Upon recommendation from the cinematically-informed readers of The Box, I watched the two volumes of Kill Bill this weekend. The movies were a pleasure to watch and somewhat true to life. I thought they were a real girl-power story and, of course, the dismembering and bleeding were fit.

Watching Kill Bill, I felt a most special urge to return to martial arts. I found the most pleasure in watching the Kung Fu movements of Uma Thurman during the movies and I honestly missed the old days. Other than that, I didn’t find the blood-spray trend very convincing and, while I liked the deepish dialogue, I still didn’t find that convincing either. Pulp Fiction talked to me better.

I had previously criticized action movies that feature females in leading roles because they were not rough enough and constantly strove to preserve the “pretty” image of those characters. I protested because I see it suitable that when a person gets hit, the person gets hurt, and that means pain and blood. In Kill Bill, Uma and other female actresses were stripped out of this limited view of female action figures and were portrayed as - surprise surprise! - real human beings (in a cinematic fashion, naturally).

The girl vs. girl scenes did not go away, however. There was jealousy, there was a sadistic air to female characters’ behaviour throughout the movies, and there was some floating in the air done. At this point, I am not necessarily stating that Kill Bill is similar to Charlie’s Angels, but merely drawing on the predominant themes in movies featuring female action figures.

I am not entirely sure what I expect a perfect movie to be and how precisely it would have to be for me to accept it as true to life. Maybe I’m just a difficult opinion to win over, or maybe I am too hooked up on documentaries. In any case, I wanted to thank the readers who recommended Kill Bill because vol. I and II entertained me thoroughly this weekend.

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This entry was posted on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006 at 1:49 am and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.