..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..RJ Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

April 21 , 2004

Interminable Cruelty

If there's any recurring tendency in critics I like to read, it boils down to this: You love what you love. And what you don't love? Ehhhhhhhhhhh.

David Poland's take on the unbearable lightness of Quentin Tarantino in the Hot Button pretty much parallels mine. Five years of silence and all we get is this?

"I've already got the whole mythology," Quentin Tarantino said in the April 16 Entertainment Weekly. (As well as "There's something very pretentious about a four-hour exploitation movie.")

At least those who suck down this Big Gulp are matched by a few honest voices that see only a Big Burp. Let us pit the wowed Elvis Mitchell --"It is rich, substantial and sustained, yet also greasy kids' stuff, a wrapper filled with an extra large order of chili fries, stained with ketchup, salt and cheese" against the repulsed Armond White: "Snickers of recognition that greet his references to Hong Kong action movies, TV theme music and 70s soul records are, in fact, the sounds of cultural retardation." Elvis? "Tarantino's deliciously perverse semisequel is the most voluptuous comic-book movie ever made." (Hellooooo, Harvey!)

Then again, my colleague John Anderson from Newsday hedges his bets: "It's a powerhouse movie, one that draws on a variety of cinematic tropes for its look and feel and perhaps the co-opted muscle of certain borrowed sources -- a Tarantino film wouldn't be one without at least some of his encyclopedic video-geekiness finding its way onto the screen. But at the same time, Kill Bill: Vol. 2 feels totally original."

Ah, yes, sweet tautology. And "it may even prove that Quentin Tarantino is as good a director as he has so long been purported to be."

"It may even..." Or not.

Then there's the first reviews from those allowed to weigh in early-raves from Ebert and Roeper and from trade papers Variety and Hollywood Reporter, whose usually goofy Kirk Honeycutt pours on the
goof, saying that it is "a brilliant, invigorating work, one to muse over for years to come... rigorously explores its pulp fiction for visceral truths that link culture and cinema... a movie that both
academics bundled in film theories and teenagers on hot dates will find supercool." That anyone might believe that, truly believe that, is more annoying than anything in Tarantino's opus.

Still, my experience is nowhere near the New Yorker's David Denby, who unmistakably wants to leave scorched earth and the smell of napalmed Trix in the morning: "Tarantino's ambition, however, is unmistakable: he wants to impress his obsessions on the succeeding generations. The pop encyclopedist and video-store genius has become a megalomaniac, and the exhilarating filmmaker he might have been is disappearing fast."

So many words. It's like poring over the business pages on the day a new product line's rolled out at McDonald's I'd rather read (let alone write) about a grown-up tonic or two, about the movies that have
absorbed me this month, something like the voluptuary clamminess of David Mackenzie's 1950s-Glasgow-set Young Adam, or the coiled, withholding chill of today's Russia in Andrei Zvyagintsev's The Return. The stunted interactions in modern-day Istanbul of Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Distant. Or the beautiful, wrenching descent into a child's most primal fears in a humming Italian summer in Gabriele Salvatore's I'm Not Scared. The ambiguous realizations of a young boy in 1960s Buenos Aires
in Alejandro Agresti's Valentin. Almost anything but Tarantino's chum.

It even makes me wonder what will disappoint Jonathan Rosenbaum this week.

The road to Multiplex Hell is paved with good intentions. Tarantino hopes to amuse himself and pass along his enthusiasm to an audience outside his writing room.

But more and more, I'm thinking of the megamegalo Tarantino as an advertising man, and not just one with a single client who dubs himself "Q."

Most ads are feats of appropriation. They delve into imagery in order to sell. To pick your pocket while picking the pockets of the history of visual imagery. That's given.

Years ago, I was a bad guest at a dinner party after an admission by my hostess that she had seen, loved and stolen visual notions from one of my favorite movies, as well as one of the most baroque and referential, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist (1971). Had she seen the subtitled version, which is washed out, or the better looking but badly dubbed one? "I don't know," she said, "We watched it in fast forward."

