Diamonds are endeavor.

A megalomaniac designs a satellite to harness the sun’s power. And James Bond is there to rain on his parade.

Cold Open Pretty Orange Explosion Zone: James Bond 007 (Pierce Brosnan, in his 4^th and final turn as the superspy) surfs some rad waves into North Korea (reflecting the tenor of the times, no more Russians), infiltrating diamond dealers, led by General’s son Col. Moon and his lieutenant Zao. They blow Bond’s cover, and he hovercrafts (!) and fights his way to a dead-end, killing Col. Moon in the chase. We are always wondering why villains don’t just shoot Bond immediately, but now we can understand a revenge motive, as the General imprisons Bond and tortures him until he looks like Gandalf after a bad day in Mirkwood.

Opening titles slam in with Madonna’s Die Another Day, which is very catchy, but washed out with insufferable auto-tune that makes me wanna smack her in the mouth, for which she would thank me. Hey, it’s Madonna. The lyrics, “I’m gonna close my body now…” make a lot of sense over the montage of Bond being tortured and closing his body off to suffering. Graphics of naked women on fire and naked women made of ice – to presage the plot of the movie…

Bearded bloodied Bond is eventually traded back to MI6 for Zao (Rick Yune), who was obviously captured after the Pretty Orange Explosions, which gave him the oomph Bond gimmick  – diamonds burned into his face. When Bond is released by the General for the trade, he sincerely thinks the Koreans are going to shoot him in the back, and Brosnan really sells it. Gone is the smug, gone is the suave, here is a man readying himself for nothingness.

But Bond is far from home free – matter of fact, he is home-imprisoned – as MI6, like any government, doesn’t trust its captured agents, so keep him locked in quarantine, with M (Judi Dench) rescinding his 00 status. (There is a heated exchange over Bond’s cyanide pill, which he apparently “got rid of years ago.” Does this make him a good agent or a bad risk? Was he so over-confident about his powers of not breaking under torture that he thought he’d never need it?) He says he was set up in North Korea, so, abandoned by his people, he must go it alone to find the mole.

Berry as Jinx: ass ass in.

So it’s that old premise: Bring the hero low. Find the mole that ruined his life.

One of the funniest scenes of any Bond movie is surely Bond walking barefoot into a swanky hotel in his soaking hospital togs and Gandalf-beard, shirt open on wet torso, after escaping the MI6 facility and swimming the bay, telling the concierge, “My usual suite, please.”

Bond starts tracking Zao. Onto Cuba, where he meets the plain-bordering-on-ugly Halle Berry as she exits the sea (in obvious homage to Ursula Andress in DR. NO, except not so deformed). Suddenly she’s dry. Bond meets her. Suddenly she’s wet again.

Berry is Jizz—sorry, Jinx, and she’s as smug as Bond (because this was that odd time in the world when people were telling Halle Berry she was all that), though I don’t know why – she’s not even a quarter as pretty as Bond. Nice side-boob though. Jinx is also some ass– I mean, also some kind of assassin. The dynamic of an adept female spy working alongside Bond worked so well in TOMORROW NEVER DIES they do it again, with Jinx. She’s no damsel in distress, and Berry does a great job of selling the strong woman who’s every bit as badass as Bond.

Jinx is under the command of Michael Madsen, whose sudden appearance in the MI6 office alongside regulars like Colin Salmon, made me think HE was the mole (brand new face in the office, and a star to boot; from RESERVOIR DOGS in 1992, in the space of just the decade till 2002’s DIE ANOTHER DAY, amassing over 60 credits! He’s like the modern day Lyle Talbot!)

Written by Neal Purvis and Robert Wade (who both started with THE WORLD IS NOT ENOUGH, and would go on to write all the Daniel Craig era films), directed by Lee Tamahori (the brutal ONCE WERE WARRIORS, 1994), we once again feel the vignette-to-vignette nature of this Bond adventure. As with most of the convoluted plots of the Bond series, you can never quite work out the intricacies – but you always get the objective of each vignette.

Bond traces Zao to a DNA facility in Cuba. Jinx is there too, destroying files of herself. This place is one step beyond Witness Protection – it constructs new identities through “gene therapy” – reshaping your face completely. Zao escapes both Bond and Jinx. And Bond traces him to a London diamond merchant, Gustav Graves (the excellent Toby Stephens, smugger than Moore and Brosnan put together); a fencer, parachutist, knight, adventurer, whose oomph Bond gimmick is that he doesn’t sleep.

