Kill Bill vol. 2. Quentin Tarantino. 2004. ⚁

OK, here we are again… the first movie was a snooze fest with two fun scenes. Perhaps this one will be better?

[twenty minutes pass]

The scenes play out like if I’m supposed to recognise the actors and feel some thrill by seeing them on the screen, like that scene between the guy in the hat and his boss in the titty bar office. I don’t, and I don’t.

And perhaps they don’t? Faux referentialism?

THIS IS SO BORING.

If Kill Bill vol. 1 is what it’s like to be a six-year-old with ADHD, those guys are a lot more chill than I thought. The first movie was a slog — 90 minutes of character development, origin stories and recaps, and 30 minutes of fun action.

This has lasted 40 minutes, and it’s been about two minutes of action and 38 minutes of backstory and tedium.

It feels like I’ve been watching this forever.

BUT IT WASN”T ABOUT ACTION!

It’s like these reviewers have never seen an actual action movie in their entire lives.

[half an hour passes]

Yay! When she meets the Chinese guy, the film turns into total sitcom, and that’s a lot easier to take. It’s not extremely funny sitcom, but it’s amusing.

And then the comedy goes even broader when Daryl Hannah finally makes her reappearance. Her scenes were actually funny!

I guess it just goes to show that you can never have too much Daryl Hannah in your movies.

[more time passes]

And now we’re into mommy issues. AND THERE”S STILL AN HOUR LEFT!

Oh god I’m so bored now.

What’s even supposed to be the tension here now? It’s just about getting Bill out of sight of her daughter so that she can kill him? I hope so, but it’s just so… flat…

[five minutes pass]

I didn’t know it was possible to even be this bored as I am now listening to Bill talking about Superman.

Well done, Tarantino! You’ve plumbed heretofore unknown depths of tedium!

[more time passes]

But I did like the epic battle with Bill. Made me laugh, at least.

I guess the second film is better than the first — it’s got funnier skits. But it’s got even longer stretches of sheer boredom. So I guess it’s about equally bad as the first one on the whole…

Kill Bill vol. 1. Quentin Tarantino. 2003. ⚁

HAIIIII YAH

I like that it starts out with Miss Piggy sound effects.

I think Jackie Brown is Tarantino’s best movie. I mean, it’s a movie — not just a collection of fun scenes.

This, on the other hand, seems like he’s leaning hard into the “let’s put some really cool scenes on film”, which is fine by me.

[half an hour passes]

I’m surprised at how boring this is. So much exposition and a very thorough origin story. And how gross it is: I mean, the coma/rape thing is beyond the call of duty, isn’t it?

And how bad the animated parts are. Looks cheap and amateurish.

[another half hour passes]

I’m kinda falling asleep here. I was expecting a bunch of cool action scenes that Tarantino had ripped off from cheesy movies, but instead it’s… just… a cheesy movie. Nothing of interest happens for hours on end, and instead we get lame and unfunny skits.

If only! It’s two thirds boring exposition and (ewww!) character development.

[another half hour passes]

Finally! Some action! The fight in Japan is fun; the very definition of excessive overkill. But, really, the fight at the start of the movie was more involving.

What really gets to me is Tarantino’s totally lame taste in music. Whenever he started blasting some suck-ass monstrosity, I just had to turn the sound down, because I just can’t take the pain.

A Personal History of the American Theater. Skip Blumberg. 1985. ⚃

This was an extra on the Criterion bluray of Gray’s Anatomy.

So it’s a VHS from a performance from 1982?

[half an hour passes]

It’s… Gray telling anecdotes about theatre performances he’d performed in, and the sequence is supposed to be random — he’s got a shuffled box of title cards that says what the order is.

But he’s also got a script he’s consulting so it’s not random? Theatre, man!

For some of the plays he just says what the title was (and where it was performed) and then he goes on to the next one. On others, like Commune, he talks for fifteen minutes about the thing (and what was going on while it was being done).

The audience is very… receptive. That is, they laugh a lot, even when what he’s saying isn’t very funny. I mean, after basically every line, somebody laughs, which is just weird.

Or perhaps they were all really stoned? I guess that’s not unlikely.

Because this isn’t really that funny, and it’s not really that interesting, either.

[more time passes]

Somehow… it all sort of came together in the last twenty minutes. It’s weird. I’m not sure what he did, exactly.