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Rants, Rates, Slags, Slates. Manic-depressive posts from Red Wright-Hand. Because there are thousands of worthless blogs out there and who am I not to add to their number?
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Arts & Letters Daily
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Saturday, April 17, 2004
Who knows what goes on inside the brain of a professional movie critic? I suppose that press deadlines make anyone's mind do strange things. In his April 16 qualified-rave review of Kill Bill Vol. 2, Elvis Mitchell of The New York Times writes: "[The movie] offers long, airy takes that suggest Visconti with attention deficit disorder; in other words it's the narrative style that Sergio Leone employed in "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly." Allow some time for the absurdity of that sentence to sink in; a fraction of a second ought to be enough. Mitchell could have swapped the directors' names and made about as much sense; if the movie is in the style of Leone (you wish, Tarantino!), then why not say so? And really, does "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" appear to be the product of ADD? It's more like the film where Leone began to seriously advance his particular technique of slow extended takes combined with highly effective cross-cutting, that is, editing for maximum dramatic effect, and not randomly like some hyper video-weaned child (we'll call him "Quentin," just for the sake of argument). Sheesh. But that's not the only metamorphosis Mitchell is up to; earlier in his review Mitchell also lets slip that "if Dusty Springfield had been an actress, she would have been [Uma] Thurman." Maybe so. And I suppose if Uma Thurman were a singer, she'd be Dusty Springfield. See how easy it is? And what's this? Among Tarantino's many (many, many, many and obvious, obvious, obvious) influences, Mitchell cites "all the Shogun Assassin movies." Except guess what? There's only one Shogun Assassin movie (called, believe it or not, Shogun Assassin); it happens to consist of footage culled, for American distribution, from a series of six Japanese films generally entitled Lone Wolf and Baby Cub. So what Mitchell really meant was "all the Lone Wolf and Baby Cub movies," which are, thank god, beginning to be released on DVD, and boy are they ever good...far superior to anything Tarantino's attempted, at least in the "lightning samurai sword" department. If Billie Holliday had been an actress, she'd be Halle Berry? If Perry Como had been an actor, he'd be David Duchovny? Once I get the hang of it, my resume's off to the Times. |