Gustav is constructing a satellite that can re-direct the sun’s golden beams on farmlands, or concentrate golden beams into destructive blasts. And he calls it… Goldeneye—no wait, that was copyrighted three films ago… damn! It woulda been perfect! (He calls it Icarus instead… does it bode well for anything if it’s named after the hubristic young mythological Greek who flew too close to the sun and died?)

I don’t know who’s cooler: the Black James Bond or Mr. White.

Bond touches tips with Gustav in a ferocious swordfight, well-staged through common rooms and libraries of this grande olde British club. Madonna cameos as a fencer; her accent cameos as British. When asked to bet on the Gustav-Bond fight, she demurs, “I don’t like cockfights.” It’s funny because she’s a slut.

Rosamund Pike is Miranda Frost, Gustav’s right-hand woman, young and smooth and ice-queen, turning down Bond’s advances. Until she sleeps with him. Oh, we can use the excuse that she’s a double-agent, but we all know it’s because in a Bond film, sexism wins.

Bond, back in the begrudging good graces of M, visits Q (John Cleese, now entrenched as the Quartermaster due to the tragic death of Desmond Llewelyn; sadly, Cleese would not continue into the Daniel Craig era). He previews an invisible car and, for a hot second, as his legs are refracted through the invisible car, we get an unintentional taste of The Minister of Silly Walks! Or maybe that was a sly wink?

Next insane location: an Ice Hotel. These things DO exist – which is a wonder in itself, constructed for tourist seasons and melted months later – but never in the fancy fashion of Gustav’s Ice Palace from this movie, a wholly impractical construct with hedonistic frills no sane ice hotelier would attempt). Jinx is there too!

We discover Gustav is actually Col. Moon whom Bond “killed” in the Cold Open Pretty Orange Explosion Zone, altered through gene therapy, Moon snidely admitting that Bond was his English character-model: “That unjustifiable swagger, those crass quips, the defense mechanism concealing such inadequacy…”

Bond: “So you live to die another day?”

It’s racism so deep we hardly see it. The plot twist required Bond to have a connection to the diamond dealer/sun king, and not realize it. So couldn’t they make this guy another Asian? At the least, an ambiguous Easterner? Instead of going all the way to WHITE MAN? Now I happen to be a fan of this particular white man (mostly because he looks like Clint Eastwood), but we can’t shake the feeling the movie is implying that another Asian guy would not have played well because all Asians look alike. Or – the filmmakers might think the audience would automatically regard him as the villain, because we opened with the North Korean villains. Thing is: we regard Gustav as the villain anyway, through his smugness and Bond’s suspicions, so… how do we get to kumbaya from here?… Do tell us, filmmakers!

The main annoying aspect is still the talking-not-shooting syndrome of all the bad guys. Or the shooting madly at the heroes when they’re running away, but as soon as the heroes give themselves up, the shooting stops. Frost says, with a sword at Jinx’s neck, “Drowning you didn’t seem to work. We’ll have to try something more to the point!”– Shutup with the puns and SKEWER HER!

For all their stupidities, Pierce Brosnan’s Bond films are enjoyable diversions, consistent in their tone and production design. It is during Brosnan’s tenure we see the upheaval in special effects technology in movies, reflected in the use of computers within the storylines of the movies themselves. As computers become more prevalent in this series of movies, so too does Computer Graphic Imagery in the production of the films. GOLDENEYE used that big green writing on computer monitors; by DIE ANOTHER DAY, we have digital readouts, modern-looking screens, virtual reality and holograms.

There’s a thug named Mr. Kil, a laser watch and laser guns, an invisible car, a ring that shatters glass, the villain’s solar suit that looks like Iron Man, a rocket car that races the satellite’s sun beam and – Bond para-sailing across rad waves with icebergs. Movie Maniacs, if you stayed for the gene technology that could change an Asian guy’s face into Nearly Clint Eastwood, you can suspend your disbelief for the parasailing.

I think it was more that Asian/Caucasian plot twist that alienated this movie with Bond fans than the parasailing, which was a dumb surface reason. By replacing the Asian guy with a Brit, the film lost our investment of emotion. It suddenly felt like it was forcing us to invest in a character which we should have a connection with – but which we don’t because – he’s not that character that we met for all of two minutes in the cold open, which we never had the chance to connect with anyway. It’s off the chain batshit. So we feel as lopsided as the airplane that flies through a Goldeneye sunbeam with Bond and Jinx and Frost and Clint Eastwood dressed like Iron Man.

