Tag: Elvis Mitchell

Double Billed.

Well, I’ll say this much for Kill Bill, Vol. 2…it’s a vast improvement over the atrocious Vol. 1. Perhaps because, one kinetic trailer park catfight notwithstanding, Tarantino isn’t trying to be an action director this time around, the second half of this revenge tale hangs together much better than the opening act. There’s actually time devoted to character beats here, which, as QT should know, is ultimately his forte as a writer and director. As such, Michael Madsen and David Carradine in particular get a chance to bring some much-needed complexity to the wafer-thin plot around which these films are constructed.

Still, like its predecessor, Kill Bill Vol. 2 has the whiff of a vanity project. It’s obvious Quentin had the time of his life making these two films, and they definitely seem to work as a love letter to a certain subset of grindhouse and chop-socky film fans (a group which includes David Edelstein, Roger Ebert, and Elvis Mitchell.) But, frankly, I thought a lot of Vol. 2 felt sloppy and derivative. I still don’t see why this project had to be two films, particularly as, once again, there’s so many drawn-out, redundant, or unnecessary episodes on display here. What’s up with the Uma car intro? Bud’s boss? Daryl Hannah’s googlesearch notes? Bill’s ridiculously QT-like riff on Superman? The tremendously stupid pregnancy test faceoff? As I noted about the first half of Kill Bill, Jackie Brown moves languidly, but with purpose. For much of these KB flicks, which often feel more like some sub-Tarantino outing (Killing Zoe, for example) than they do Jackie or Pulp Fiction, I was just bored.

Ultimately, there’s a difference between paying fleeting homage to some film influence and constructing a four and a half hour movie that just moves lazily from homage to homage. The Good, the Bad, & the Ugly, some Wu-Tang flick, Oh, look, The Vanishing. I’m sure that I recognized less than 10% of the movies Tarantino was referencing here, and I’m sure that probably invalidates my opinion of the film in many people’s eyes. And, if QT wants to show off his film-geek cred so blatantly and the film-geeks eat it up like candy, who am I to complain? Still, I very much hope that Tarantino had to get this orgy of excess out of his system, and that he’ll now settle down and focus his considerable talents a little more narrowly, instead of jumping all over the map as he does here.

Sprockets, the Movie.


So I finally decided to make an end run around the January movie slump and catch up on some of the Oscar contenders of last year, and lo! I stumbled upon the most “Emperor has no Clothes” film experience I’ve had in a good long while. To wit, I have yet to see Amores Perros, but 21 Grams, despite pretty solid performances by its three leads, was a ridiculously ponderous and pretentious piece of work and, worse, just a flat-out dull film. It’s hard to talk about without going into major spoilers, so, if that’s a problem, I’ll leave you at this: Elvis Mitchell, who just went screaming down the Murphometer with this “film of the year” rave, owes me $10.25.

Still here? Ok, well, 21 Grams looks very nice, I’ll give it that. And the acting is universally good…poor Naomi Watts comes off rather shrill, but I don’t really blame her. That being said, Grams is a relentlessly downbeat, oh-so-sudsy soap opera for the arthouse crowd. And I do mean downbeat — there’s no joy in Mudville here. These three characters are basically stuck in the last twenty minutes of Requiem for a Dream for two and a half hours. Ok, sure, horrible things happen to good people all the time, even symbolic and portentous hit-and-runs. But the way bad mojo just piles up on these three souls throughout the movie is so deadening and ham-handed that it eventually becomes laugh-out-loud funny. (Seriously, there was a sequence near the end just after Naomi Watts wails about her child dying with (gasp) red – not blue – shoelaces on, and just before she’s simultaneously scolded by a nurse for her drug addiction and told she’s pregnant, where I finally turned on this soap opera of a film, and had to double over in convulsions to stop from breaking out into loud peals of awkward giggling.)

Yes, I know it’s horrible to titter at the tragic intertwining of a drug-addicted woman’s family wiped out in a tragic truck accident, her dying, infertile, heart-transplant lover, and the star-crossed ex-alcoholic jesus-freak recidivist who can’t hold down a job, maintain familial harmony, or drive home without Bad Stuff Happening. But, you know, it’s even worse for a film to milk grotesque amounts of tragedy to try to substitute for honest characterization or real human emotion. As I believe someone mentioned in the Slate movie club this year, it’s a wonder they didn’t bring a puppy onscreen at some point and start kicking the hell out of it.

Finally, just to add to the Sprockets-ness of the whole enterprise, the film’s narrative is completely splintered, with the story flipping back, forth, back, and forth again. For the first fifteen minutes or so, this made for an interesting viewing experience. But, by the end, (a) it adds nothing — you get to realize that there was absolutely no point in telling the film this way other than sheer artistic license — and (b) it’s detracting and distracting: you’re waiting desperately to see the two or three scenes that you know have been coming for an hour, just so the movie will end already. When these scenes finally do happen, of course, they’ve been foreshadowed for so long that they have no power left but the power to annoy.

In sum, 21 Grams was a pretty atrocious swing-and-a-miss. Sean Penn’s other movie last year, Mystic River, did a much better job of rooting tragic events in interconnected lives, mainly because it was grounded by a strong sense of place and a more realistic balance between light and dark moments. But, like its characters, this film just ambles around in its terminally depressed jag for so long that it loses any sense of perspective, and instead becomes just a vehicle for indulging the arthouse fallacy that misery is a substitute for character. By the end of this dull, implausible, flick, I had only one word on my mind: ANTS!