Kill Bill

[Stephen Gallagher]

I'm never sure whether I have a blind spot for Tarantino or whether I'm just fundamentally at odds with his ethos. KILL BILL is terrifically well done... it's daring and confident and entirely lacking in that dull, safe patina you get where you just know that a succession of office-bound non-filmmakers have had 'input'.

I like it, but why don't I like it better? Partly, I suspect, because the cheesy 70s originals that it celebrates are wearing and shallow, and so at its heart is this.

[Wayne Mook]

Have to admit I've not seen this. I love his films but even so they are not films I really take to my heart.

Pulp Fiction is this only one I'd go out of my way to see. Its funny and has warm as well as evil characters.

I'm going to have to go to the pictures, watching Bella Lugosi in The Corpse Vanishes (Birthday present, I'm know officially a grumpy old man, the starting age is 35) was great fun and I feel a real warmth for these films (Invisible Ghost is next). Maybe in time I will feel the way about more modern films. Though the remake of The Haunting (I am the only one who thinks this is a second rate version of the recent Caspar the Friendly Ghost?) will not be one of them.

Wayne.

[Stephen Gallagher]

It's the big mainstream commercial movies that seem most destined to disappoint. I won't go near anything with Michael Bay's name on it.

[Stu]

I enjoy Tarantino's films but he does seem to have developed a worryingly large amount of authorial tics -- Mexican standoffs, the Radio 2 soundtrack, the black suits and white shirts, the pop culture references, having a caption flash up revealing that a character has performed a normally timeconsuming task in a matter of seconds (or the flipside where they perform an incredibly simple task over a period of hours). I think maybe that's why he leaves it so long between films so people forget that he's just repeating stuff he used in previous films.

Anyway, yeah KILL BILL is pretty shallow. And QT deserves a slap for the passe post-modern irony/homage to 70s exploitation flicks. But somewhere behind the waferthin plot and below-par dialogue is one of QT's favourite themes -- professionalism clashing with personal loyalty. He just doesn't handle it as well as he did in DOGS or PULP.