Kill Bill Vol. 2 reminded me of that uncomfortable evening, or at other moments of a late night in the company with acquaintances whose bloodstream courses with a different set of pharmaceuticals. What are these characters speaking of with such narcotized conviction?

Like the more assertive opening portion, Vol. 2 is a magpie's stockpile of purportedly cool and shiny stuff from days and nights of greedy accumulation, put together with a vocabulary purloined from many
cultures but suggestive of none of its own. There is even a scene where a little girl watches a cartoon in which two magpies sing a song about how the magpie is the farmer's best friend. (The Village Voice's Jim Hoberman notes approvingly, "Kill Bill is one wacky magnificent assemblage, and Tarantino salutes himself with a clip from what looks like a '40s Terrytone: "The magpie deserves your respect," one funny animal tells another. He does indeed. The Bride's destiny has been fulfilled, but the movie's won't be until the day Vol. 1 weds Vol. 2.")

In articles leading up to the release of the remainder of this four-hour slab of exploitation movies, he's taken great glee in citing sources for almost every frame of the film. Not extended, adapted,
elaborated upon, or infused with the whiff of life, but piled up like a big front window diorama at a one-man toy store "Q 'R' Us."

I wish Tarantino mattered to me. But I don't get it. I'll admit it. But I don't feel contempt. Only a wrung-out sensation of waste: his time, my time, and of a conscientious moviegoer's time.

The style of Vol. 2 is calmer than the first. Plodding, even. Conversations drag on. And on. The cutting pings. The cutting pongs. The opening scene between Bill (David Carradine) and The Bride (Uma Thurman), whose name is soon revealed to be "Beatrix Kiddo," is paced to abuse. (And yep, Tarantino persists in his near-Bressonian reverence for shots of feet, particular Thurman's.)

The sound mix is strange throughout, a barren track that makes dialogue as crisp as dry cornflakes. And unlike the first portion, Tarantino's alternately baroque and tin-eared verbal expectorations are rife: "I don't dodge guilt and I don't Jew out of my comeuppance," Michael Madsen says with all the conviction of an actor at a table reading.

At least David Carradine is sly in his delivery of cheese-dog lines like "He never teaches anyone the five-point-palm exploding-heart technique!" Thurman's feral performance remains the most compelling
element of the movies, with her sweaty, beat-down, lithe mongrel singularity, such as in a scene with her face, tilted slightly, camera in close, sitting by cinematographer Robert Richardson's pumpkin-golden firelight smiling familiarly at a length of Bill's Chinese-myth jumbo-sized mumbo.

The movie never took on a life for me. It seems a matter of mistaking obsession for vision, fixation for iconography. He's got an entire mythology in his head, he's told various reporters. "I consider myself
a Method writer. I am the Bride, and I started taking on little feminine tendencies during the writing process, and just like an actor you go with it," he told Entertainment Weekly. "It was great to look at
the world for [over a] year with that perspective."

While I appreciate movies that draw from the greats who came before, the game of spot-the-reference in Kill Bill Vol. 2 is more aggravating than even in lesser Scorsese efforts like Casino. Even the more obvious ones, like those arrayed by Dave Kehr in a Sunday New York Times call-out: the iconic John Ford-at-the-front-door frame, the Michael Madsen character being named Budd since he's like one of the laconic director Budd Boetticher's mournful creations.

Shouldn't a movie come alive through its own breath and wind, rather than drown under the cumulative weight of its footnotes? (Compare Kill Bill's leaden self-importance to Takeshi Kitano's furiously brilliant exploration of the storied Zatoichi blind swordsman series, due for U.S. release in June or so.)

Artists can't help but be a summary of their influences. But ideally, something new is brought to bear, something that informs life rather than a decadent manner of cinephilia.

I've always blanched at words like "buff," "flick," jargon that suggests that a love of movies is somehow inferior to a study of literature or painting.

Kill Bill is a buff's flick through-and-through.

Tarantino also avers that this movie is a love letter to his mother and to Thurman, to strong women in general. But there's so much sexual hostility even when he embraces his female characters that one fears for both his yin and his yang.

