Kill Bill

So, yeah, there's this Bride (Uma Thurman), member of an elite team of killers called the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, whose wedding day is turned into a total massacre by her colleagues. Left for dead, she comes out of a four-year coma seeking revenge against them, and ultimately their boss, Bill (David Carradine). We know all that. But what are the Kill Bill movies actually about?

When Kill Bill Volume 1 was first released in October 2003, it opened up the old debate that Quentin Tarantino's films in general - and this one in particular - are about nothing. Which is nonsense. Volume 1 - and as I'll be covering both films in the series here, let's stick with that as a naming convention - is quite emphatically about something, and your enjoyment of it will be pretty much dependent on how long it takes you to work out what it is. For me, it came during the scene where The Bride walks into an Okinawa hostelry and listens to the owner and his sidekick arguing. It's a perfect example of kyogen, the sort of two-man comedy sketches that have been a part of Japanese life from the days of Noh theatre all the way up to The Two Beats (the standup act where Takeshi Kitano started). The scene initially seems out of place in the middle of all the hacking and slashing, but it confirms Tarantino's main theme, which is this:

Isn't Asian stuff cool?

The positive reviews of Volume 1 frequently mentioned the adrenalin buzz that runs through the film. I'd agree with that, but everyone else thinks it's down to the violence, and I think that's wrong. It's the buzz you get when you've spent years seeing South East Asian culture in the movies, and then suddenly find yourself standing in the middle of a street in Hong Kong or Shinjuku and can't quite take it all in. In the end Volume 1 doesn't really care that much about its revenge plot (except maybe during the final five seconds). It's just a structure on which Tarantino can hang a series of riffs on Chinese and Japanese things he's seen in films which he can finally experience first-hand - and try to make the audience feel as excited by them as he is. And the key to enjoying it is realising that's all it's about.

It's about the aforementioned double act, and the fact that one half of that double act is Sonny Chiba in a surprisingly sympathetic role (normally he's just a big sod that smacks people). It's about the way Kabukicho looks at night. Snow-covered Japanese gardens. That yellow jumpsuit. The anime sequence. The girl rockabilly band. The swords. And, yes, for the breathtaking last 45 minutes it's about "the sound like a wailing winter wind" that arterial spray makes. (Not too long after seeing Volume 1 I made a point of rewatching Shogun Assassin - a surprisingly prescient move, as Volume 2 was to prove several months later.) It was almost tempting to tick off the Asian pop culture cliches as they turned up in Volume 1, to try to work out what was left for Volume 2 to cover. (Which would seem to suggest that Godzilla would have a cameo in the second film, though I think the beautifully tacky model work depicting The Bride's arrival in Tokyo may be Tarantino's monster movie homage.)

Take it at that level, and you can forgive the undeniable flaws in the film. Primarily, the sequence where The Bride discovers what's been happening during her coma is a seriously ugly misjudgement of what the audience will find acceptable. (I can see why Tarantino tried to do it, as part of his schtick is being able to switch between emotional responses to a scene at lightning speed: but trying to treat the most horrific thing that happens to his lead character as black comedy is a stretch too far.) Also, there's a tendency to let scenes run too long because Tarantino wants to keep them going till the end of the music. And you could be picky and criticise the way that he steals from Japanese and Chinese influences within the same sequence like some sort of crazed Asian fusion chef. But he's taken those influences and built on them to produce something that's, for better or worse, unique. And because I think I know what he's feeling, I'm with him on this one.

Oh, and memo to the Wachowski Brothers, given that this was released in the same year as The Matrix Reloaded: that's how you do a cliffhanger.

A cliffhanger we'll leave hanging for a bit longer, because before I move onto Volume 2 we need to take another look at Volume 1, which is now available on DVD for your viewing convenience. Even in the early days of the first film's cinema release, rumours abounded that Tarantino had paid homage to one more bit of Asian culture: the myth of the Japanese Version. Anyone with an interest in genre cinema - particularly violent genre cinema - heard stories like this on a regular basis: that a Hollywood film had been re-edited by its producers to create a second version for Japanese audiences, containing footage that would apparently be too extreme for the Western filmgoer. Every few years, you'd hear about a film being treated in this way - Scream is the most recent example I can think of. But proof that these versions actually existed was always hard to come by.

