'Kill Bill': Tarantino's millennial 'Pulp Fiction'

• Tarantino makes a blood-spattered comeback

By Jack Garner
Gannett News Service

KILL BILL — VOLUME ONE (Rated R) Four Stars (Excellent) Quentin Tarantino marks his long-awaited return to the big screen with an awesome explosion of visceral energy called Kill Bill Vol. 1. It's a relentless bloodbath of sword-wielding revenge, a romp through Chinese martial arts, Japanese Yakuza flicks and spaghetti westerns, thrown together in a parade of violent action that may be unprecedented in American movies. Uma Thurman stars. Miramax, 112 minutes.

Quentin Tarantino marks his long-awaited return to the big screen with an awesome explosion of visceral energy called "Kill Bill — Vol. 1.

"Kill Bill" is a relentless bloodbath of sword-wielding revenge, a romp through Chinese martial arts, Japanese Yakuza flicks and spaghetti westerns, thrown together in a parade of violent action that may be unprecedented in American movies.

At its center is a riveting performance by Uma Thurman, who may be the most bloodied actress to ever deserve an Oscar.

After all, this lean and lovely lady makes us totally believe that she can take on a hundred or more black-clad Yakuza swordsmen and come out ahead. Now that's acting.

Thurman stars as the Bride, so-called because she starts the film flat on her back in a Mexican chapel, where she's been left for dead after taking a bullet to the head on her wedding day. Eight others are dead. After four years in a coma, she recovers — and swears revenge.

The Bride was once an assassin, and worked alongside other elite killers in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or DiVAS), headed by the mysterious Bill (David Carradine). Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu and Michael Madsen play the other killers. The Bride plans to work her way through her former associates until she can ultimately "kill Bill."

In Volume One, the Bride tackles Fox and Liu in two fabulous set pieces — leaving Hannah, Madsen and Carradine for Volume Two, due Feb. 20, 2004.

In classic Tarantino style, "Kill Bill" delivers magic from a disparate mix of often-disreputable source material, from the junk movies of the director's youth to the garage rock and spaghetti western scores found in his record collection. He brings the elements together with unbridled passion and imagination so they take on a new persona that can only be called Tarantino.

As he did in "Pulp Fiction," Tarantino often plays with the narrative time line, putting a later occurrence early in the film. But unlike "Pulp Fiction," "Kill Bill" includes little dialogue. Characters don't talk about fast-food hamburgers or foot rubs. In "Kill Bill," Tarantino emulates action genres that feature nearly silent characters.

So Tarantino fans won't be quoting "Kill Bill" lines (like they've done for years with "Pulp Fiction" dialogue).

But they'll take perverse pleasure in the new film's intense, balletic action and physical set pieces. In "Kill Bill," the sword is mightier than the pen.

Rated R for strong, bloody violence, sex, and profanity.

Tarantino makes a blood-spattered comeback

LOS ANGELES — For a while there in the 1990s, there was nothing bigger than Quentin Tarantino.

He was the most exciting thing to happen to the movies in years, maybe decades. Quentin Tarantino, the poet of pulp. Virtually inventing Miramax. Resurrecting independent film. On the TV talk-show circuit. In the gossip columns. On Broadway (well, briefly).

After the legendary success of "Pulp Fiction," Tarantino weighed in with "Jackie Brown," a charming crime caper, but not the kick in the gut audiences were expecting. When he started to fade from view in the latter part of the decade, his impact lingered, like a gritty, ironic residue. Violent movies tried to be "Tarantinoesque." Young, overnight Hollywood successes were measured against his hype. But — where were the movies? Where did he go?

Now, with "Kill Bill," the writer-director brings his signature swagger back to the screen. The epic action film was shot over the better part of a year, the crew spending four months in China, several more in Los Angeles, Tokyo, Mexico. It went vastly over budget and insanely beyond the 89-day shooting schedule, ending up at 155 days of production.

