Kill Bill, Vol. 1.  Dir. Quentin Tarantino.  I saw lots of beautiful shots, but I saw little substance.  I saw a lot of superficial energy, but I was not moved by the film.  An early scene is an acting tour de force by Uma Thurman.  She wakes up in a hospital bed and suddenly realizes her child is dead.  (She was pregnant when she was “killed.”)  She gives us an acting 101 exercise in grief.  Her acting throughout the film—and especially in this one shot—was the best thing about this film. But the director brazenly manipulates us in this shot, as well as in other scenes of the film that relate to sentiment.  His idea of sentiment is a version of sentimentality—oh!  What a horror!  This woman’s baby is dead!  Now I understand the depths of her rage!  Nonsense.  The film also provides a cockeyed idealization of the samurai code of honor to justify the violence, but to me the violence was present because of a baser reason: the director loves it, glories in it, glorifies it, worships it.  The violence is pure hip-hop violence, a kinky kind of let-me-throw-down-the-words f___, sh__head, b___, and other epithets and I’ll come across as cool.  But abusive language is abusive, and violence without a core of feelings is brutality—a kind of pornographic violence.  I kept thinking of films like Goodfellas and Taxi Driver and realizing that the violence in those films was anchored in culture, alienation, environment, and ideals of family.  In those films viewers could understand “why” the characters lived a violent life, and could even see how the films indicted us as participating in that violence.  But there is no such anchoring in this film.  Instead, the violence simply seduces without any judgments.  Violence is simply equated with power in this film.  And power, no matter what, has to be good!  For instance, in a key scene our heroine examines a display of samurai swords.  Her response is a hushed orgasmic awe.  To make sure we “get it,” the director repeats her reaction until it soaks in.  Gosh!  Aren’t these beautiful?  Now that scene has an analog in Taxi Driver, where Travis Bickle  responds to a .44 magnum long-barrel pistol.  The point of that scene is to make us feel what he feels, see what he sees.  The reaction shot is blank, expressionless, dead.  Scorsese wanted us to get inside the character and implicate ourselves in that lust for power.  In this film the emphasis is on the character’s reaction—and even a reaction shot seen in her reflection in the blade of the sword.  What are viewers to make of this sword-worship?  The answer is easy—that’s cool, man.  Power is cool, man. 

Although I marveled at the acting of Thurman, then, I never marveled at her character development, because there was none.  There was no real transformation of character.  She is a puppet in the hands of the director’s ideal of a post-modern hero.  Of all the scenes in this botched film, only the scene showing her fighting in the suburban household worked for me.  It was closest to the energy and kinkiness of Pulp Fiction, and it was also economical—a quick and dirty scene.  The scene also endorsed a simplistic brand of right vs. wrong.  The bad woman uses a gun and tries to take unfair advantage of the good woman.  Nasty bad woman.  She deserves to die—because she played dirty.  Too bad that her four-year-old daughter had to see it happen.  No matter.  Our heroine is untainted.  Later in the film she dispatches a brutal rapist—easy not to feel pity for him.  He’s all bad.  Then how about the guy who set the rapist on her.  Dispatch him too—this rape-revenge fantasy is so easy to get past the right vs. wrong test according to Tarantino’s world.  All these scenes pass the director’s sniff test for “justice” because he stacks the cards for the players.  The good guys get aces, the bad guys get deuces. 

 Somehow I’m supposed to see this film as a version of great Japanese samurai films.  But the director’s transference of the medium works only in the suburban scene I referred to earlier.  As soon as the plot switches to Japan, the film grinds to a halt.  The Japanese animé sequence, with blood spouting every which way, was boring.  Similarly, the scene of her revenge against the head of the Japanese underworld plodded along and showed the director’s self-congratulatory filmmaking style in spades.  In fact, much of the film’s pace plodded after the suburban scene.  Then comes the attack of the crazy 88 bodyguards.  What a joke!  As the swordplay continued, I kept thinking of that scene from one of the Indiana Jones movies—the one where Indiana is confronted by a robed Arab in the marketplace.  This giant of a man whirls one or two swords as if to terrify his soon-to-be-victim.  Indiana stares at him, shakes his head in disgust, pulls his revolver out of his belt, and plugs his adversary.  So much for swordplay.  Where was Indiana Jones when I needed him in this scene.

Then there are the balletic aspects of the action.  I presume these scenes utilized wires that supported the actors and then were digitally erased.  Again, I saw this stuff, and it meant nothing to me—because it had been done so much better in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.  The action scenes in that film were ballet.  And the scenes in that film seldom incorporated heads being chopped off, or limbs being severed, or blood pouring from wounds. 

Then the music—hard-driving, pounding beats, almost nothing that was memorable to me.  I felt like I was trapped in on a street corner where low riders kept passing by, windows open, stereos booming.  Get me out of here!  The film was all about power, and how power is sexy, and how power is all surface qualities (cute yellow truck with “shocking” language written on the back), cute outfits, great swords—all design for the sake of design.  Pick up your “Kill Bill” toys at Burger King, kids.  And then to top everything off, at the end of the film we learn a crucial bit of plot that undermines the emotional core of the film—her desire for revenge. 

Legally Blonde 2: Red, White, and Blue.  Dir. Charles Herman-Wurmfeld.  This botched project has Reese Witherspoon’s stamp all over it.  As executive producer, she must have thought that she could make a silk purse out of this film.  But she failed miserably.  After watching the first two scenes, I realized that the film was going nowhere.  Unlike the first Legally Blonde, this film failed to get me emotionally involved with the character.  In the first film Elle was naïve and sometimes clueless—but always plucky and caring.  In this version she is simply vacuous—and her sweetness and charm are oily and saccharine.  I got tired of her many costume changes—yes, she looks good in everything she wears.  That was established early—and then it was simply trotted out ad nauseum in order to cover the fact that there was really no plot to the film.  Her sudden interest in animal rights is downright silly.  She picks the topic as if thinking, “This is perfect.  Who can disagree with me?”  But the topic of animal rights is not a simplistic one—it has many nuanced meanings, and it even has its share of radicals and absolutists.  Choosing that topic was like trying to mix oil and water.  I could not believe how bad this film was.