Kill Bill volume 1 Buena Vista Home entertainment     Reviewed by Tony Buchsbaum	I saw Quentin Tarantino's first film, Reservoir Dogs, and just hated it. The scene toward the end, when the guy's ear is cut off, took me to a place I just didn't want to go. Pulp Fiction, Tarantino's second film, blew me away in precisely the way that Reservoir Dogs didn't. It was brash. Smart. Violent. Driven by character and plot. In short, I gave a damn about these people and their story. There was something undeniably magnetic about it, about seeing John Travolta and Uma Thurman's dance in the restaurant. The movie was serious business, but it didn't take itself seriously. Jackie Brown came and went before I had a chance to see it. Two kids. Busy life. What can I say? And then there was Kill Bill. I am completely unable to tell you what moved me to want to see it. Maybe the name itself; such simplicity, such poetry. In just two words, it outlined a mission I could understand right away. As long as the movie avoided torture, I'd be fine with it. To tell the truth, I knew I'd love it the moment the trailer unspooled at my local 24-plex, as the hard-hitting music of Tomoyasu Hotei filled the speakers. Kill Bill, as it turns out, is a smart, sexy thriller. A seriously killer thriller about love, vengeance, and righteousness. It's about family. It's about Hong Kong action films. It's about music. From the moment it begins, with all its bombast and filmic art, you're hooked. There's been a massacre at a small chapel in Texas. The guests, the pastor and the bride herself have all been beaten senseless and shot to death. Only the bride isn't dead. She's in a coma that lasts for the next five years. And when she wakes, her pregnancy terminated, she knows she has to get revenge for what Bill and his compadres did to her. Who is Bill? What's all this about? In some ways -- in many ways -- it doesn't matter. What matters is that the Bride (played to arch perfection by Uma Thurman) is pissed, and rightfully so. And she's going to get her revenge on Bill and the others who ruined her perfect day. Thus begins a film that has more energy, more inventive juxtapositions of film history, more artfully playful filmmaking than any film I've seen in recent years. It's one thing to tell a story well. We can all list directors who tell stories well, whose personal style draws us into their stories: Spielberg, Hitchcock, DePalma, Scorsese, Altman. But there's no one like Tarantino, who seems to have come into his own now. I can almost imagine him in his own personal film reference library at home. He's standing in the middle, and no one source, no one inspiration, is more than an arm's length away. He stands there, slowly turning, the story he's telling in his head. And when, as he turns, something catches his eye, he stops and wonders: "What if…?" What if the Bride's story could be told in the style of a samurai film? Or as a Hong Kong action flick? Or as a strange sort of western? What if part of it was animated? What if the violence could be raised to the art of dance, so that it's no less violent but somehow actually beautiful? What if its distastefulness could be replaced with sweetness? To me, these are the questions that inform Kill Bill. With all his artistry, all his tongue-in-cheekiness, this is Quentin Tarantino having his way with us, knowing all along that we trust him to provoke us and entertain us like no other. I mentioned the violence. Kill Bill is violent. It's violent to the nth degree. But it doesn't come across that way as you're watching it. All those samurai swords slicing and dicing through crowds of bad guys, limbs flying in every direction, blood arcing through awful fountains -- and yet, the feeling of nonviolence? Yes. Let's take a moment to look at the second Matrix movie. So much fighting, and yet so little of it makes any sense within the film's own context. For example, we know that Neo can fly, so why does he bother fighting 100 Agent Smiths? He can fly away -- and does, after 15 pointless minutes of fighting. And all that martial arts? To me, it looked choreographed to within an inch of its life. I didn't believe for one moment that anyone was in any danger whatsoever -- and shouldn't you? I mean, isn't that the point? Neo was no threat to Smith, and Smith was about as much a threat to Neo as Fred Astaire was to Ginger Rogers. But in Kill Bill, the violence means something. It hurts, yes, but it makes sense. It's there because there is no other possible solution for the Bride. She must kick ass. And she must wield her sword to do so. She must slice and dice. And somehow, her elation and her feelings of retribution more than balance the awful reality of whatever harm she's caused. Her life has been ripped to pieces, her fetus ripped from its womb, and the payback is loss of limb, loss of life, loss of everything that stands in her way. The Kill Bill Volume 1 DVD is terrific. There are few extras, most notably a short making-of documentary. But no matter. Kill Bill Volume 2, which completes the tale of the Bride and her madcap road trip of revenge, hit theaters just as the DVD was released. I'm certain that at some point the two films will be assembled into one, with all the extras one could hope for. Until then, the first film's DVD will have to do. There's endless fun in just watching scenes, taking them apart, tracing their inspiration and lineage. In many ways, Kill Bill is a massive assemblage of Tarantino's own movie history, a globally influenced pop-culture puzzle that so much wants you to unravel it. Once the two films have been seen -- and perhaps even seen as one -- will we know if Tarantino's film, as much as it's about history, can also make history. | May 2004   Tony Buchsbaum is the author of Total Eclipse. At night he works on another novel and a screenplay. Days, he writes advertising copy in Lawrenceville, NJ, where he lives with his wife and sons.	Kill Bill, as it turns out, is a smart, sexy thriller. A seriously killer thriller about love, vengeance, and righteousness. It's about family. It's about Hong Kong action films. It's about music.