A deadly assassin seeks international revenge against the former associates who tried to kill her on her wedding day.

“The 4th film by Quentin Tarantino” — as the opening titles winkingly proclaim Kill Bill Volume 1 to be — is an ultra-violent, live-action-anime salute to trashy cult movies and American pop from the seventies, an exaltation of style for its own sake, and for all of its adrenalin-inducing narrative skill, a strangely distant exercise in moviemaking.

Surely part of the film’s reserve is an unintended by-product of being chopped into two installments by its distributor, Miramax. The decision to do this was made at the last moment for many reasons, not least of which was simply a distressing trend toward the major studios chopping all of their tent pole movies into two installments. As the audience is beginning to figure out, if you split your spectacle into two release dates, you double the potential box-office, provided the first release generates enough good will. Naturally, with a film originally designed to be absorbed in one sitting, there are going to be more loose ends than in a season of the X-Files, but that’s the point — leave ‘em pondering the quirks and unanswered flourishes, and they’ll come back for more. (more…)