A final scene finds James entering MI6 and laying Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) across her desk for a sensual pumpi—a hologram! Moneypenny’s fantasy… Still, it was kinda nice that both these characters got to makeout in this last turn for both of them.

Bond ends this caper with diamonds and Jizz.

END

A film that takes us somewhere, yet goes nowhere.

Quentin Tarantino once again brazenly rewrites history in his scintillating homage to La La Land of the 1960s, ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD.

Hollywood 1969. Two tales intertwine – one, a tale of an actor and his stuntman, hustling for work in a business that has moved past their cowboy attitudes and advancing ages; the other, a tale of a rising young starlet going somewhere, while her throughline goes nowhere.

And that’s the small gripe I have with this meticulously made film: a little less homage, a little more story.

Writer-director Tarantino paints two fictional characters from scratch and portrays one real life character; the fictional pair are actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman bro Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt, as leathery and runneled as Tommy Lee Jones), while the historical character is Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), who is connected to real life acquaintances that would scar history forever – the Manson Family (portrayed as peripheral characters, including a lookalike who could be a young Liam Neeson or, I’m guessing, Charlie Manson).

Tarantino also re-dresses Hollywood the town (either in CGI, practical effects or a combo of both) in the glitter gown it wore in the ‘60s, from the shop facades on Hollywood Boulevard, to the car models from that era, down to the street signs, bus shelters and billboards. And credit where it’s due – that effort in itself is a stunning achievement!

However, Tarantino seems to have lost his throughline in chasing his art. Firstly, only movie-philes would know or care that he has brought 1960’s Hollywood to life so fastidiously; secondly, he spends way too much time with eyes on Sharon Tate. Movie might have benefitted had Tarantino simply followed the two buddies (with their own compelling narratives), because by inserting Tate and rewriting her as a survivor of the “Tate Murders,” her appearance in the film is meaningless to any cinemagoer with no knowledge of her real history (victim to the Manson Family, that murdered five people in Roman Polanski’s Los Angeles home in 1969), and she ultimately becomes nothing but a red herring to those who do know the history. Tate happens to be Rick Dalton’s neighbor, therefore a motivating subplot for actor Dalton, who craves to make contact with Tate’s director husband, Polanski. After the film’s climax (in which Tate is not involved), she appears as a concerned neighbor, in the smallest of comedic payoffs.

That being said, allow me to commend IN HOLLYWOOD for its sudden, savage climax – one of the most satisfying payoffs in cinematic history, with Brad Pitt pulling out his big dick for the type of studied gore-ballet that Tarantino is renowned for. The crafted gutshock blunt blow to our skulls doesn’t get any better. It’s Hero Time.

Most women have to be held back when confronted with The Pitt.

Like the two films that inspired its name (ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST and ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA, both directed by one of Quentin’s heroes – Sergio Leone), ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD is a tale about a few connected characters set against the backdrop of a kaleidoscopic cultural sprawl. Definitely a passion project for Quentin (who admits 1969 holds a rose-colored grip on his youth), movie is a pastiche wrapped in a homage and doused liberally with roman a clef, packed with Easter eggs, classic rock, in-jokes, and parts for all his brahs.

There’s ice-cool Timothy Olyphant and ice-veined Michael Madsen as cowboys, Kurt Russell as a producer (and narrator), stuntwoman Zoe Bell as his wife; there’s even Bruce’s daughter Rumer Willis and Kevin Smith’s daughter Harley Quinn, as Manson cultists. Leo, of course, did DJANGO, and even Pitt has crossed paths with Tarantino before… remember Floyd the stoner in the Tarantino-penned TRUE ROMANCE? “Don’t conden-send me, man! Fucken kill you, man!…”

Al Pacino is producer Marvin Schwarz, who steers Dalton toward spaghetti westerns out-of-country, to build an overseas cachet and return a hero (a real life gambit that rocketed none other than Clint Eastwood to stardom); Margaret Qualley is Pussycat, a free spirit who tempts Booth to the cult; Bruce Dern is old George Spahn, who allows the Manson Family to camp at his Spahn Movie Ranch (which features in the other prime scene of the movie – Booth visiting the eerily stagnant Ranch and talking his way through the ominous female hippies to visit old George, who may be… dead? prisoner? worse?…)

Martial artist Mike Moh plays Bruce Lee (during his Kato period in THE GREEN HORNET), comparing dick size with Cliff Booth on the set of a movie. Booth ends up getting kicked off the set for beating up Lee. Now that’s just wrong. No matter how funny or artistic license the scene is – no one beats up Bruce Lee!

