Thinking Out Loud

Tag: 2004

  • Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is a glorified double feature

    Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair is a glorified double feature

    My simplistic take on the mini-controversy over Quentin Tarantino casually bad-mouthing Paul Dano: he still talks about movies like a fan, not a professional. Pithy dismissals, sweeping generalizations, and professions of binary love or hate are for movie buffs on Letterboxd, but are uncouth coming from a working filmmaker. See also Paul Schrader’s often blunt hot takes.

    All this preamble is to cushion these half-formed thoughts:

    I thought I had sentimental fondness for the two Kills Bill from back in the day, but watching them again in the theater, back-to-back in this form, really tried my patience. Even if the original artistic intent was a single four-hour film, the Whole Bloody Affair version strikes me as just fancy marketing speak for a double feature. I don’t think there was some great injustice done by releasing it in two halves in 2003 and 2004.

    I was also newly irritated by the mannered dialogue, which once sounded fun and fresh, but now sounds like baby talk from Juno, Ned Flanders, or Jay & Silent Bob: skip diddly doo homeskillet, snoochie boochies, silly rabbit Trix are for kids, etc.

    It really stood out to me in this rewatch how much work the music is doing. Biggest example: imagine the entrance of O-Ren Ishii without Tomoyasu Hotei’s thunderous “Battle Without Honor or Humanity”, which was directly quoted from another movie soundtrack, only a few years old at that point. Younger fans may not remember that a big driver of Tarantino’s earlier films’ success was their best-selling CD compilation soundtracks. The mixtapes of their day.

  • Brad Bird Steals His Own Movie in Pixar’s The Incredibles

    Brad Bird Steals His Own Movie in Pixar’s The Incredibles

    Like writer/director Brad Bird’s Ratatouille, The Incredibles is a virtually perfect movie. Bird’s astonishing one-two punch for Pixar builds on the animation studio’s reputation for deep emotional resonance already earned by Andrew Stanton’s Finding Nemo and later reconfirmed by Wall-E. But Bird’s films add a welcome maturity that proves the medium of animation can be, at its best, truly for all ages.

    Although packed with action, spectacle, and chase sequences, it’s difficult to imagine how little kids would react to such a relatively dark movie. Note the middle-aged anxiety, marital strife, and surprisingly high body count (granted, most deaths happen offscreen, but only just!). I can easily imagine most kids tuning out during the many long dramatic sequences obviously pitched at adults. Just to name one scene that might be hard for youngsters to grasp: Mr. Incredible saves a suicidal man who doesn’t want to be saved. Guest blogger Snarkbait asked her two little boy cousins what they liked best about the movie. They relate most to the character Dash, and probably selectively ignore the bits they can’t yet understand. So perhaps I’m underestimating how well the movie works on multiple levels.

    The Incredibles
    It’s hard to imagine Mr. Incredible’s midlife crisis meaning anything to the kids in the audience.

    Even the voice casting is so perfect, it’s impossible to imagine any others in their place. Craig T. Nelson is as perfectly suited to Mr. Incredible’s middle-aged anxieties as Tim Allen was to Buzz Lightyear’s innocent bluster in the Toy Story films. I could go on to praise every single other voice actor, but special mention must go to Holly Hunter as sassy spitfire Elastigirl, Sarah Vowell’s perfect expression of teen anxieties as (shrinking) Violet, and Brad Bird’s gut-bustingly hilarious impression of Hollywood fashion legend Edith Head as the superhero costume designer Edna Mode.

    If forced to find one thing to critique, I would point to the relatively minor details of the characters’ hair. On the DVD bonus features, the Pixar animators and software engineers brag about the technologies they invented to simulate realistic hair, but none of the virtual coifs sit well upon the deliberately stylized cartoony faces. The characters have cute little dimples instead of hairy nostrils and waxy ear canals, so why give them such photorealistic hair?