Well, good news, everyone: Kill Bill Volume 1: Japan Version does, in fact, exist. And thanks to two recent developments in technology - internet shopping and DVD - we can all get to see it. (Which was presumably part of Tarantino's evil plan all along.) However, things aren't made easy for Western viewers. When you saw Volume 1 at the flicks, the scenes in Japanese were specially subtitled into English: and, of course, there's no real reason why that should be the case for a Japanese audience. So there are two subtitle streams on the DVD - English and Japanese - and by default they run for the entire duration of the movie, rather than just kicking in when you need them. There are obviously a couple of ways round this, primarily involving keeping your finger on the subs button of your remote and turning them on and off as required. For this viewing I took the less obvious option of watching the entire film in its Japanese dubbed version, with English subtitles throughout. It's surprisingly easy to get used to.

The nicest difference from the US version is in the opening title card: the Klingon proverb is replaced by a dedication to Kinji Fukasaku, the Japanese film director who died in 2003. And it's Fukasaku's Yakuza gorefests that spring to mind when you see the most notorious alteration - the change of the battle of the House Of Blue Leaves from black and white to red all over. Fukasaku tended to have one or two spurty amputations per film: Tarantino seems to be aiming for one or two per shot, continuously throughout a five minute sequence. The gore isn't really unexpected, it's just that we've never seen it in these quantities before. There are other changes to the sequence, with a few extra shots of carnage scattered throughout its length. Most subtly, The Bride's bloodstained tracky has been digitally toned down in the US version, where the bloodstains are all virtually black: in the Japanese version, they're as splendidly red as all the other claret on display. (In an interview last year, Tarantino justified this with a quote from Godard, who once said that cinema audiences aren't really afraid of blood: they're afraid of red.)

In addition, a couple of other scenes get extended by a few seconds - for example, we get a bit more of Sofie Fatale. (And a bit less too, if you know what I mean.) There are also odd editorial tweaks here and there, which have been documented elsewhere on the internet by more observant viewers than myself. Overall, it's definitely more extreme than the US cut, and would certainly get a restrictive NC-17 rating over there if it was ever released. Amusingly, though, you could probably release this in the UK with no problems at all: our 18 rating doesn't have the same stigma attached, meaning that films actually intended for adults can be shown to that audience. There's none of the explicit sexual violence that tends to be the BBFC's bugbear these days, and they tend to treat massively over-the-top gore with the sense of humour it deserves. Maybe we'll get to see it at our local Odeons eventually.

In the meantime, this DVD version is worth the import cost (see Links below for details of how to get it). Apart from everything else, even its special features are better than the ones on the US and UK DVDs. They include lots of interviews (mostly in English, of course), a lengthy making-of feature on the animated sequence, and some interesting behind the scenes footage from the House Of Blue Leaves. Plus one additional feature that seems curiously specific to its country of origin: a special menu that allows you to jump directly to the bits where The Bride kills people. Hmmm.

But that's the Japanese for you: just that little bit more over the edge, apparently. And the same applies to Kill Bill Volume 2 - which really is just called Volume 2, according to the opening title card. In Japan, this is being marketed as Kill Bill: The Love Story, with a beautifully nonsensical tagline attached to it: Kill Is Love. It's an extreme statement of the change in direction between the first film and the second - Tarantino hasn't suddenly got romcom on our asses, or anything - but the initial reaction on seeing Volume 2 is definitely one of comparative restraint. Volume 1 had the highest body count of any Tarantino film to date: Volume 2... well, the most shocking thing to many audiences may well be just how few people die in it.

We know a bit of what's coming already, thanks to the foreshadowing of the first film (and some hints dropped in the original trailers, made before the story was split into two parts). We know we'll be returning to the events of the wedding chapel on the day of the massacre. We know there are confrontations remaining with the three members of the DIVAS still standing: Budd (Michael Madsen), Elle (Daryl Hannah) and Bill himself. What we don't know is the way those confrontations will turn against expectations: in particular the last one, when we start to realise that the title might not be a foregone conclusion after all. Which is amusing, given the amount of flashforwards and foreshadowing in the two films as a whole: apart from a brief period of uncertainty in the opening chapter, we're aware in advance in most scenes that The Bride has made it through unscathed and able to continue her pursuit. It's not about the suspense of whether she'll reach her destination: it's about the interesting route she takes to get there.

As a result, this is more the followup to Jackie Brown that we might have reasonably expected from Tarantino in the last six years. That film was famously all about 'hanging out with the characters', and this is pretty much the case here. Though some critics are bitching about the lack of quotable lines here, there are some fabulous sequences involving the bad guys, the sort of thing that O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) and Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox) never quite managed to snatch for themselves in the first film because they were too busy fighting. Budd's resigned fatalism: "that woman deserves her revenge, and we deserve to die". Elle's hilarious setpiece in Budd's trailer, where for a few extraordinary seconds she appears to be channeling John Travolta. And, of course, Bill.