Rare picture of Bruce Lee at one of his Fight Club meets.

The primo performance in this movie is Leo. His Dalton looks haggard, old, he’s coughing, smoking, clearing his throat, he has a slight stutter (which is beautifully played by DiCaprio, not as a full-blown “b-b-b-but” type of impediment, but an occasional slight hesitation when he is talking to people in uncomfortable situations), his usually pretty eyes are bloodshot with lack of sleep, but also with the knowledge that every hour he rests is one less hour he is spending trying to stay on top of a profession which is leaving him in its wake. Though he’s starred in his share of TV serials, his confidence as a viable leading man is waning, because he cannot get the breaks to transition to the big screen, (like Steve McQueen and other contemporaries).

On the cusp of a new decade, Dalton feels aged and used up, realizing the movie industry is No Country for Old Men. And we are in the fibers of his being and suffering with his soul through his existential crisis. And I personally feel every bladed inch of his anxiety; that character – is ME. And I’m guessing a lot of YOU as well…

His crisis is brought to a head when he meets a precocious little girl on set (an outstanding performance by young Julia Butters, who is reading a book where the hero feels the world has moved on without him. Dalton confesses “I’m more useless every day,” and breaks down in tears in front of her.

Tarantino is transmitting directly into my darkest limbic fluids, that place where hope goes to die, my sunken place…

While Dalton is Acting The Shit out of his angst, Pitt’s Booth – also in the autumn of his career – comes across as still vital and more in touch with his previous power. He seems happy to flit from one odd job to the next, always the faithful second banana to Dalton, his stuntman skills serving him well in street fights, drifting, and taking life on the chin; in essence, DiCaprio has the meatier role, while Pitt has the meat.

“I’m having such a good time doing nothing in this movie.”

The Rolling Stones’ Out Of Time drives us into the third act, and I found myself wondering why I was not gripped around the throat yet, which is the usual modus operandi for Tarantino films at this late stage. Also, besides Dalton and Cobb starting a new life chapter, eyes are back on Tate, and no one will fault me for thinking the Stones song is a harbinger of her doom, “Baby baby baby – you’re out of time…” (hinting that her time is up soon?). Not only that, Russell’s narration describes the people who would be the real life Manson victims moving in next door with Tate – but in this movie, they do NOT meet a tragic end, and are therefore useless to this movie’s plot, yet the narration continues this red herring throughline! Looking back on it, I’m actually getting annoyed. Technicians and actors spent days, weeks on these scenes; editors, lighting, costumes, et al, only to have this thread completely dropped when the Manson Family – led by the real life character “Tex” (Austin Butler) – skulked up Cielo Drive to start the mayhem. And Tarantino cut out all Tim Roth’s scenes for that non sequitur garbage?!

Maybe Tarantino is right, when he says he only has 10 films in him. In this penultimate one, he is finding it hard to clear his own high bar; his own legacy of leaving us breathless for weeks, months, years after viewing his iconoclastic product. Besides the compelling performance from Leo and the mantastic muscle of Pitt, this film wasted more time meandering up and down the Hollywood Hills than idiot tourists searching for the Hollywood sign.

ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD, “The 9^th Film from Quentin Tarantino,” definitely ends with a bang not a whimper, which flavors our exit libido, however, do we allow Quentin to skate on the body of the film being “merely great,” or do we insist on nothing less than gripping from film start to final frame?

We await Quentin’s 10^th, insisting on, and anticipating, the latter…

END

Eight is Enough to fill our hearts with dingus.

THE THING meets CAPTAIN RON. And all Snake Plissken breaks loose.

Wyoming. Post-Civil War. At a snowbound outpost, eight strangers must survive the stormy night. And each other.

Writer-director Quentin Tarantino‘s THE HATEFUL EIGHT is a slow burn; a firecracker waiting to be ignited in a nunnery. Unlike many of his films, we are not bled with anxiety in the first scenes. It can be said this is Tarantino’s first linear plotline. Or is it?

