I have to say, I saw Kill Bill last night, and yes, Lucy Liu looked stunning. Maybe it was the kick-ass attitude as well, but blimey, she was HOT. 
[hijack]
Well, hel-lo dangergene! I too had no idea there was another Singaporean on the boards, and that too a Singaporean who thinks like me! Hooray for this TPLAC*! I’m almost tempted to let loose with a barrage of lahs and mahs. 
As for TV in Singapore, the less said the better. TVMobile was the final nail in the coffin. RIP, Singapore Broadcasting.
By the way, if you don’t mind my asking, are you a local?
[/hijack]
To all the people who felt the same way as me about Lucy Liu, thank you for speaking up! I feel less of a freak now. No one I know IRL felt she was anything great. Idiots! What do they know?
- With apologies to Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay
Her beauty was very disarming, too
Ack! Gasp! Wheeze! chokes over ghastliness of pun
splutter snigger
slight hijack now - the soundtrack - wasn’t it fantastic? I commented when I got out of the cinema that I must find that soundtrack if its the last thing I do. It rocks!
The soundtrack is absolutely fantastic, no doubt about that. But, imho, I think the main reason it really sticks to us is the opening with Nancy Sinatra’s Bang Bang - My Baby Shot Me Down.
The starkness of that song makes you sit up and really take note of the music that comes later. For me, it created this atmosphere of barren desolation that almost forced me to follow the background music even as I followed the on-screen shenanigans of Thurman and co.
It was a supremely understated, yet very, very powerful opening to the movie.
Yes, I think it is that. I remember that it was the opening song that made me sit up and think “hey, this soundtrack rules”. It was the shear desolation of that song that did it for me. I’ve found it on Amazon, so I shall be buying it soon.
The mindless kick-ass violence was pretty good as well
I agree.
And I thought that Sophie Fatale should have been smart enough never to go… unarmed in that sort of company.
Aw, “EFF it!”
She gets her arm cut off!!! Her freakin’ arm gets cut off!!! Hacked-off limbs, limbs, more limbs everywhere!!!
Wasn’t the soundtrack Kick Ass? If you wanted a textbook for “How to use music in movies”, you couldn’t do any better.
My film professor after seeing Kill Bill: “I thought I loved blood before…but man, now I really love blood. It’s just everywhere. I love it.”
Hijack/- Aasna, sorry, I’m not local, but my wifey is. I’ve been here for nigh-on eight years now, so also can lah. Tida apah, etc etc etc. And indeed, TV mobile is the curse of the bus lines! Blah blah, yackety yack! Why can’t they turn the volume DOWN?!? -/hijack!
further, milder highjack/-I actually bought the soundtrack based on the Tomoyasu Hotei piece that plays over the teaser trailer. I must say, I’ve been playing the soundtrack non-stop for many days! My son loves it, not so sure my wife still loves it!-/light on the highjack, so you can slam it down fast!
(Aasna, I got my soundtrack at Sembawang Records).
Sweet Sophie. She’ll need a hands-free unit for her mobile now! chish boom!
And GMRyujin, I’m normally one of those ‘shy away from blood’ types, but goddamn, I say GODDAMN!!! The foutains of pain in Kill Bill were so poetic, so delightful! (and please don’t EVER let me live through something like that! EEK!).
And further to the whole straight-but-deeply-attracted-to-godly-fimstar, I was another of those men who’s never had a homoerotic thought until I ssaw Johnny Depp as Capt Jack! Hoo-wee! Pity my poor colleagues couldn’t appreciate the divine beauty that is Johnny! (I know I’m not alone here!).
Oh yes! The blood was amazing! Now, I’m not normally a blood, guts and gore kind of person, but the fountains of blood everywhere was amazing. I loved it.
And the feeling halfway through that I’d accidentally bought a ticket for a Japanese anime film rather than Kill Bill.
I found the anime sequence rather disturbing, to tell you the truth.
Nothing to be sorry about. I’m not local either.
(Wouldn’t be anything to be sorry about even if I was, for that matter!)
I found the anime sequence rather disturbing, to tell you the truth.
Nothing to be sorry about. I’m not local either.
(Wouldn’t be anything to be sorry about even if I was, for that matter!)
Yeah, I thought it was disturbing, I couldn’t watch a fair chunk of it, but I also thought it was so totally surreal. Which in my books is fantastic.
Those of you who saw the movie, what do you think of this review? http://comments.imdb.com/title/tt0266697/usercomments-692
I didn’t realize that was Nancy-freakin-Sinatra doing that “Bang Bang” song!
Most outstanding.
Did you write the review, dan?
In any case, I disagree with the reviewer in some ways.
One point of dissent is that he says about Lucy Liu’s role:
I haven’t seen anything else by Lucy Liu, so I don’t know about it being her best work, but heavily layered? From what angle was it heavily layered?! Her entire role was carried off by her look and her fights…I didn’t notice any significant acting skills on display! The depth given to her character was provided by the anime short. All that Lucy Liu really needed to do was look regal and glacial.
As regards the violence, well, we have
1. The opening scene with the bride.
2. All the scenes where the bride gets beaten up.
3. The hospital orderly and the door.
4. The anime sequence.
The rest was fairly cartoonish; it really ought not count as gore. So, yes, it was far more violent than your average movie, but the fountains of blood ought not, IMHO, be considered violence, per se.
I am in complete agreement with this, though.
Bingo!
You left out the entire scene in the club, aasna, which took a considerable amount of time to play out - bride fights henchmen, bride fights Sofie Fatale (sort of), bride fights Gogo, and bride fights O-Ren. Cartoonish or not, it was still violence - and if you don’t think dismemberments, beheadings, and other slayings aren’t gory, then we just have different definitions. (And “fountains of blood ought not … be considered violence”? Eh? Wha? Huh? What do you consider violence, if not the presence of fountains of blood?)
Other stuff by her - well, let’s see. There was Playing It to the Bone, Payback, Shanghai Noon, and Charlie’s Angels. Lucy Liu can be very expressive in her eyes and movements, and she simply didn’t do so in any of the above movies - none of them played off her as an actress but as window dressing (in particular, Play It to the Bone had her as a major slut and a real bitch, too). Every time I saw her on screen in Kill Bill, to me she commanded that scene. And that’s a heavily layered performance.
It’s easy to dismiss acting in movies like Kill Bill that appear at first glance to be more about violence than about actual nuance, but I think it’d be a mistake to do so.
Oh, I’m not arguing with you about the violence. Really, I’m not. It was majorly violent.
It’s just that the spurting blood scenes were more stylistic than ferocious. I hate, I abhor, I detest, I deplore violence in movies, and this just didn’t pass the cut. There was lots of blood, but it did not result in terror, revulsion or queasiness. I guess what i’m trying to say is, there were buckets of blood all around, but those sequences were not disturbing.
The sequences that I thought were really disturbing were the ones in my spoiler box, and the Gogo thing which I forgot about.
About Lucy Liu’s acting in this movie, though, we’ll just have to agree to disagree. If you read the OP, you’ll know how obsessively I followed her through the movie ;), and I’m afraid I wasn’t struck to any great degree by her histrionic abilities. She acted, she filled the role competently, but I didn’t see any “layers” to her performance. Maybe the fault lay in the characterization, rather than the actor.