Word: vols
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first one, or the first half, inspired moral arbiters to tabulate the body count. Sober souls went all tremulous at the prospect of the sequel. Now Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1, which earned $70 million at the domestic box office and $100 million abroad, is joined by Vol. 2--not so much a sequel to the story as the completion of a chapter...
...about the Bride (Uma Thurman), a hit woman who had been "jetting around the world killing human beings and being paid vast sums of money" as a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad--DIVAS for short. In Vol. 1 she went straight, got left for dead in the slaughter of her wedding party and, years later, began to take revenge on the killers: the rest of the DIVAS and their charismatic boss, Bill (David Carradine). Vol. 2 finishes the tale as the Bride tracks down Bill's brother Budd (Michael Madsen) and one-eyed Elle (Daryl Hannah) before...
There's enough blood here to appease the Passion of the Christ crowd, plus a nifty catfight in a trailer, a virtuoso buried-alive scene and some Old Testament retribution (an eye for an eye). But Vol. 2 reduces the casualties and gentles down the mood. You get less kill, more Bill. The first was show, this is tell--anecdotes at 10 paces. Of course, this being a Tarantino film, the conversations are as long and lurid and finely choreographed as the martial-arts set pieces. (The auteur is a bit of a diva himself: he loves arias, visual...
...Vol. 1 was, at heart, a movie about movies--a whirlwind graduate course in pulp-film culture. Vol. 2 also boasts some scenes that will have cultists attaching mental footnotes: flicked references to John Ford's The Searchers and the Jackie Chan--Michelle Yeoh Supercop, as well as a rehabilitation of Pei Mei, a.k.a. White Eyebrow, a villainous character from '70s Hong Kong action films. Here he's a stern but endearing teacher (played with majestic comic brio by the legendary Gordon Liu). You'll also make the Kung Fu connection. That was the '70s TV series that made Carradine...
...like Thurman’s character in the Kill Bill movies, their careers are suddenly back from the dead (despite Thurman’s near-false start with last December’s quickly bounced Paycheck). Luminous and fashionably skeletal in last weekend’s Kill Bill, Vol. 2 (which earned more in its first weekend than Vol. 1), Thurman is once again a hot commodity in Hollywood, where the break-up of her recent marriage adds an extra dimension to her comeback...