Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (2004)

Unrated, but that's because it was two R-rated movies combined into one film.  Also, Tarantino was less restricted for some of the minor things that kept the original theatrical Kill Bills (Kills Bill?) from being NC-17.  Before I write out the litany of things that make this movie incredibly offensive, know that the worst part is that it is all exploitative.  Okay, we got all the violence, gore, and death in the world, all on screen.  We have rape.  We have language.  We have just vulgarity of all kinds.  It's meant to push the limits.  Still, unrated.

DIRECTOR:  Quentin Tarantino

This is my red flag movie.

For a hot second, I thought that I was going to get away with not having watched the combined The Whole Bloody Affair.  I think Tarantino is a scumbag human being.  Golly, I do not care for this man.  I tend to be on the team of "tie art to the artist."  And it's not like Tarantino is the worst of them.  Like, he's just a jerk.  He's a jerk who is convinced that he gets  a pass to do a bunch of awful things, but nothing that is full on criminal.  At least, as far as I know.  

(I'd like to put a behind the scenes footnote here.  I have been trying to write this blog for a while now.  I keep trying to start and I keep getting interrupted.  My goal here is to write faster than imaginable.  If I lose any sense of coherence, it's because I need to get this blog done and then another blog immediately after it done.  I don't know if I have the mental RAM to get that done, but I'm going to try my best.)

The thing that bugs me about Tarantino isn't the fact that he's a fanboy.  Most of the cinephiles I know tend to point out that he has made a career off of copying other people's works.  There's actually a long history in filmmaking entirely based on copying what other people have done.  Heck, the nouvelle vague probably wouldn't have been a thing had filmmakers been concerned with being wholly original in their visual language.  I think Tarantino has always been a copycat, but it actually might be one of the more endearing things about him.  He's watched a lot of movies.  He loves movies.  When he's filling his movies full of homage, it's honestly because he loves what other people have presented before him.  He doesn't seem to hide behind others' works because he wants you to watch the source material that he's borrowing from.  When I watch him borrow, it's a kid playing with action figures, only incredibly well.  Like, I hate to say it because it seems blasphemous, but he often does the thing he's stealing from better than the source work.  

Kill Bill was the movie(s) that won me over to Tarantino because the movie is incredibly fun.  Like, start to very-long finish, Kill Bill is incredibly entertaining.  Should it be two movies?  I will talk about that in a bit.  I think so, but I'm also not completely sold on that.  But the story of The Bride carving her way through her vengeance scorecard, out-of-order nonetheless, is super engaging.  Yes, like I mentioned, Tarantino is borrowing when he's telling this story.  He's doing his own Lady Snowblood, but I don't even mind a bit.  As a guy who likes Lady Snowblood, I have to say that Kill Bill has more fun with the script here than Lady Snowblood did.  I often hate when people try to be cool and (I'm going to be brutal here) Tarantino himself is painfully uncool.  But his art is cool.  I don't know what makes it better than a lot of its mimics.  There have been so many movies where I've damned the film for trying to achieve a level of cool that Tarantino just imbues his films with.  But I'll tell you what:  These movies are cool.

Let's just say it's a fine line coupled with the fact that I'm often a hypocrite when it comes to stuff like this. 

One of the biggest frustrations of the Star Wars sequels is that JJ Abrams set up a mystery that needed to be solved only to offer a substandard, non-answer at the end of the franchise.  I'm a guy who likes the sequels.  I don't love them, but I have a good time with them.  But I do think that not coming up with a great answer to "Who are Rey's parents?" is a disappointing one.  Tarantino, for the first 70% of the movie, plants a mystery:  "What is the Bride's name?"  She's this epic mythic character of vengeance, named after her outfit when she cheated death.  She's also the Black Mamba and that's just a bit of cool.  But when the film has people say the name "Beatrix Kiddo", Tarantino bleeps the name out.  

Until he doesn't.

Why does that non-answer work when Rey Palpatine or Rey Skywalker doesn't?  Part of it is the notion of humanizing The Bride.  Tarantino knows that to make Kill Bill work, you need to be over-the-top from moment one.  We start the film with Kiddo getting the inciting bullet through the head and then transitioning immediately into the Vivica Fox fight.  (I had to look up "Vernita Green."  Now I know.)  But when we have the Vertina Green fight, it's exclusively about showing what the Bride is capable of.  Out of the gate, we know that the Bride is fallible and has rules.  She's an incredible fighter, but she's also hesitant to kill a mother in front of her daughter.  She's able to hold conversations, but she refuses to be bullied into mercy.  For the first seventy percent of the film, she is the Bride, more of a force of nature than anything else.  But the closer that she gets to Bill and the more that we learn about the Bride --both through direct and indirect characterization --we discover that Beatrix Kiddo is in there.  Yes, the name is almost arbitrary.  It makes it fun that Bill's nickname of "Kiddo" actually isn't a nickname, but a loving way to say her real name.  By the end, despite the sheer body count that she leaves in her wake, she seems way more human.  When she is confronted by the realization that her daughter is alive, we see a woman who has gone through it and may hesitate when she's right at the finish line.  When she sits down with Bill, despite the absolutely toxic trappings of Bill's world, it really does feel like she still loves him.  This is the better Harley / Joker dynamic, by the way.  Both incredibly toxic.  It just feels like the Bill / Beatrix one is more realistic.  (As silly as Kill Bill is.) 

