Kill Bill Vol. II

Seen: 2004.04.19 ¶ Reviewed: 2004.07.17

I dearly anticipated having my dream come true: The first encounter with offscreen voice of Uma Thurman speaker-IDed as THE BRIDE:. And lo did it come to pass!

Overlong by half and valuable solely for the trailer fight sequence and, of course, the Bride's Chinese training regimen, complete with bleached film stock and bleached stock film acting. I find it quite repugnant to suggest that “professional killer” is a valid occupation for any parent, nor do I accept the film's proposition that the Bride's return to kill her baby's perfectly kind and loving father somehow makes for a happy family.

I'm sure the captioneers at WGBH were finally relieved to be “doing” a “cool” movie. I would be.

Theatre experience

At the Paramount (where scarcely anything ever goes wrong), I decided to let Mr. X do the talking. Then I of course said “What's today's sign-out procedure?” “You write down your name in—” replied the playa, who handed us the binder and simply walked away!

So I snapped a picture. I blanked out all the names later. (At no time did I look at them, but I did notice two other signouts for Kill Bill.) Famous Players seems ready to violate federal privacy laws.

The first reflector had erectile dysfunction. I had to ask for Windex®. “As I say every time this happens,” I explain to the bored, uninterested, extremely tall manager who had stood around at all times during this process ignoring us, “managers always tell us playaz don’t have time to Windex the reflectors, but I’ve come out during the middle of a show and seen them [mimes standing around snapping fingers].” I didn’t add that that was precisely what he was doing.

The manager said (and I paraphrase): That’s right, they are too busy. I simply turned and pointed to the playa, who was seated chatting disinterestedly with another playa.

So, just to recap: The playa walked away in the middle of a sentence, let us look at everybody else’s names, and later killed time (if not Bill) yammering away with a friend. Meanwhile, a manager stood idly by, then claimed, in face of evidence right in front of him, that playaz are too busy to do the grunt work I the “guest” was stuck doing.

So this MoPix system – it’s chuggin’ away just fine, huh, Famous?

Caption quality

Who was that you used the play for? “Used to play for,” shurely?!

Geez-Louise is not hyphenated.

(metal vibrating): I think we see that. Shouldn’t this be (blade sings)?

And we let them think, we don't like it: Spurious comma.

Serious and thoroughgoing failure to denote foreground music, given that there is no such thing as “background” music in tarantinist cinema. But there are occasional flashes:

(synthesized emergency siren over galloping beat) is actually a stock trope from 1970s TV shows, though to this minute I don’t have a better way to caption it
(playing spy-theme melody)
(horns play suspenseful fanfare)
(scratchy, dramatic soundtrack playing)
(electric guitar and chorus perform dramatic theme)

or shit? was actually “horseshit”!

The black-mamba speech flubs quotations within quotations.

Budd's Henzo sword: Hanzo!

(voice-over): I poisoned his fish heads

...and further flashback exegesis captioned thus even though there’s no way it could possibly be emanating from the scene, hence (voice-over) is, perennially, redundant.

But every once in awhile: It’s two words, kids. “Sit yourself down and stay awhile” would be different.

Exit interview

None that I remember. At the Paramount, there usually isn’t.

← Previous ¶ Next →