tracksuit corpse Party, Even casting in a Tarantino film is an expression of refined taste, almost a boast. Here, we get martial arts legend Sonny Chiba in a small but important role as an experienced sword maker.

As it followed a round of amusing crime-movie gaffefests, kill Bill It also felt like Tarantino was trying to hone his craft and showcase his craft – to stand out. director aspect of his writer-director title. In pulp Fiction And reservoir DogsThe fun was in watching B-movie idols behave like “normal” people, shooting shit on their way to a hit, or debating pop culture in a diner. kill BillOn the contrary, often gives the verb a chance to speak, and quite brilliantly: volume 1The climax of House of Blue Leaves, in which The Bride dispatches a veritable army of goons armed with samurai steel, is as amazing today as it was 20 years ago; The splatter is so hilariously, outrageously gory that Tarantino had to convert to black and white to maintain the R rating. And Thurman plays an unusually brief character in the QT canon. It’s a true star performance of Eastwoodian gravitas and power that is now sadly, inevitably colored by an injury suffered on the set and subsequent disagreements between him and Tarantino.

volume 1 This remains the director’s purest blast of no-frills entertainment, perhaps the only time he’s really allowed himself to go all out. But Tarantino still insists on subverting the adventure to play it completely straight. For one, the chronological architecture of his script deliberately neutralized some of the tension: while mixing up the scene sequence allowed him to effectively revive John Travolta’s character. pulp Fiction (just as the film would revive his career), here it foreshadows the outcome of The Bride’s confrontation with Liu’s sword-wielding yakuza boss O-Ren Ishii. Sometimes, Tarantino Delivers And That makes it complicated. The first altercation, which takes place in the living room with Fox, is unexpectedly interrupted, leading to a conversation that later appears to set up a more formal duel, and then is resolved with rapid, brutal violence. She goes.

Released the following spring, Volume 2 Almost as a response, the sabotage will be further escalated volume 1: After staging some of the most notable acts of the 2000s, Tarantino slows down, pauses, and plays around with audience expectations. One villain becomes angry with another instead of The Bride. And the big final showdown… turns into a very long Tarantino conversation, with the actual fight resolved in mere seconds. two parts of kill Bill are so radically different in pace and tone – an Eastern followed by a Western with a deliberate counterpoint to the anti-climax – that it’s almost hard to believe they were ever intended to be the same film.

there are also those who swear Volume 2 It is a better film. it’s probably Daring Of the two, the more emotionally satisfying. But it doesn’t have that dazzling happiness volume 1, driven by Tarantino’s delightfully playful filmmaking. It’s like a great DJ set, always taking you from higher to higher. It also feels like a course based on Tarantino’s genre education: you can see the logic of how one detour leads to another – a journey that an intrepid viewer would begin with the film as their reference guide. Can do, signs point the way forward.

Absolutely, kill Bill It also marked a new path forward for Tarantino, who would deliberately engage in his cinematic passions. With the possible exception of the more marginalized Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, all the films he made thereafter are pure pastiche, operating in an alternative film world informed by the classics and cult curiosities that the filmmaker lives and breathes. It’s possible to admire the playground that Tarantino has created for himself and his collaborators, while still being a little curious about what they accomplished. jackie brown, Now there was a great movie with one foot firmly planted in reality, rather than Tarantino Land where most of his ilk were digging in their heels.

kill Bill The films are available to rent or purchase from major digital services. For more writings by AA Dowd, please visit his website authorized page,