MungaPoff

This eighth film by the master of mayhem is styled along the lines of the master of mystery, Agatha Christie’s AND THEN THERE WERE NONE (1945) and TEN LITTLE INDIANS (1965), and, due to the snow and Kurt Russell, holds more than a little resemblance to John Carpenter’s THE THING (1982). Or does it?

Isolated strangers, hidden agendas, mysterious deaths. The Tarantino fan – and the casual Western buff or thriller buff – must wait a good way into the film to discover it is one big ulterior motive waiting to happen. Or is it?– Okay, that’s enough of that. Just asking contrary questions doesn’t create tension, y’know… Or does it?

Opening scene finds bounty hunter John Ruth (Kurt Russell, sporting a mustache that is more mungabush than handlebar) as he dashes through the snow in a stagecoach, headed for the town of Red Rock, racing a storm, with his cuffed bounty, Daisy Domergue (Jennifer Jason Leigh in a primal, dangerous-funny role). Ruth aims to see her hang and collect his $10,000 reward. They are stopped by a stranger in the street sitting on a pile of dead bodies – Major Marquis Warren (Samuel L. Jackson), another bounty hunter who is begrudgingly allowed to share Ruth’s expensive coach. Soon they come upon yet another strandling in the snow, Chris Mannix (Walton Goggins), who claims to be the new Sheriff of Red Rock, in transit to his new post, without a badge or official paperwork yet. John Ruth trusts no one – not while he’s chained to a $10K bounty that others might kill for – yet he lets Mannix aboard on the indisputable logic that “If you want to collect your bounty in Red Rock, I’m the one that’s gotta pay you!”

Sam Elliott’s mustache called Kurt’s mustache,
and told it to dial down to a 7.

Forced to stop at a way station called Minnie’s Haberdashery, to let the storm blow over, these four strangers encounter four more stranded strangers in transit: the hangman of Red Rock, Oswaldo Mobray (Tim Roth), a cowpuncher writing his autobiography (Michael Madsen), a Confederate General looking for his son (Bruce Dern), and Bob the caretaker (Demian Bishir), who says he is taking care of the place while Minnie is on vacation.

Even at this point, there is still none of that characteristic Tarantino tension. And the dialogue is not up to par with Tarantino’s usual repartee that keeps us glued to our seats through Nothing Happening (foot massage from PULP FICTION, Superman’s idea of humanity from KILL BILL VOL 2, et al). The strangers are somehow all linked in tenuous ways, and though John Ruth blusters his way around the tavern, eking out everyone’s motivation on the pretense of knowing who his mustache is spending the night with (while getting everyone’s backstory exposited for screenplay purposes), we find ourselves almost anxiety-ridden that there IS no anxiety.

Then comes Chapter Four.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT is told in Six Chapters (starting with Last Stage to Red Rock), and in Chapter Four (Domergue’s Got a Secret), something dark starts to rise like a shadow in a corner. As introduction to this Chapter, we hear Tarantino himself in voiceover – like a storyteller – detailing a plot point that only one character sees (even we the audience did not see it). It’s strange, it breaks filmmaking rules, but we are home! Coming out of nowhere as it does, it disorients us – yet we suddenly feel that Tarantino paranoia embrace us like a lost lover…

Tarantino has become such a force in movies for contravening convention so fearlessly. Only to create new conventions that others adopt in their filmmaking vernacular. Or he uses techniques that have fallen out of favor, like his penchant for cartoonish titles showing character names or information; techniques that have become such staples in hip movies nowadays that a younger viewer might easily mistake Tarantino for copying his own copycats. So though we titter for the voiceover’s obvious invasiveness, it gives the movie Tarantino’s unique stamp. They’ll be copying this raw invasiveness soon enough…

Suddenly – like piano wire tightening around our throats – everything gets slanted, everyone becomes a suspect, everywhere is a big black dingus.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT is filled with all the tiny details that make a good film great. Firstly, it is shot “in glorious 70mm.” (Ultra Panavision widescreen filmstock that hardly exists in reality. Tarantino’s DP, Robert Richardson, tells us this is only the 11th feature made on Ultra Panavision.) It was Tarantino’s recurring descriptive in his script notes, and not so much a detail, as an overarching ethos. Tarantino wanted to isolate his cast and crew to ensconce them in 1800’s frontier survival mode. Even though only a few moments capture the breadth of the exterior snowbound vistas, we’re told the interior cabin shots are also out there. The indoors was in fact outdoors.

