Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is not as good as the first one. Let’s just get that out there right now. Roger Ebert said that although he gave the first film four stars it did not make his top ten, whereas this picture is sure to make the list. My reaction is purely the opposite. Assuming that we have a pretty decent year, you can expect this film to bottom out my top ten. Where Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was one of his best, this is one of his worst. Yeah, compared to every other movie out there this film comes out near the top and of course it is going to be considered for my top ten. Placing this picture on about the same level as Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy is certainly not faint praise. Tarantino’s worst is indeed better than many filmmakers’ best. There is certainly a temptation to over-criticize a picture that has given us high expectations. The film headed a grindhouse revenge double feature at the drive-in. It was followed by the remake of Walking Tall.

My wife remarked that they were about the same in quality. I suspect that she would think her remarks heresy now; she was responding fresh off Walking Tall’s modest high which was certainly roughly comparable to the disappointment of Volume 2. But she has since told family that Walking Tall really sucked and that its 75-minute running time was sort of repugnant. She hasn’t said much about Kill Bill: Vol. 2, partially out of respect to the original I think. There is certainly an equal temptation to over-praise the picture in that it is in fact a sequel to Kill Bill: Vol. 1 and more Kill Bill can only be a good thing. It’s even more complicated than that: Not only is this a sequel to Kill Bill: Vol. 1 it’s a necessary sequel. They are the same movie, split in two.

You can kind of see how or why many Star Wars fans are defensive of the prequels. It’s all part of the same movie they say; it’s an all-or-nothing deal. I cut my teeth on Star Wars. I liked the Disney cartoon features a whole lot of course, but they meant fly shit to me compared to Star Wars. Really, Return of the Jedi; Star Wars was kid stuff and Empire Strikes Back was old people stuff. Return of the Jedi doesn’t get enough credit for being the mean. But anyway… there is enough Star Wars fan in me to obtain some sort of worth in the prequels. There are themes in the series that are further developed in these pictures, and I don’t think that their harshest critics are really working hard enough with them. Although, to be fair, Lucas isn’t working very hard either. Why are C-3P0 and R2-D2 in these movies? Doesn’t that seem extremely bad form, given that there is no implication at all in the original trilogy that Anakin knows who they are? Why does Obi-Wan Kenobi say that Yoda was his trainer, when it’s Qui-Gon Jinn in the prequels? And what about the racist caricatures, which Walter Chaw theorized (correctly I think) exist less out of malice but out of a lack of exposure to real people and an aversion to the work it would take to create new languages for new creatures? As there are a couple pounds of poetry in Attack of the Clones and The Phantom Menace and we get a pretty decent look into the Anakin character and the questions such a character presents, I can give the prequels a modest recommendation. Those deeply socialized into the Star Wars films should be able to get something out of them; if they don’t stand up as the text itself they still have some value as supplements.

Pertinent to discussion of an inferior Kill Bill follow-up is a question I posed to a message board following the release of Attack of the Clones. It was in response to Obi-Wan’s offhand remark of “Anakin, you’ll be the death of me.” The line shows that in making the prequels, Lucas is expecting a familiarity with that which follows them. My question was, “When future generations see the Star Wars films, will they be punished for seeing them in chronological order?” Indeed, I think they will, as that quote presumes knowledge of things to come. If they are not meant to be seen in chronological order, this seems to imply to me that the prequels can safely be omitted. (Then again, maybe not. Lucas is rumored to have shot additional footage to put in the original films when they are released on DVD. This in addition to the “Special Edition” stuff he put in the 1997 re-release.)

Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is far less disposable. Omitting it isn’t even on the level of omitting Return of the Jedi because it’s disappointing. It’s more like omitting seasons three and four, maybe season two, of “The Sopranos” because they are disappointing. Omit them and we get a purer drug, but we are also omitting the growth and evolution of the characters. It’s difficult to rewatch the first season of “The Sopranos,” knowing what happens in subsequent seasons. Everybody seems so naïve and trapped in their false perceptions of what is going on. I suspect that Kill Bill: Vol. 1 will play in a similar way in light of Volume 2. The Kill Bill movies are richer than the Star Wars films. For a writer/director who has made a name for himself through non-chronological narrative structure, the narrative structure is probably the least important thing in a Tarantino movie. He does a hell of a lot of root work and writes very strongly defined characters. There is no such thing as a gratuitous sequel to a Tarantino movie, as these people change through their experiences. There is no such thing as a gratuitous prequel either, as unlike most other movies, the characters existed before the movie started. Last Year at Marienbad has been popularly described as being entirely self-contained; when the film starts the characters exist and when it ends they cease to exist. In that respect at least Last Year at Marienbad is explicitly just like the mediocre “typical” mainstream movies that we see all the time (of which the new Walking Tall is an obvious example). With Tarantino’s films you feel that you are simply getting a glimpse of a pre-established universe. His alternative reality is arguably as deep as that of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner or Alien.

