2003-10-12 - 5:53 p.m.
Well, there I go again buggering off on all of you. Humble apologies. I'm not always very good at this "updating" my "website," um, "thing."Friday evening Palinode and I stepped out to see Kill Bill Vol. 1, the ridiculously violent exploitation-meets-grindhouse-kung-fu-flick-meets-spaghetti-western-meets-70s-cop-TV bloodbath that marks Quentin Tarantino's return to the world of filmmaking. It was great -- I hate to admit it, as I've made no secret of my dislike for Tarantino's films so far, but then again this is no ordinary Tarantino film. Drained of all lah-de-dah cineast pretention, this film is nothing but spirited revelry in gore, violence, cheese, gore, outlandish characters and, well, gore. And because it completely refuses to take itself seriously, because it casts aside all fear of going too far, because it comes off as the work of a director who has gotten over twitty self-honour and simply wants to enjoy himself, it's actually very entertaining.
And gory.
The film's violence, incidentally, is so absurd that it actually serves as material for fairly consistent humour. You find yourself laughing not out of nervous tension but because you sometimes simply cannot believe the lengths the film goes to. Limbs fly in all directions, trailed by spurts of ludicrously profuse blood.
This is not the noble score-settling of something like Ridley Scott's Gladiator; it's a raging action hero stuck on the idee fixe of bloody Shakespearean revenge that reminds me more of Mel Gibson's character in the underrated Payback. Tarantino is determined to be over the top in every regard, trowelling on thick layers of wry cheese-tribute camp as his caricatures drift from samurai sword-slinging to tasteless humour, from spaghetti-western tough-guy posturing to slick anime impressionism. Everything seems effortless, at once absurdly exaggerated and strangely scaled-down; there's relatively little in the way of silly wire-fu theatrics -- just silly violence. There's none of the CGI sorcery that produced the palpably artificial one-man-against-an-army battle royale of The Matrix Reloaded -- just a girl in leather with a sword, numberless* Kato-masked assailants, and gallons and gallons and gallons of syrupy movie blood.
See it by all means but, um, have lunch first.
In other news, Palinode and Schmutzie have gone to Saskatoon for the long weekend, and I have offered to see to it that their young pet rabbit, Gordon, has a full dish of food and something like human contact for the days they're gone.
The dish has been kept full, I've been invited to raid their bookshelf (and have done -- in about 25 hours, alongside working, sleeping, and miscellaneous other activities, I've devoured 230 pages of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity, a very engaging and funny novel that makes the what-I-thought-was-good film it inspired look sort of, well, malnourished) and as an added bonus I've learned a lesson about myself that I might not have discovered in a thousand years were these precise circumstances never to appear: I am not at my most suave when I am standing in a friend's living room trying to make small-talk with a nervous rabbit.
Gordon thrives, I'm told, on being spoken to, and I'm happy to help out, but I'm finding myself quite surprisingly at a loss for good things to say to him. He's a charming and adorable beast to be sure, but he's a bit socially unapproachable on account of being The Most Nervous Living Thing on Earth. So apart from your standard "howyadoin' Gordon" (followed by him freaking out and doing spitfire cagelaps in a chest-pounding frenzy) and a little restrained coo-ing here and there (babies and cute furry things, we seem determined to believe, enjoy the same simple-minded imbecility from us), I've pretty much cast off conversing with him in favour of soliloquizing in his presence. That the notion of talking to myself about whatever springs to mind to soothe a rabbit is less awkward and bizarre than talking straight to him is, I think, to be filed with all other unaccountable and irrational human deeds, right between avoiding stepping on sidewalk cracks and viewing movies with Britney Spears in them.
