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" FOR A FLICK THAT NOT ONLY opened at number one but also looked all set to provoke a king-sized media tantrum about its bloodiness, Quentin Tarantino&amp;#039;s Kill Bill--Vol. 1 ended up as a curious kind of nonevent. In chastened hindsight, The New Republic&amp;#039;s Gregg Easterbrook--who astounded his colleagues with an online rant against Miramax&amp;#039;s greedy Jews for cashing in on Tarantino&amp;#039;s gore spree--probably has more than one reason to rue his misjudgment. It&amp;#039;s got to be embarrassing to vent your latent anti-Semitism over a movie that wasn&amp;#039;t even that big a hit.  Not that Kill Bill flopped; far from it. Among last fall&amp;#039;s movies about Yanks in Japan--fun category, no?--it undoubtedly sold more tickets than Lost in Translation while getting better reviews than The Last Samurai. The public reaction, though, was a massive ho hum. Weeks into the movie&amp;#039;s run, friends I&amp;#039;d expected to be in the tank for Quentin on opening weekend were still sheepishly admitting that they hadn&amp;#039;t gotten around to seeing it. This has to be making Miramax&amp;#039;s Harvey Weinstein, who induced Tarantino to split his four-hour revenge epic in two for easier consumption, jittery about this month&amp;#039;s Vol. 2. Whatever Easterbrook thinks, Weinstein&amp;#039;s fondness for moolah is a lot less idiosyncratic among studio heads than his passion to be king of the powerhouse art flicks. When Oscars aren&amp;#039;t in the offing, he&amp;#039;ll settle for classy buzz. But that&amp;#039;s what Kill Bill didn&amp;#039;t provoke--no bandwagon pieces in the sophisto press, no drooling minutiae-fests among online cultists. If Quentin Tarantino can&amp;#039;t stimulate buzz, what good is he to Harvey? After six years when Q. T.&amp;#039;s imitators had the screen to themselves, Kill Bill was supposed to be the Tarantino picture to beat the band: not just a spectacular martial-arts send-up/tribute from junk cinema&amp;#039;s ultimate fannish boy, but the flashy return of a filmmaker who spent the early &amp;#039;90s as the auteur theory&amp;#039;s Madonna. Me, I was looking forward to Kill Bill the way I would to being trapped in Sean Hannity&amp;#039;s library. Unlike the under-30 cinemaniacs who talk about Tarantino&amp;#039;s best-known movie as if it&amp;#039;s their Citizen Kane, I&amp;#039;d always thought that 1994&amp;#039;s Pulp Fiction was a self-indulgent letdown after the startling authority of Reservoir Dogs. Three years later, Jackie Brown left me sitting on the fence, and during his long hiatus, I didn&amp;#039;t miss him much. So you could have knocked me over with a feather when I came out of Kill Bill raving about it to anyone who&amp;#039;d listen. I didn&amp;#039;t flip for the movie because I&amp;#039;m partial to Tarantino&amp;#039;s sources. I know why Hong Kong action pictures turn him on, as they did plenty of &amp;#039;70s seekers of &amp;quot;pure&amp;quot;--i.e., basic--cinema. But one reason that stuff&amp;#039;s basic is that it&amp;#039;s so cheesy, and you know what? Life&amp;#039;s too short.  Even so, Kill Bill entranced me for essentially the same reason it disgusted The New Yorker&amp;#039;s David Denby. Violence isn&amp;#039;t the movie&amp;#039;s subject but its element: a self-contained universe, just like art deco was for Fred and Ginger. You&amp;#039;d think it would be obvious that any film this into dousing audiences with not just blood but mood blood--three different hues, says Tarantino, each with its own connotation--owes more to The Wizard of Oz than to Peckinpah. It&amp;#039;s just that Uma Thurman as the Bride--Tarantino&amp;#039;s track-suited, sword-wielding answer to Dorothy--spends the movie hunting down and killing the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion for wronging her. What exasperates humanists like Denby about Tarantino isn&amp;#039;t just that he&amp;#039;s compulsively waggish about things that actually move him. What moves him baffles them, too, because he&amp;#039;s a romantic about pop puerilities it wouldn&amp;#039;t occur to them (or me) to romanticize. His imagination is so movie-ruled that turning characters into stereotypes is his idea of aggrandizing them. But his real passion is charging up cartoon behavior with the emotional veracity that his own response to it proves to him it