Kill Bill

Tarantino. You know the legend, you love the legend (as you love all legends that transform a schlumpy loser into a respectable winner). Video clerk turns Hollywood on its ear by becoming the next director that saves Corporate Lockstep Entertainment from itself.

He directs "Pulp Fiction", resurrecting the career (for which we should thank him?) of Vinnie Barbarino and tweaking the Hollywood conventions of storytelling and chronology and hero identification, while knowingly using (and stretching) the established vocabulary of film. His tongue remained pretty firmly in-cheek, even while delivering a loving restatement of film archaeology. "Pulp Fiction" earned all its wild praise; and Tarantino earned all his flavor-of-the-month-wunderkind-beads-of-praise.

But. But.

Since "Pulp Fiction", has any director been more overpraised, overhyped, overrated than Quentin Tarantino? His raison d'etre seems to be to remake bad movie genres in homage, to bring what he perceives as his own special touch to the conventions of Hollywood, to continue to turn corporate filmmaking on its ear. It seems, though, that with his tongue this firmly in his cheek, he's not so much turning Hollywood on its ear as biting Hollywood's ankle, less Quixotic savior than yippy chihuahua.

"Kill Bill" purports to love the chop-socky films while being a subtle parody of them. What Tarantino doesn't seem to grasp, though, is that chop-socky is already so self-parodying that creating his own seems like pouring salt on Lot's wife. "Kill Bill" tries be bravura filmmaking, mixing styles and genres and storytelling methods, but by being stylish for the sake of being stylish, and unendingly repeating the same images (limbs (and heads!) being cut off while the torso sprays blood everywhere, for example), it merely comes off as a stylish but ulimately pedestrian remake.

As interesting as every single movie ever made may be to the ex-video clerk, not every single movie deserves remake or homage.

I should probably, by the way, be less hard on Travolta. After all, since the revelation of his very good work in Pulp Fiction, he has brought us "Broken Arrow" and "Battlefield Earth" and "Swordfish". Wait, never mind.