Do you know what I realized with this viewing?  I've seen this movie a dozen times, but it's been a really long time since I watched any version of it.  I think I probably had this epiphany back-in-the-day, but it hit harder this time.  O-Ren Ishii almost feels like the big bad of the story.  Yes, she's the conclusion the original Volume I.  She's also the first kill that Beatrix has after waking up.  Okay.  Cool.  But the other members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad barely get any kind of lead up and O-Ren Ishii has the majority of Volume I devoted to her origin story and taking her own.  I give props to Tarantino for playing with the chronology of the film because it makes sense that the Bride would want to take the most dangerous of the members out first.  But if we saw that first, the movie exists in a state of anticlimax.  But this is almost a movie that should be called Kill O-Ren because Tarantino really wanted to make a movie about Japanese swordplay in Japan.

It's actually because of this that makes me want to watch these movies split into two parts.  I told you I would get to this.  I'm not completely sold on my opinion, but the tone really does shift between Volume I and Volume II.  I know.  Tarantino swears that he made it as a Whole Bloody Affair, but golly if there is a different vibe from the first half of the movie and the second half of the movie.  I'm glad both volumes exist.  It's not like I want this to be the Kill O-Ren movie.  I like that we have this long, deliberate set of challenges that The Bride has to make her way through.  (Also, I've always adored Volume I way more than Volume II.)  But when Miramax said, "Split them", I kind of like it better.

It's not to say that there's anything wrong with The Whole Bloody Affair.  Thank God I read up on the rights issues that came with why it took so long for us to see The Whole Bloody Affair.  I actually thought it was a bit silly that it took us this long to see this version because it is incredibly similar to the original two part version, minus the "Previously on" car sequence.  Now that I know it has been in the can for a long time and that most of the problems came with rights, I can appreciate seeing The Whole Bloody Affair way after the fact.  But I don't love the one change.  I mean, I should.  

The only real changes in the movie are the Previously on (as previously mentioned, ironically enough), the tease that BB is alive, and a new anime sequence --no shock! --involved with O-Ren's origins.  Listen, I originally loved the anime sequence in the original theatrical release of Volume I.  But O-Ren going after a lieutenant completely seems arbitrary to telling O-Ren's origin.  Outside of giving Tarantino something else to be vulgar about, let's pretend that the sequence added something to the story.  That sequence is so over-the-top is seems like it is breaking its own rules. In the sequence, O-Ren accidentally unloads her supply of grenades inside an elevator as the lieutenant grabs onto her ankle.  Now, there's this horror in young O-Ren's eyes that she's going to die.  The grenades weren't supposed to be unloaded in the elevator and she can't get away.  The explosion is astronomical.  After all, all of her grenades exploded simultaenously.  But instead, both O-Ren and the lieutenant are unharmed.  The big threat is now that the elevator no longer exists.  That's...silly?  Like, she was afraid that she was going to get blown up.  Let's not pretend that she was afraid of the lieutenant holding her down.  It's the same problem with Charlie's Angels.  Sometimes, there's so much plot armor that we don't know what the rules of death are anymore.

But if I'm preaching why I like this movie so much, I should mention that it really bugs me how gross Tarantino is in this movie.  There's a lot here that might be used better given another director.  After all, if you distill the marrow of Kill Bill, it is about a mother who takes back power from the godlike patriarch who stole it from her.  Cool.  You can absolutely look at the movie like that. But Tarantino is so exploitative that it never feels like this is a win for women.  Let's look at Buck.  We've seen in movies where a woman is about to be raped by a creep when she turns the tables on him.  In this, The Bride destroys the two men before they can do anything to her.  But that's not actually true.  We find out that Buck has been raping Beatrix for two years and it really is treated as an afterthought.  That moment colors what the rest of the film looks like.  Instead of being the story of a self-actualized woman, it become often about a hot lady dispatching a bunch of people because it's cool.  I don't know.  It bugs me a bit.

Still, I started by saying that this was my red flag movie.  I may not advertise how much I love this movie because I'm filled with a bit of shame. But I can't deny that I really like the movie.  Tastes are tastes.