Details like hammering two boards on the front door to shut out the raging tempest. Why not just one board? Authenticity. The amount of time spent for characters to hammer two boards into the front door every time someone kicks it in to enter the cabin, is enough to get you drunk if you’re playing the drinking game.

Details like hat brims: Jackson’s character is in Bichir’s face, shouting at him. Their hat brims touch. But then Jackson moves into Bichir’s personal space – signified by their hat brims starting to overlap, as Jackson’s slides under Bichir’s and inches closer. Excellent.

Details like Jackson’s lascivious story describing what a freezing man did for a warm blanket, revolving around what he terms alternately his “big black pecker,” “big black johnson” and – wait for it! – his “warm black dingus.”

Details like the Lincoln Letter: A key element that opens doors for African-American bounty hunter Major Warren. Until Mannix smirks, “The nigger in the stable has a letter from Abraham Lincoln?!” the phrasing of which tells us why he must carry that letter.

Details like nigger: Yes, Tarantino’s characters have no compunction blurting his second favorite word. With Tim Roth putting British spin on it, “…my Nubian friend…” Activist groups get another chance to feel relevant as they twitter their faux-outrage…

And this is not a detail – but a coup: composer Ennio Morricone! Whereas Tarantino has used this giant’s soundtrack music in previous films, (KILL BILL, INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS, DJANGO UNCHAINED), at last he hires the man himself – 89-year-old master of Westernized Mexican music – Ennio Morricone!

THE HATEFUL EIGHT is not structured to convention. You will find no character that arcs or finds redemption. None do, and no one does. Like the best bucking of convention, the galloping story subsumes the subtexts. By Chapter Five: The Four Passengers, the stagecoach is running off the rails. And we pray to a non-existent god that when it ramps over a cliff, we can keep our crotches safe.

Strangely enough, though Jackson, Madsen and Roth are Tarantino veterans, though Leigh ravages the screen with her savagery, though Dern is an old seadog, though Kurt’s mustache is ten times the badger it was in TOMBSTONE, this movie belongs to – Walton Goggins!

Walton Goggins, perennial creepy-guy character actor (Steve Buscemi-adjacent), a Junior Bruce Dern – here sharing scenes with ACTUAL Bruce Dern, and blossoming as we watch him! He’s been co-star on series like JUSTIFIED and SONS OF ANARCHY, but never red meat like this primo role. Though one of the B-characters, he grabs the reins like an A-Lister and steals the show. He’s at first goofy, then steadfast, and comes out damn righteous. Tarantino had to cast someone who could emerge from amongst the stellar ensemble to shoulder the denouement, and after Goggins’s small, unimpressive turn in Tarantino’s DJANGO, it’s pleasantly surprising that he was chosen to carry this beast to its intriguing conclusion.

THE HATEFUL EIGHT is intelligent, well-paced, gory and mungabush. Enough to fill our hearts with dread. Or a big black dingus.

END

Bridal Power.

Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned / Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.
— William Congreve, “The Mourning Bride” (1697).

The second installment of Quentin Tarantino’s KILL BILL masterpiece blasts in with “Chapter Six”– Yes, a movie starting at Chapter Six is audacious enough, but this chapter itself is a flashback to the events that engined the revenge of VOLUME 1 – the previous film. Audacity, genius, or insanity?

chapter six: massacre at two pines

DAUGHTER TO THE SLAUGHTER! Assassin Beatrix Kiddo aka The Bride (Uma Thurman) attends her wedding rehearsal with her redneck fiancé (who looks like Bobcat Goldthwait) at Two Pines Chapel, when Bill (David Carradine) unexpectedly appears. We learn, though cryptic dialogue, that Bill is the leader of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, of which The Bride was a member, that he is The Bride’s ex-lover, and that the baby she is gravid with is his. To Bobcat, she introduces Bill as her father (and we see a “surprised” look cross Carradine’s face that is simultaneously hilarious and a testament to his acting prowess).

Then the rest of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (Michael Madsen, Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, Daryl Hannah) enters the chapel and guns down everyone.

With this wedding, The Bride aka Black Mamba wanted out of the Squad, but, like all assassins, her boss would not let her leave with her life.

And KILL BILL VOLUME 2 continues its mad dash for gory…

chapter seven: the lonely grave of paula shultz

ANOTHER NAIL… Flashforward from the end of Chapter 1 in the last film. Keeping up, pagans? Having disposed of O-Ren Ishii and Vernita Fox, The Bride goes after Budd aka Sidewinder (Madsen)–

And I have a problem with her method.