The whole enterprise eventually revolves around one little girl, wouldn't you know? In interviews, Tarantino makes an intricate case for what the vengeful child symbolizes at the start and finish of Kill Bill and at the end.

The most lasting moment for me is one of the many curtain lines given Bill, the wizened vulture who gets to sign off by calling Ms. Kiddo a particularly powerful word that has seldom sounded more pathetic: "You're my favorite person, but one in a while, you can be a real cunt."

It's a wonderful life.

Devil's "Rain"

Sometimes you think a thing's gone away, like a rash. It's gone, and so's the memory. You wouldn't want to remember everything you've ever had to scratch.

Such is the case with the movie Lana's Rain, which I'd figured would fall off the face off the earth after its February playdates in Chicago. So I never wrote about it in this space, not wanting to seem
like I had any especial antipathy toward a disaster coming from my adopted home.

But after a few uncommonly kind words posted over the weekend in these pages by my estimable colleague Gary Dretzka, I feel compelled to weigh in. I'd hate to think anyone laid down hard-earned for Lana's Rain without a few caveats.

It's bad. So bad. Not criminal, just bad. No matter the intentions of those financing and making the film over the past four years, it is misjudged in almost every manner of its making.

After a press screening, a shell-shocked colleague and I stood on the sidewalk in a brisk wind for a while, musing over why there was no indigenous Chicago narrative filmmaking to speak of. And we agreed how provincial it would be-a mercy-fuck of sorts, to be blunt-to overlook the considerable flaws of this unmemorable failure and salute it for merely having been cooked up in an adjacent ZIP code. Did either of us have any idea that the Chicago Reader would say it was "harsh but moving" and the Tribune's Michael Wilmington would see it as a "genuinely ambitious and accomplished Chicago
production."

Back home on the farm, nobody got sentimental about the newborn pup that couldn't walk straight: out came the claw hammer and POW! It's curatorial irresponsibility not to take the hammer to the listless,
brutal and stupid Lana's Rain.

But don't let my anecdote confuse you: the violence in this hollow idiocy isn't directed toward animals, but instead only toward women and any sentient being who's sitting out there in the all-but-empty house.

A preposterous, humorless sexual exploitation entry with less value than most 1970s drive-in entries, Lana's Rain has pretensions to political consequence as it ornaments itself with a genocide plot.
(It's like a mouse fart that's convinced itself that it's a mighty dragon.)

The stinking inauthenticity of this Chicago-set story of Darko, a Bosnian war criminal (Nickolai Stoilov, snarling, spitting and swearing behind a pirate's eye patch) who pimps his sister Lana (Oksana Orlenko) on South Wabash puts the "awe" into "awful."

But Orlenko, besides possessing a lovely name, widens her eyes fetchingly amid the pimping, beating and bloodying, as well as nauseating sub-Cinemax slow-motion lovemaking with a sensitive
Chinese-American sculptor (Louyoung Wang, whose flat, hapless bleating easily makes him the worst actor in a poor cast).

(A side note: the publicity for the movie notes that Orlenko took a prize at the Milan International Film Festival, whose website helpfully notes, "Nicknamed the new International Sundance of Europe, MIFF is the unparalleled combination of classic Milano style and vibrant energy of worldwide independent spirit.")

This 2000-shot production, incompetently lit, framed and edited, is simply an ornery libel on the photogenic qualities of even the most rundown corner of Chicago, as well as upon narrative competence, wit, insight and any notion of grace.

There are so many things the makers of this movie seem to know almost nothing of. For starters, what makes the characters native to their country? Funny accents, that's what!

The cupboard of characterization is bare. The filmmakers fail to provide their vacuous ciphers with a single gesture that would illuminate the culture they left behind or any insight into their inevitable discomfiture as refugees and outsiders.

It's like bad cable, except without production values. There are high and low elements to a multitude of Eastern European and former Soviet émigré communities in Chicago, but it is as if all concerned knew
nothing of them, of this city, of psychology, of what it means to live with your eyes and ears open when you walk down a street peopled with human beings. Lana's Rain is the phoniest trash in memory.

Shame on everybody.

- Email Ray Pride