How did O-Ren rise to the top of the Tokyo underworld? Tarantino tells her back story in an anime sequence of startling vividness. Hattori makes the Bride a sword to take on O-Ren Ishii and her black-suited yakuzas. The story hopscotches from Pasadena, California, where the Bride confronts Vernita at home, to Okinawa, where she finds ninja Hattori Hanzo, played by the great Sonny Chiba, who did the same role in the Japanese TV series Shadow Warriors. That’s the setup for Tarantino to film each scene in a different style (cinematographer Robert Richardson and editor Sally Menke both work miracles) that may reference Kinji Fukasaku’s Battles Without Honor and Humanity or, for all I know, home movies from Tarantino’s crazy cousin. Sure it’s more fun if you get the references, but Tarantino knows how to grab you hard. And what if you don’t know the Shaw brothers from the Olsen twins? No sweat. Tarantino sets the mood with a faded logo, complete with scratchy sound, announcing our feature presentation, to be shown in shaw scope, a homage to the Shaw brothers, the Chinese producers of 1970s epics such as Death Kick. In Kill Bill, Tarantino brings delicious sin back to movies - the thrill you get from something down, dirty and dangerous. Tarantino has the talent to show us what’s sacred about the profane, even if you didn’t enjoy a misspent youth in seedy theaters with floors sticky from God knows what. No use hammering Tarantino for raiding the lost ark of 1970s pop culture when his movie is killingly funny, wildly inventive, bloody as a gushing artery and heart-stoppingly beautiful. Everything that makes Tarantino tumescent - kung-fu fighting, samurai flicks, spaghetti westerns and babe-on-babe head bashing, preferably with swords - is stuffed into the 110 minutes of Vol. Kill Bill is an act of indecent exposure. Some people may want to kill him for it, and not just because they’ll have to pay again to see Vol. Like a dick-swinging flasher, Quentin Tarantino lets all his obsessions hang out in Kill Bill: Vol.
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