After all her expertise, after knowing her wily enemy, after all the skulking to deal a death blow efficiently, she stupidly flings his trailer door open and rushes headlong into a shotgun loaded with rock salt. Quentin, you do us an injustice! Are we to believe The Bride could be that girly-silly? Further, Budd does not simply shoot her dead, but buries her alive in the manner of a Batman villain. Will she escape? Doi…

chapter eight: the cruel tutelage of pai mei

COCKY CHOP SOCKY! Flashback to The Bride’s training by an overcheesed Chinese sensei ripped from the reels of old kung fu cinema. Master Pai Mei is Chia Hui Liu (he played Johnny Mo in VOLUME 1!) so it’s quite laughably obvious he is a young guy with old guy makeup. But with Liu’s eccentric, sarcastic performance, the audacity works!

Tarantino leaches and grains the filmstock to make it look like those trashy 1970’s kung fu films; wirework, superhuman disciplines and Pai Mei’s cruel swishing of his footlong beard.

chapter nine: elle and i

EYE-EYE! The Bride takes one step closer to Bill by meeting the eye-patched Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) head-on. Here again we marvel at fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping’s inventiveness, as what could have been just another samurai fight is transformed into a scrabbling, punching, trash-filled mêlée in the confined space of Budd’s trailer. Elle continually tries to unsheathe her sword and bangs it on the roof and walls, while the camera itself seems to fight for space to film the hand-to-hand blonde-on-blonde. And we eventually “see” the pun in the title of this chapter…

last chapter: face to face

KILLING BILL. The Bride has come a long way for just this vengeful, bloody moment and finds – her daughter B.B. (Perla Haney-Jardine), thought dead, happily playing with Bill.

And before we can forget that Tarantino is the master of making mundane dialogue sound compelling and nerve-wracking, Bill launches into monologue after monologue. He speaks of B.B.’s goldfish, he speaks of Superman being the real identity and Clark Kent being the disguise, he speaks of his love for The Bride, yet everything he says in that measured rasp is like winding a spring tighter until it threatens to explode in your face. (We even get a quick, darkly funny flashback to The Bride discovering her pregnancy – just as an assassin has tracked her down. The dialogue in this scene is bravura not only for Tarantino’s writing but for the actors pulling it off so convincingly.) We wonder whether Bill isn’t speaking so much because he knows a reckoning is imminent and that one of them is going to die tonight, so wishes to prolong his time with the woman he obviously loves, but whom he must kill out of principle or be killed out of principle.

After the massive fight sequence with the Crazy 88s in VOLUME 1, we wondered how Tarantino and Woo-Ping could top each successive fight scene. They did. It was not a case of escalating the violence, but moving it in different directions. Unlike the STAR WARS saga, where Lucas and his choreographers kept repeating themselves (see one lightsaber battle, seen ’em all – even poor Yoda got boring with his dynamic ghetto moves), Tarantino and Woo-Ping never rehash the same old moves. As Elle’s fight was an ingenious closed quarters brawl, The Bride and Bill’s last pitched battle is fought with katanas and hands and the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique (ain’t the language just beautiful?!) – while sitting in chairs!

Like Leone on heat, like Kurosawa on angel dust, like an American pioneer, like a Japanese traditionalist, the KILL BILL saga proves there is only one person who makes movies – like Quentin Tarantino.

END

Revenge is a Bumblebee.

Revenge is a dish best served cold.
— opening text, KILL BILL, VOL. 1

Something about Uma Thurman in her yellow and black top-to-toe leather, lopping limbs and severing arteries – how hot is that?!

Quentin Tarantino writes and directs KILL BILL VOLUME 1, an epic masterpiece of simple brutal story, brutally vicious direction, viciously creative dismemberment, and revenge as cold as liquid nitrogen.

Tarantino once again defies modern movie convention and structures KILL BILL not in Three Acts but in two whole movies, this VOLUME 1 made up of five chapters of dynamite keg vignettes. And, sticking to his own inimitable convention, each of the Chapters hits the ground running like a reservoir dog.

