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.

Gray’s Anatomy. Steven Soderbergh. 1996. ⚄

Well…

I was somewhat sceptical. I mean, everybody loves Sex, Lies and Soderbergh, but has he done any movies after that (his first) that’s any good?

On the other hand, this is Spalding Gray, who’s fun.

So I was hoping this would just be Gray on a stage with a static camera, and… this isn’t that. It’s the most spruced-up stage thing ever.

I’m also having a lot of difficulty connecting to his story, because he’s talking about all these weird cures for his eye thing. I have the same thing, and my eye doctor told me what it was, and that it might fix itself. And then the next time I visited him, he told me that it’d fixed itself.

That’s less drama.

I didn’t even visit a single Christian Science person, or any sweat lodges, or any nutritionists, or any psychic surgeons.

I’m not trying to say that my complacent passivity is any good or anything, but… It’s like…

Americans are weird?

But his eye anecdotes are funny, and mine aren’t. So he wins.