Never Seen It #313: Kill Bill: Volume 1

It was not my intention to watch 500 movies I've never seen before in front of you. For that I'm sorry. But you can take my word for it, your blog had it comin'. When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I'll be waiting.

Kill Bill: Volume 1

2003

Quentin Tarantino

Zoom: May 26, 2026, 9 PM to 10 PM

Participants: Batts, Bobby M., Brianna, Frank, Joe, Sam, Sean E., Sunny

Quentin Tarantino is the only director on the Film Club list that is cognizant of Film Club's existence. Or was, at least, for a brief moment, while he was ordering his coffee in a coffee shop in Israel, as served by Film Club member Zach. Tarantino was not present at the Zoom.

We did talk about Quentin Tarantino as a person, though, probably more so than we usually do with directors of the films we cover in Zoom discussions. How he's, at best, flawed as a human, at worst unoriginal as a filmmaker, the truth somewhere in between these poles, and also the connection to Harvey Weinstein.

A subject that we probably didn't discuss as much as was warranted was the idea of sexual violence being gratuitous in film. How maybe each member of the audience has their own tolerance level, how some directors are more wanton than others with the subject matter, how it's tough to discern the director's intentions when the subject itself can be so traumatizing. Things get even murkier here than they did in, say, Blue Velvet, because of how the violence bends toward the real world and behind the scenes: Harvey Weinstein, a producer, sexually assaulted Uma Thurman, the star of the movie that glorifies the idea of revenge against your abuser.

Here are some other things we discussed, most of them less tangled or complicated than the Weinstein of it all.

• Most people acknowledged that it was fun, but there was some trepidation around saying that an action movie was good, because action movies typically eschew character building or rich plot
• Was the world building within the genre that the movie was taking on?
• David Carradine, who plays Bill here, starred in a TV show called Kung Fu (his appearance here was intended as a surprise for audiences)
• Many of the Tarantino tropes appear here, including snappy dialogue, time juggling, cheesy line readings (cheesy on purpose)
• "Tarantino's flaw [in Inglourious Basterds] is that he assumes Holocaust victims would want to do to nazis what nazis did to Holocaust victims."
• Does this makes sense as one movie or two? In other words, is it bifurcated or episodic?
• Foot fetish.....
• Is Tarantino an influential filmmaker / why he is so hard to copy
• Were scenes taking wholesale from other movies and does that matter?
• RZA's involvement in the score—based on Wu-Tang's already established love of kung fu films?
• Does it build suspense or kill it to mix up the chronology?
• "Audiences don't appreciate the illusion, they appreciate the technique."
• What would Vol. 3 look like?
• Where does this fall in the ranking of Tarantino films?

We didn't talk much about:

• How realistic the groans of the dying martial arts dudes were, and how that seemed like a good twist on how this would typically happen, where they would die and basically disappear
• There must have been so many references to martial arts films that I missed
• I appreciated some unique camera shots, e.g. when a dude gets hit with an ax and falls backward and the camera follows the ax
• There was a lot of humor, like when the Bride spanks the teenager with a sword
• "If on your journey you encounter god, god will be cut!"
• Reason for beeping out the main characters name for most of both movies?

And finally, a thought that I originally had but then maybe thought was too cliché or shallow to bring up during the Zoom. There were a couple people who didn't want to watch the film because they thought it was going to be too bloody or gory. They were right, but it also got me thinking about how we view movies, and how we depend on the knowledge of movies being fiction to put up an emotional wall between us and the film sometimes. But not everyone likes doing this! I had a friend one time who couldn't watch Mrs. Doubtfire because she was recently divorced. Sometimes the pain cuts too close.

What did you think of Kill Bill Volume 1 overall? I'd give it a 4 pukes out of 5, for creativity and fun. What say you? Lots to discuss, let's hash it out in the comments.

(NEXT TIME: Our second month's first small group pick is Akira!)