Kill Bill.

I'm not quite sure how Tarantino managed to build himself a cinematic mogul hype more colossal than any director in the business; especially since his total output in the last ten years has barely been noticeable (did anybody even bother with Jackie Brown?).

Kill Bill is gruesomely living proof that a well-thought out, meticulously done, cinematographically genius, and wildly original film can still be straight out bad. It was barely entertaining. I became more concerned with my stomach turning from the 70's-samurai violence than the actual film itself.

Why does Kill Bill not measure up to Pulp Fiction in the least?

1) Pulp Fiction, to put it bluntly, had content. Besides being the single most inspirationally revolutionary film of the 90's, the predominant themes of redemption, religious right, and philosophy all came through in shining hall-of-fame colors. This worked brilliantly with Tarantino's insanely Kubric-esque obsession with details in film, and the cinematic and pop-culture references were right on spot.

Kill Bill is not about anything. You could say it's about chivalry, but you wouldn't really be kidding anybody. And that's lame anyway. You could say it's about revenge. Whoopee. Revenge. No, the truth is Kill Bill is not much more than a ten-year-in-the-works magnum opus of a brilliant director who is immaturely eager to prove to the world that he is artsy, learned, well-read, and intelligent. Kill Bill shows me three things: 1) Quentin Tarantino watches a lot of movies. and 2) Quentin Tarantino is well-read. and 3) Quentin Tarantino is intelligent. But that doesn't make it a good movie.

2) It also concerns me that the pseudo-intellectual and quasi-artsy pop-references from the 70's that Tarantino infuses throughout his films get lost in the esotericism of cinema. I mean, seriously - who really caught all the Shaws Bros. references, the Red Apple cigarettes, the oddly-devised Tarantino stamped soundtrack, and probably the thousands of other references that I didn't catch because frankly, Tarantino is too intelligent for his own good - so intelligent, that we don't even notice or we don't even care.

3a) Shooting selective scenes in black-and-white, another in anime, and another in blue sillouhette makes a movie artsy (true), but it does not make it good.
3b) Basing a movie on 70's Samurai references from Shaws Brothers' films and infusing your film with cinematic knowledge and inside jokes makes a movie cool, but it does not make it good.
3c) For all of the hype regarding Tarantino as one of the greatest screenplay writers of all time, this script sucked. Period.

4) I can just see a fast-talking, nervous, Quentin Tarantino, sitting in the same house in Los Angeles for the last 6 years watching the rise of kung-fu, wu-shu, samurai, and what not into american films with the Matrix, Charlie's Angels, Art of War, etc. and thinking to himself, "I could do so much better than any of those idiots." I mean, don't forget, Tarantino was the one who brought Iron Monkey to the United States. He owns this genre right? Nobody knows it better than he does, right? right...

Mr. Tarantino, please believe that I still have the utmost respect for your intelligence, and Pulp Fiction will inevitably go down in history as one of the greatest films of all time. May Kill Bill be just a fluke.