deserves. The main difference between him and other genre-happy, meta-referential moviemakers is that the crud in his head means so much more to him. Since his sensibility also insists it&amp;#039;s all connected, he&amp;#039;s happiest when he can get his totems to play musical chairs. Mostly thanks to Pam Grier&amp;#039;s presence, Jackie Brown is always described as Tarantino&amp;#039;s homage to blaxploitation movies, something its action doesn&amp;#039;t really bear out. But Jackie Brown plainly cleared the decks for Kill Bill&amp;#039;s swerve into complete fantasy. JB also hatched the fascination with goddesslike women that pays off in Uma Thurman&amp;#039;s Bride. While Kill Bill is more genuinely a kung fu tribute than its predecessor was blaxploitation redux, its real subject is the vicarious love affair between Thurman&amp;#039;s physique and Tarantino&amp;#039;s camera. Every hypnotized shot of her celebrates the director&amp;#039;s adoration of his star as woman warrior, visual icon, and female principle with an ax to grind. And as usual with Quentin, this monomania has a cinematic pedigree; as Tarantino himself has eagerly explained, his Uma fetish most resembles Josef von Sternberg&amp;#039;s for Marlene Dietrich, whose seven films with von Sternberg rank up with the glories of movies not least because they&amp;#039;re so gaga. Wondrously gaga, maybe profoundly gaga--but gaga. Kill Bill just swaps painting with blood for von Sternberg&amp;#039;s equally delirious shadows and light. It&amp;#039;s typical of Tarantino to spell out the parallel, but he can&amp;#039;t be oblivious to the connotations. A big part of why the von Sternberg/Dietrich collaborations have stayed mesmerizing is that, on his end, they were awesomely masochistic. True, torment doesn&amp;#039;t seem to be Quentin&amp;#039;s bag; he&amp;#039;s too gleeful. But no other director&amp;#039;s use of violence, in his characters&amp;#039; motormouthed verbal brutalities no less than their behavior, has always been so blatantly recognizable as sublimated sex. On the rare occasions when he does deal with sex, he turns it into--surprise, surprise--sublimated violence, which is why &amp;quot;My name is Buck, and I&amp;#039;m here to fuck&amp;quot; is Kill Bill&amp;#039;s most quotable quote. Yet one reason the movie transcends the cliches of the empowered-martial-arts-heroine genre, which isn&amp;#039;t easy to freshen up after a decade of Lara Croft and Buffy, is that Tarantino clearly thinks female empowerment is a tautology. He wants to gaze on a goddess while she smites her enemies, and you suspect he wouldn&amp;#039;t give a damn if she were in the wrong. Because it&amp;#039;s so stylized, Kill Bill gives short shrift to Tarantino&amp;#039;s signature dialogue move: the convoluted diatribes that make his characters sound as if they&amp;#039;re hunting for nonexistent needles in a pop-culture haystack. But that omission just allows us to goggle at his visual command. The movie&amp;#039;s best effect is the surprise switch to black and white during the climactic donnybrook at the House of Blue Leaves, which on one level is an indefensible trick; we know Tarantino&amp;#039;s just jazzing things up so Thurman&amp;#039;s abattoir bit won&amp;#039;t get samey. Yet the shift in palette is haunting, because what it conveys is loneliness. We&amp;#039;re seeing the situation as starkly as the Bride does, and it&amp;#039;s the only time we grasp that--unlike the director--she doesn&amp;#039;t think she&amp;#039;s invulnerable. It&amp;#039;s impossible to be moved by such moments unless you&amp;#039;ve accepted the movie&amp;#039;s terms. Since Tarantino&amp;#039;s MO takes comic-book violence not only further but deeper than legions of others have managed, Kill Bill is as much an apotheosis of American filmmaking&amp;#039;s sensational, fantastically nihilistic side as Mystic River is of its equally fertile streak of understated naturalism. Yet Mystic River not only starts from a secretly corny premise--isn&amp;#039;t it time Hollywood declared a moratorium on abused childhoods as plot motivators?--it veers at the end into American naturalism&amp;#039;s standard vice, which is melodrama. Tarantino&amp;#039;s movie, by contrast, never falters. They&amp;#039;re both impressive, but guess which one&amp;#039;s the art film? "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a1729/esq0204-feb-movies/>