Which brings us to what I think is my chief beef or frustration with Kill Bill: Vol. 2. The picture isn’t as much a movie, it’s not as much Tarantino jerking off, as it is a novel. Going back to my comments on the first Kill Bill film, there is a dichotomy between Tarantino the director and Tarantino the writer. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is Tarantino the director incarnate, whereas Jackie Brown is Tarantino the writer incarnate. For my money, Jackie Brown is a very good film but is his very worst. There is a significant cult that considers it to be his best, his only really mature work. It’s not a film that seems to be patched together from other movies; it’s a slice of life informed by other movies. Jackie Brown suggests a self-taught filmmaker who has finally learned to tell his own stories and make his own art. (Ironically, of course, the film is adapted from an Elmore Leonard novel: Tarantino’s first and only official book adaptation.) This is terrific, and unless maybe Jonathan Demme takes a swing at it, I’m not sure that we’ll ever see a better Elmore Leonard film.

But somehow I think that I like the immature Tarantino better. Jackie Brown reeks of “selling out.” I think that it was Tarantino’s biggest box office failure, but that isn’t what I mean when I say “selling out.” I mean that he has made a “Hollywood” movie, a prime example of what we critics mean when they say a “good movie.” It was leisurely and heavy with intelligent dialogue and well-drawn characters. It was about something; it illustrated something human and as a result proved to be one of the more humanistic movies of recent years, an affront to the nihilistic humor that he showed with the exploding head in Pulp Fiction. Instead of reinventing the wheel and challenging these ideals, he conformed to them. Everybody loves Pulp Fiction; the Jackie Brown cult had been able to find the things that they want from movies in it. But there was a lot of Tarantino in the film. With Jackie Brown he gave the critics what they want in a purer form, and became a stylist. It doesn’t seem like a film from Tarantino’s soul.

Far from being an impersonal “copy of a copy,” the constant barrage of movie references in Tarantino’s oeuvre provides evidence of life and personality. There is a deep reality in Jackie Brown thanks to the well-developed characters. But there is a deep reality in the first Kill Bill film; the film is so damn tight that there isn’t any room for any gratuitous details. Kill Bill: Vol. 2 seems to be billed as his big one, as the synthesis between Tarantino the director and Tarantino the writer. I don’t think that the movie really works very well on those terms. Pulp Fiction did, although probably not as well as Kill Bill: Vol. 1 or Jackie Brown did in their individual goals. But Kill Bill: Vol. 2. Well, it seems to be a bit of a compromise. There are severe problems with it as a pop entertainment (the very word seems to suggest that Kill Bill is little more than a cute amusement. Saying that Kill Bill is entertaining is like saying that heroin makes you feel good) and as serious “art.” Meaning “art” as the critics and lawmakers do, as dealing directly with the human condition. (The Supreme Court’s definition of obscenity as lacking sociological or artistic merit always bothered me, as all novels, photographs and films have sociological or artistic merit in that they reflect upon the culture that produced them. But let’s play the game.)