Sure, there are no enormous setpieces in Volume 2 - except possibly the glorious Shaw Brothers spoof of Pai Mei's training camp, possibly the only sequence in the whole four hours that requires prior knowledge of other films for maximum amusement at its epileptic zooms and intricate beardwork. (That Heroic Grace season at the NFT was better timed than we could possibly imagine - after seeing Gordon Liu suffer as a martial arts student in films like The 36th Chamber Of Shaolin, it's nice to see him in the master role, in an appearance that's as much a tribute to Chinese genre cinema as Sonny Chiba's is to Japanese.) But maybe the lack of setpieces is the point. Because Volume 2 is a vastly superior film to the first one in every aspect bar one: the fan-friendly, cool stuff aspect. And that's okay, because that's what Volume 1 was for. This may have been conceived as one complete film in its early days, but what we have here is something more interesting than one long film with an enforced interval: two distinct films that complement each other.

At some point, when the films inevitably hit the repertory circuit, I'm planning to see them both back to back in the same cinema: already it's apparent that the similarities and differences between the two will play off each other in ways we can currently only guess at. The similar structures of the two films, each with a genre-based flashback at the centre. The use of spaghetti western music in the first film: initially seeming like a throwback to the theft of those tunes in old kung fu films, now revealed as foreshadowing for the desert landscapes and operatic emotions of the second movie. Volume 1 being all about the glossy, larger-than-life legend: Volume 2 being all about the grubby, ageing, creaky reality behind it.

Some people have been down on Volume 2 because it's a very different film from Volume 1: I think that's what makes it great. And despite the differences in tone between the two films, there's always Tarantino's sensibility visible in every frame and line, ensuring this is more than just a mix tape of great moments in foreign genre cinema. And to illustrate that point: if there's a key bit of music that people will remember at the end of Volume 2, it'll be About Her - the vocal line from the Animals' She's Not There, plus a Bessie Smith sample, mashed together with hip-hop beats from producer Stephen Hague. None of whom are credited with the track on the film credit listing: because this is, apparently, the new Malcolm McLaren sound. A less charitable soul would suggest that Quentin and Malcolm have more in common than you might initially think. But not me. Being a monkey, and all.

Links

Kill Bill's official site would be the obvious place to start, but why limit yourself solely to the American one? The British effort is pretty much your standard internet movie promo, but other countries have taken a more interesting approach. The Japanese site gives you an insight into their Kill Is Love marketing strategy for Volume 2, while the Czech site has a fabulous Shockwave game in which you can take on the Crazy 88 yourself (and in full colour, too).

killbill2.net is a fan site dedicated to both films, contrary to what the URL might imply. In addition to all manner of bits and bobs, possibly the most fascinating item on display is an early draft script from the days when it was just one big movie.

The Tarantino Archive is the best fan site for overall Quentin gubbins. In the middle of all the news of the man's projects past, present and future, you may find this list of movies referenced in Kill Bill of particular interest. Although if you want to know what Tarantino's up to right now, and you're reading this before May 23rd 2004, then head to the Cannes Film Festival, where he's heading up the jury this year.

The Film Unlimited talkboards are, as ever, a hotbed of discussion for all movies, with particularly heated discussions on display for both Volume 1 and Volume 2. Parts of this piece first appeared on there, in case some of you think this all looks familiar.

YesAsia is probably one of the best sites for Asian media imports, and they've got all manner of stuff relating to Kill Bill. The key item you'll probably be interested in is that Volume 1 Japan Version - note that it's Region 2, which is great for us Brits but possibly awkward for any American readers who don't have a region-hacked DVD player. Also available is a pair of ultra-glossy souvenir brochures, magazine/book hybrids that they insist on calling 'mooks' (oh, is that what a mook is?): and a ludicrously over-priced collector's edition of Volume 1, in a presentation box with a whole pile of extra items.

Sonny Chiba has an official website. Gordon Liu hasn't.

Star Wars Kid was one of those Internet memes that drove us all nuts in 2003. A video of a 15 year old Quebec kid playing with his lightsabre ended up splooshed all over the internet, much to his embarrassment. And it was subsequently parodied and resampled by countless other people. So, lightsabre... samurai sword... you can see where this is heading, can't you?

May 16th 2004