Mayhem-o-rama

It's about a tall, blond assassin (Uma Thurman) who seeks revenge on the squad of killers who beat and shot her and left her for dead, pregnant, on her wedding day. The bride — she seems to be known only as Black Mamba — is going to kill Bill, the leader of the assassins, if it's the last thing she does. But first, many body parts will be severed. Many gallons of blood will spurt — skyward, if possible, as if from a fire hydrant.

Even Tarantino says he lost track of the number of dead bodies.

The movie was so big it broke in half. Audiences won't get to see the last thing Black Mamba does until February, when Miramax releases Vol. 2, a last-minute decision by studio chief Harvey Weinstein.

In the meantime, there are questions at hand: Does Tarantino live up to the myth of his own talent? Can the filmmaker who once defined cool for his generation still find the beating heart of popular culture?

If he fails, it won't be for lack of trying. "This was my Mount Everest so far," he says. "It was an adventure. It was meant to be a journey. It was meant to be a really kick-(butt) movie, where I'd push myself and be in another place when I finished. I set it up that way. It was supposed to be a life-changing experience. And it was."

Whoever else he has become in the process, Tarantino at his core is still a filmmaker and die-hard movie fan. "This was me proving I could do that," he says. "Throwing my hat in the ring ... to prove I could do it."

Do what? "Make one of the greatest action movies ever seen."

Forty going on 15

Fans of Tarantino will be pleased to know the man hasn't changed that much. He's thickened a bit with age — he turned 40 this year — but his attitude remains reliably adolescent. In a suite at the Four Seasons hotel, where he has signed a pile of mustard-yellow promotional Puma sneakers (the kind Thurman wears in the film), Tarantino wears baggy, shredded, knee-length shorts and a loose Phat Farm polo shirt.

His hair is dark, and the famed lantern jaw has a tuft of beard in the cleft chin. His food choices still run to Eskimo Pies, Nutter Butter bars and Cap'n Crunch.

What was tough for the director wasn't the pressure of a production that went from a $39 million budget to $65 million, by conservative estimates. Or the length of the shoot. Tarantino considered all that someone else's problem.

"To me it ain't the (budget) pressure, all right?" he explains. "It's the waking up that early in the morning." Frequently he rose at 4 or 5 a.m. to be ready to shoot. In real life, he's not usually up before noon.

There were many other complicating factors.

"Shot-wise, it was about making it up every day," he says. "There was no shot list (where the camera would be positioned for each scene), no storyboards. I had it in my head, but I was keeping it in there. I was shy and precious about it. I didn't want to let it go. The crew had to charm it out of me. I gave it to them bit by bit. On a need-to-know basis."

This made for what some considered confusion and chaos on the set. Daryl Hannah, who plays one of the assassins, recalled that Tarantino would upend scenes on a dime. One weekend during the Los Angeles shoot, he saw "Jackass," the stupid-stunt movie. Inspired, he began rewriting the scene for Monday.

Scenes that normally would be shot in four or five days sometimes took a month. The elaborate central fight scene in "Kill Bill, Vol. 1," a non-stop slice-and-dice orgy featuring Thurman in yellow surrounded by dozens of black-clad killers, took six weeks to shoot.

The glory of gore

He makes no excuses for the violence that is the heart of the film. "Violence is the funnest thing you can do at the movies," Tarantino says. "It's the funnest thing to watch. I've always felt action directors come as close as you can get to pure cinema. Literature can't do it the same way. Painting. TV. None of the other art forms can do it the same way."

As for the budget, he maintains it was a bargain compared with $100 million action movies like "The Matrix" or "Charlie's Angels."

Weinstein did fly to Beijing at one point, alarmed at the overages. But he was hardly likely to punish the man about whom he says: "Miramax is the house that Quentin built." In an interview, Weinstein said the shoot was long, but not exceedingly expensive: "While it was over schedule," he said, "it was not that far over budget. Quentin Tarantino is an extremely responsible filmmaker. And we shot a lot in China, which is extremely economical." Other production executives, however, urged Tarantino: "You gotta rein this in."

Not that the director necessarily listened, said producer Lawrence Bender. "He's really going for something different here," he says. "He's going for a different paradigm."