We are told the KILL BILL epic is “Based on the character of The Bride, created by Q & U.” That would be Quentin and Uma. This was the period in Tarantino’s life when he was infatuated with Thurman, calling her his “muse”; and why wouldn’t he be? Uma possesses that intangible inclination to sometimes look like a man with her big nose and strange lips, yet throughout this rambling saga, she is absolutely beautiful – and my summation of why may not sit with most men; it is because she never tries to be feminine or sexy or alluring – most of the time she is covered in blood, mucus, sweat, grime, snow, water; she is intense, threatening, sarcastic, haughty, baleful, desolate, determined. Never weak. Never dependent. Never “feminine.” So hot.

chapter one: 2

CATFIGHT! Girl on girl violence between Thurman as a vengeful warrior known as The Bride (although her actual character name is purposefully bleeped out) and Vivica A. Fox as Vernita, her opponent from the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. We do not realize until the end of this sequence why the Chapter is called ‘2.’ Before she drives off, Uma crosses Vernita’s name off a list – it is the second name crossed off. The first name already crossed off is “O-Ren Ishii.” True to non-chrono form, Tarantino has dropped us somewhere in the middle of his movie and half the fun is in putting the jigsaw together while his crazy train is going off the rails.

chapter two: the blood splattered bride

MASSACRE! A wedding chapel in El Paso, Texas; a heavily-pregnant bride (Thurman) left for dead. Four Years Later, this Bride wakes from a coma in a hospital bed, just in time to stave off another unconscious rape from one of intern Buck’s paying customers. She makes off with Buck’s “Pussy Wagon.” (“You know that I ain’t braggin’ / She’s a real pussy wagon – greased lightning!”… Greased Lightning, from GREASE, 1978.) He won’t need it anymore on accounta her thoughtful crushing of his head in a hospital door.

Though we still do not know exactly what is going on (except that The Bride is out for revenge on the people who “killed” her), Tarantino has an uncanny knack of keeping his films kinetic with his gunslinger direction and eclectic soundtrack. Every element of the film works in concert to create a perception of immediacy, of wanting to be a part of this hip, cool animal; there is narration, there are flashbacks and flash-forwards; there are split frames and crafty reveals; there are Eastern musical motifs overlaid with Western rock, and suddenly–

Darwin never looked so good.

It’s ALIEN with a spectacular pair of natural knockers.

Designed by H.R. Giger – the alien species, not the knockers – a half-human, half-alien life form called Sil (Natasha Henstridge in her human form) escapes from a SETI facility and goes on a rampage fucking everyone. In the Biblical sense. And then fucking them in the Hollywood sense.

Spreading her alien seed, doing what every species on Earth has been designed to do by genetic engineering since life began, somehow she is regarded as doing something wrong. Only because she is not of the human species.

And it only confuses the issue when non-humans have such great knockers.

Specialists are called in to hunt down the alien: Michael Madsen as the Tough Guy, Alfred Molina as The Dork, Marg Helgenberger as The Hot Scientist and Forest Whitaker as The Empath, all led by Ben Kingsley The Brain.

SPECIES hangs our credibility by a thread by initially mating human DNA with alien material to spawn Sil, but we can live with that in a haze of scientific jargon and mungus ta-tas; that thread is cut when The Empath is introduced, tracking mud all over the science and jerking all over the jargon. Whitaker is only here so that the alien hunters can glean clues to Sil’s movements without hard evidence and stay hot on her hot tail. That spoils an otherwise good story centered around the most basic tenet of natural selection.

Sex.

The message at the core of SPECIES is that every living thing’s purpose is to mate; continuance for the genetic code. It’s what Marg Helgenberger aches to do with Michael Madsen all movie.

We’ve grown so inured to that mating message with all our displacement and duplicity and political correctness that when Sil asks a captive woman why she is here on Earth, the woman tearfully laments, “I don’t know!” And people don’t! They think they are here to make money, to worship false gods, to get married, work a job, buy a house, blah blah…

Writer Dennis Feldman got it right – the purpose of life is to propagate more life. And the organism in this story trying to copulate copiously is designed correctly as well – she is the most alluring thing on two gams. Genetic engineering at its best. Henstridge is so strikingly beautiful, there is nothing else onscreen when she glides past. Helgenberger is a tasty specimen herself, but in this movie, Henstridge is in a league of her own.

The message gets a little lost when the person on the team who eventually has mind-blowing, unprotected sex with Sil is The Dork. Who promptly explodes with alien bodybursting.

There’s the other message: the more beautiful the chick, the more painful the disease.

END