It comes down to the Budd character. Budd, played by Michael Madsen, was the only man to be involved directly in the killing. Bill was the mastermind, but Budd was the only male minion. There is a scene early in the film where Budd arrives at his job as a bouncer at a strip club twenty minutes late. His boss suspends him for a couple weeks without pay, and on his way out is informed by one of the girls that he has to clean up a flooded bathroom. I realized somewhat to my surprise that this sequence doesn’t have any heat to it. One of the attractive things about Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was that Tarantino was getting off on every single aspect of his film. There was one ounce of fat in the first picture, the Sonny Chiba scene at the bar, but you could forgive it as it was Tarantino indulging himself. Tarantino doesn’t seem to be indulging himself here. Kill Bill: Vol. 2 turns out to really be about Budd more than anybody else. The mythology of Kill Bill is very similar to the Sergio Leone mythology. This isn’t an unfair connection. Tarantino rediscovered The Good, the Bad and the Ugly in very recent years and has since declared it one of his favorite movies. Inspired by Bill Chambers’ review of the recent DVD, I saw Once Upon a Time in the West between Kill Bills and I’ve tried very hard to recommend it to everyone I know who liked Kill Bill. This was the movie that Kill Bill was based on, I tell them. Once Upon a Time in the West is a film conscious of the mythology and iconology of the Western, a super-Western. The picture is in love with movies and filmmaking, and it’s in love with violence and artifice. You see a lot of this film in Kill Bill. Specifically, for example, David Carradine’s flute stands in for Harmonica (Charles Bronson’s) harmonica; broadly, for example, the basic revenge plot carries through where the heroes try to avenge the deaths of their families. In his great collection Cult Movies the film critic Danny Peary writes about the difference between Leone’s supermen and his mortals. The supermen are represented by the Good and the Bad. The mortals are represented by the Ugly. Peary theorizes that perhaps some of these mortals have superman lineage, but it has been diluted with the blood of mortal women. (Peary labels the Jason Robards character Cheyenne from Once Upon a Time in the West as a mortal and points out that his mother was a whore.) Budd, despite the fact that we are told that he is Bill’s brother, is certainly a mortal. If The Bride and Elle Driver (not Bill interestingly enough) are the Good and the Bad, this guy is the Ugly. Like the Ugly with the gun in the bathwater and Cheyenne with the gun in the boot, Budd resorts to clever tricks to take down the Bride. He has to resort to his wits, because he doesn’t have the strength or skill of the supermen.

I think that Tarantino could have easily had fun with Budd, but it’s very interesting that he doesn’t. He seems to really look down on Budd. If Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was a Sergio Leone film, I think that this may be a Sam Peckinpah film. Peckinpah’s pictures don’t have good or bad in them; everybody is ugly. The idea of the Ugly is a pessimistic view of mankind; it’s saying that we can’t really hope to evolve beyond the rat. But because Leone puts the Good and the Bad in his movie, I can never see them as really pessimistic the way a Peckinpah film is. Leone is a theist; Peckinpah is an atheist. God has left the Peckinpah universe or was never there. The terms good and bad are relative in the Leone films, to be sure, but Leone preserves this idea that there is something greater than man. I think this may be a tip-off of my problem with the people-oriented film. The people-oriented film suggests that there is nothing beyond human beings. They can be pro-human, but in being about humans they are inherently against God and spirituality. They are tied into the material world. That seems to put entirely unnecessary limitations on film to me.

Tarantino’s reasons for putting Budd in this film are rooted, I think, to his hatred for men. He’s a man-hating lesbian. A woman who was formally heterosexual, but has since reformed to worship the pussy. To Tarantino, men are a dangerous toy. Fun to play with, but don’t get too attached. Let’s take a look at his first film Reservoir Dogs where his obvious alter ego Mr. Orange produces a friendship heavy with homoerotic overtones with Mr. White. Mr. White represents the allure of the tough guy criminal culture. He falls in love with it. And he’s punished severely for it. He even wanted to punish his alter ego Clarence from True Romance with his lover Alabama angrily condemning him in voiceover for trying to make a big-time cocaine score. True Romance and Reservoir Dogs were early Tarantino scripts and as such they were highly autobiographical. He saw himself, a man, as being in love with the masculinity of violence but realized that the real men play for keeps and are really ruthless pieces of shit. There is nothing cool about real criminals, he seems to be implying. In Kill Bill, however, he ties the violence to women, and in doing so seems to be able to release himself from moralizing. Tarantino loves women and believes that they can do no wrong. He loves their feet; he jerks off thinking about massaging Uma Thurman’s feet and sucking on Salma Hayek’s toes. Not only does he live to eat pussy, he has built a shrine to the pussy. The “Pussy Wagon,” once a symbol of women’s objectification, has now become a symbol of the organ’s power, and Tarantino now personally drives the vehicle with pride.

When Kill Bill: Vol. 1 came out, we all wondered why Bill wanted to kill The Bride. In the sequel we discover that he had a damn good reason. He was in love with her, and she skipped town. When he found her she was pregnant and was going to marry a record store owner. She never told Bill about his child because she knew that he would want to keep it, and she was eager to leave the life. The action was possessive, but it was also impulsive. And he regretted it and seems even to want to start anew with the Bride and their daughter. He tells their daughter about her, and tells her that she will wake up one day and they will be together. There is some ambiguity about whether or not he is training The Bride’s daughter to be an assassin or not. It’s “maybe/maybe not” from what I can recall. Bill gives a speech to The Bride detailing how his daughter killed her goldfish by putting him on her carpet and stepping on him. We think back to that unlikely but provocative scene in Henry Bromwell’s Panic, where hitman Donald Sutherland trains his four-year-old grandson to shoot squirrels so he can be better detatched towards life and can continue the family business. There is a slight chill to the scene, but the lesson that Bill purports to teach his daughter is that death is unsolvable. Once it happens, you can’t undo it. Bill wants his daughter to understand that that is the mistake that he made with his mother. His attempt to kill her was entirely undoable. He follows up with the now very famous “Superman” speech, where he states that “Superman” is the reality, who Superman really is, whereas Clark Kent is the costume. This goes against typical superhero lore, where the superhero is embodied by a costume they put on. Here the superhero powers are innate. Bill tells The Bride that she was born a killer and should remain a killer. He finds the idea that she wants to marry away from the “life” rather repugnant.

