Kill Bill

Action/US/English and Japanese (Japanese subtitles)/93 minutes
Starring: Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, David Carradine
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Miramax

Kill Bill: post-post modern, post ironic, post coherent, and posthaste to the bank with buckets of dosh. After a six-year absence Tarantino is back with the biggest, baddest, most hubris-laden film of his career and what a stinker it is.

The high priest of movie nerds has raided the stock of martial arts, samurai, yakuza and James Bond movies and gene spliced them with Japanese manga to create something that is essence of pulp action.

It is the process we saw in Pulp Fiction taken to a rarified form.
Unfortunately he has forgotten the elements that made his previous films popular: strong characterisation, witty dialogue and a halfway coherent plot. He has given us instead an eclectic patchwork of images and postures transplanted from other movies and 93 minutes of almost unrelenting fighting.

Fans of the fight genre will be wetting their pants with glee, most other folks will be gagging their way to the exit.
One British reviewer asked whether Tarantino had lost the plot.
A very apt question because this film doesn’t have one. Bill (David Carradine) and his evil troupe, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad — a sort of Charlie’s Angels of Death — inexplicably turn on one of their own, known only as the bride (Uma Thurman), massacring her wedding guests, her husband and her unborn child on her wedding day, and leave her for dead.

It is a bit of a shock for them when the bride, four years later, comes out of her coma and sets about slashing her way to revenge. She kills someone in the US, goes to Okinawa to buy a samurai sword and goes to Tokyo where she kills lots and lots of people. That’s about it. Worse, the key events of the story — the key events are always ridiculously gory killings — happen without motivation or reason. The story is merely a thin line connecting the blood splats.

The world of Kill Bill is the world of comic books and as such we are not supposed to take any of it seriously — why then take it at all, I ask.

Prozac Nation

Drama/US/English (Japanese subtitles)/98 minutes
Starring: Christina Ricci, Jessica Lange, Nicholas Campbell
Director: Erik Skjoldbjærg
Miramax

Elizabeth seems to be rising above the difficulties of her upbringing as a single child to a divorced mother and a remote, disinterested father. She is a gifted writer and something of a prodigy. Her mother has burdened her with all her with her own hopes and aspirations and has pushed her to go to Harvard despite their financial hardships.

Don’t make the same mistakes as me, girl — get a life! Elizabeth makes it to Harvard on a journalism scholarship and just as the future starts to look rosy, things start to fall apart. She wins a Rolling Stone journalism prize, becomes compulsive in her behaviour and begins to suffer major mood swings and depression. She is a Jeckyl and Hyde character: no one can predict whether she will be the life and soul or will be paranoid and abusive.

She bounces from one guy to another looking for approval, but tests the relationships to breaking point, creating self-fulfilling expecta-tions of rejection that put her into an emotional tail spin into breakdown.

As is the way with depression, neither Elizabeth nor those around her recognise the condition as a clinical disorder in need of treatment until the damage is done.

Elizabeth is Elizabeth Wurtzel, the author of best-seller Prozac Nation, the account of her struggle with chronic depression as a young Harvard undergrad. In this movie director Erik Skjoldbjærg — the Norwegian director of the compelling Insomnia — recreates her story with sympathy and sensitivity.

Wurtzel is played by the excellent Christina Ricci who honed her moody skills as Wednesday Addams in the Addams family movies and is proving herself an actor of range and talent. Jessica Lange turns in a convincing performance as Elizabeth’s dominating mother, as does Nicholas Campbell as her insincere and shambolic father.
I’ll let you into a secret: this reviewer suffers from bouts of acute depression, but only when he has to review Hollywood blockbusters.

Prozac Nation is no blockbuster and, despite its subject, is uplifting for its complete lack of hubris and for its humanity and for its insight into this misunderstood condition that afflicts millions.

Film Reviews: Chris Page

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