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and speaking of kill bill......the music is incredible. I mean, amazingly good and even when it's corny, it's corny in a Tarantino kind of way, where it's not corny anymore. (So I guess it's not really corny). Which is not surprising because Tarantino has repeatedly said that he finds the music that defines the movie, rather than the other way around. (This, adding to what I mentioned yesterday). Right now there's a documentary on TV on Kill Bill (such a coincidence!) where Tarantino is saying something that is really important for stories in general. He says "I gotta know the mythology. You, as the viewer, don't have to know it, but you have to know I know it." I have always thought that this is a crucial element in fiction of any kind, and that the best works are always those were you can just feel the depth of information, stuff that you can't see or are not told but that you know it's there and that it gives consistency to the story. Examples of are many, from The Lord of the Rings, to Ulysses, to, yes, The Matrix (although who knows, the Matrix might still explain absolutely everything in Revolutions... but that would be a mistake IMO). And, by the way. The scene where the Bride fights maybe 50 or whatever bad guys. Isn't it really really close to the scene in Matrix Reloaded where Neo fights off 100 Agent Smiths? Isn't it a cool that two entirely different, entirely unrelated movies would reflect exactly the same concept in exactly the same way using exactly the same ideas, with very much the same cinematics, (Eastern fighting techniques basically), at exactly the same time? Of course there are some parallels with reality today. But that's not it. Not all. Great minds think alike! :-) Categories: art.mediaPosted by diego on October 20 2003 at 12:29 AM Comments (please see the comments & trackback policy).
I have to agree with you. The music screamed Tarantino in a very good way and I'm glad I'm not the only one who saw the similarity between those two scenes. Posted by: C.C. at October 20, 2003 12:34 AMThere's a pretty good article (part interview, part critic) in the latest New Yorker on Tarantino. Most interesting was the visceral reaction QT had about being called "ironic" by Paul Schrader, as if that's all there was to him. It also goes into why he uses so many references to other films, and how much he loves *all types* of movies, role of the audience in his head, etc. The article's not online (I checked), but I can scan/copy it for you if you can't get a hold of it and you're interested. Posted by: Chris Winters at October 20, 2003 1:02 AMThere's only one problem. The scene is Reloaded was completely over the top; there wasn't a shred of realism in it. Tarantino has done his homework. He's obviously studied the genre, and it shows. E. Posted by: Erik C. Thauvin at October 20, 2003 8:28 AMThe similarity is obvious. Except, of course, that the Kill Bill version pisses *all over* the Matrix version. It was so much more impressive, mainly for the reasons Eric gives. Posted by: Phil Wilson at October 20, 2003 10:02 AMChris--sending you an email re: article. Erik & Phil: I agree completely. The scene in Reloaded was not at the level of that of Kill Bill. Nowhere near in terms of quality (what with all the crappy CGI in the reloaded scene and all...). I was just pointing out how similar they were, specially considering that they were done independently at roughly the same time... Posted by: Diego at October 20, 2003 12:20 PM[Anonymous comment deleted] -- please see the policy (linked at the beginning of the comments) Posted by: Diego at October 20, 2003 4:37 PMThe more I watch the "lots of Agent Smiths" fight from Matrix Reloaded on DVD, the more I like it. Especially since a lot of what on first glance I dismissed as CGI turned out to be wire-work, just with high-speed cameras and face-replacement. It's very _dissimilar_ to the scene in Kill Bill, though, except that they're both one-vs-many fight scenes that happen to share the same fight choreographer. (Yuen Woo-Ping, also responsible for Crouching Tiger, not to mention Drunken Master, without which Jackie Chan's career would have been still-born) You can find just as much similarity with similar large-scale fight scenes in, say, Crouching Tiger or Drunken Master 2. The scene in Reloaded was experimental and stylized: further blurring the line between live-action and animation. Kill Bill, on the other hand, was homage: pouring a lot of blood over well-traveled ground, while fusing the samurai saga and the spaghetti western (almost inevitable given how many of Kurosawa's films were filched by Leone). I think they're both pretty damn good sequences. Posted by: Charles Miller at October 20, 2003 11:51 PMCopyright © Diego Doval 2002-2007.
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