Kill Bill: Volume 2

This film is better than the first volume. It's also better than Pulp Fiction. But before anyone jumps down my throat on that last one, the reason is because Quentin Tarantino seems to be learning how to create a film by not just cobbling together all of his influences. Having heard and read interviews of Tarantino (and if you've never heard him, it's worth it... once), I would be quite dense not to be aware that the man is driven by what has come before. This can be frustrating for the viewer, although it isn't so much for me because I enjoy his efforts at playing around with genre identification and trying to mix and match as many as he can. He certainly does that in this second part, but he also creates a nice (well, nice is far from the right word), cohesive, complete story. That's craft, and that's the difficult part. I wonder whether folks who haven't seen the first one would be lost in this one, but I consider them two completely different (and different types of) films. There's much more dialogue and less violence in this final part. I would caution some people from watching either, because although the violence is stylistic and meant to amuse as well as entertain (if nothing else, watch Volume 2 for the sword fight in the trailer), this may not be obvious (or desirable) to the inexperienced filmgoer. But you may not want to miss David Carradine. Thought Kung Fu was just another poorly acted 70s TV series? Clearly not.

year: 2004
length: 136 min.
rating: 3.5
IMDB link: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0378194/combined