Kill Bill Vol. 2

Quite different from the first one. It's still quite enjoyable in it's own way, and quite thematically consistant with the first half of the film, and here's why: one of the things that really impressed me about the first one was the mechanics to the violence. The violence matched the setting. when she attacks Vernita Green at the beginning of Vol. 1 they're in California, and the violence is very American Hollywood, albeit a little bit faster paced, thought that is more a consiquence of timing, not violence. I digress. The violence is American Hollywood: not alot of blood (comparativly), lots of broken glass, alot of falling over and scrapping on the floor, and ultimately the rules of combat are discarded when Vernita pulls a gun. Then she goes to Japan to face O-Ren (even though, strictly speaking time-wise she's already killed O-Ren, but we're sticking with film order here) and the violence changes dramatically. Suddenly we have ten-foot gouts of blood, limbs being chopped off every-which-where, exotic weapons, and people flying trough the air. Where American violence drops their characters to the floor in a leveling symbol of ultimate helplessness, Asian films send their characters to the skies as a symbol of superiority. I could go on about the theory for some time, but I won't. You know the visual difference. In an american film Sofie Fatale would have died (or at least disappeared from the screen) as a consiquence of having her arm cut off. Instaed, here, she survives for another almost forty minutes of screen time. Enough said. In Vol. 2 we find ourselves following The Bride into Texas. We're now into another movie style with it's own distinct rules: the western. As another aside, I do find it qutie amusing that David Carradine is in a movie that brings these two settings, Chop Sokey and Cowboy, together seeing as he made his career with Kung Fu which was the orriginal at melding these two genres together. It really is quite a natural blending too since they fill an equivalent hole in the cultural background of their respective cultures. So, the western. While vol. 1 had some American elements but remained predominantly Asian, vol. 2 is reversed. There still are some Asian elements carried over, but the movie is predominantly a Western. One of my favorite indicators of this (though I didn't like it at first) is David Carradine's character, Bill. In vol. 1 Bill wasn't a person, he was an entity, like irony or humor; vital to the progress and feel of the movie, but not actually there. Why? Because Asian villians aren't revealed until the end of the movie when the final showdown comes, or are at least kept mysterious until then. That's why the genre change, and the subsiquent very sudden change in the quantity and quality of Bill's screen time, is a little unsettling at first: we're not at the end yet. So you have to get used to it. Vol. 1 all we ever saw were his hands, Vol. 2 we frequently see him walking around like a normal person. We even see him making a sandwich for goodness sakes. But Carradine makes the transition easy to take. So, the violence. What makes it a western? Budd takes the Bride out in one shot, right off the bat, then he buries her alive. The Capture is probably the oldest Cowboy plot out there. If we go way back to the old weekly westerns (Lone Ranger and company) there was a delicate art of the cliffhanger. The hero would be put in a certain death situation then the movie would end and be resolved the next week. Impossible situations were usually solved by starting the next week's movie with a flashback explaining how the hero is able to do what they're about to do to get out of the impossible situation. Cut from The Bride in a coffin to the cruel tutelage of Pai Mei then back to the coffin for her escape. I'm running out of steam here with my explination and this isn't an essay for a film class, so there really is nothing to hold me to finishing it. It's not like there are a whack load of people out there reading this anyway.

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