All the same, there is not really any implication that Bill wants to continue with the life necessarily. His crew has been disbanded. Vernita Green has taken the life that the Bride had wanted, O-Ren has become a major gangster in Japan, Budd is cleaning bathrooms. Elle Driver seems to be doing hits with Bill and they seem to be lovers, but Bill seems to cheerfully disregard her when The Bride comes around. Bill doesn’t give this speech to show that The Bride that being a killer is ideal, as much as to show that they are both killers, they are both these Leone-esque Gods, and that they are of the same super race. Bill becomes a largely sympathetic character in our eyes, and we begin to look down on The Bride a bit for betraying him. Her reasoning for leaving him is that when she became pregnant she suddenly realized that she belonged not to him, but to her daughter. She could not raise her daughter in this sort of environment. He says that it wasn’t her choice to run away with his daughter. She thinks otherwise.

It was here that I suddenly realized that Tarantino does not believe in father’s rights. He doesn’t believe they have any inherently. Mothers do. Motherhood is sacred; fatherhood is at best admirable and at least disposable. Tarantino is a feminazi, the kind that suggests that men should not have any say as to whether or not their partners abort their children or should have custody in a divorce. Some critics have labeled a scene where The Bride lies down with her daughter to watch the violent samurai epic Shogun Assassin proof that he is detached from reality. There is a detachment in a way, much in the same way that the Superman speech is, in that pop culture is the meat and potatoes of Tarantino’s everyday vocabulary, but I’d argue that that is exactly the sort of stuff that he watched with his mother and her boyfriends and guy friends.

Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is obviously his love letter to his Mom, who gave birth to him when she was 16 and raised him as a movie lover. Tarantino never knew his father, Tony Tarantino. When asked what he would say to him, Tarantino says he would say “Thanks for the sperm.” (Tony Tarantino has since exploited his biological connection to Quentin for all that its worth, most hilariously by becoming a member of The Silver Foxes, a group of parents of celebrities.) Quentin has had a number of father figures in his life, but none of them really stuck. Ah, but Mom has been there always. I think that Tarantino’s view of men as posers, as the Ugly of the Leone universe, and his deification of women stems from his impressions of who maintained relationships with him throughout his childhood. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was challenging as feminism, placing men pretty much entirely in the sidelines and populating its foreground entirely with women as its heroes and villains. The very idea was hilarious and a lot of fun. Kill Bill: Vol.1 is to “The Powerpuff Girls” what the Homo sapien is to the ape. The film simultaneously parodied and sold feminist empowerment, and it was evolved and intelligent about it. The film took The Powerpuff Girls to the next level. The film even parodied and celebrated the exploitation of women in both the “love doll” scene and through the very presence of violent Japanese school girl Gogo Yubari.

With Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Tarantino has introduced Budd and especially Bill, substantial male presences. And he has put in heart, soul and a sense of morality into the picture. And so we get a battle between the sexes, and see who Tarantino knows should win and has to win. It’s not feminism, it’s female chauvinism; morally repugnant like feminazism and not morally vacant like feminism (woman can be anything she wants, one identity can’t be preferred to the other, tears down boundaries instead of figuring out how to build new ones). As a white male, I generally don’t find sexism against men that any more threatening than racism against whites. I guess I just feel that I can take it. But on some level, I don’t think that it represents clear thinking and it greatly oversimplifies things.

And so the film really isn’t on par with the superficial but profound Kill Bill: Vol. 1 philosophically as well as cinematically. As failures go, I have to admit that Tarantino’s has failed in a more interesting way than most films and it’s probable that a substantial amount of its failure can be attributed to being compared to Vol. 1. It’s clear that he didn’t fuck this up for any other reason than this was exactly the story that he wanted to tell, and that in itself is really sort of admirable.