"Kill Bill".

This is coolbert: Movie review:

The movie being reviewed today is "Kill Bill I and II".

I consider "Kill Bill II" to be a continuation of "Kill Bill I". I believe this was the intent of the director, Quentin Tarantino.

These movies are said to be homage paid by the director to genres of the martial arts movie and the "spaghetti" western. Indeed, music is heavily borrowed from the latter to set the scene for final show downs, etc.

In "Kill Bill I" [more so than in II], the director DOES an excellent job of portraying the Japanese "way of the warrior" [bushido] as NOT only being about warfare. Bushido has an entire "world view" for the practitioner [samurai], and is a philosophy as well. This has been talked about in previous blog entries.

To the samurai, aesthetics play a powerful role in design and manufacture of weaponry. This is again shown in I more so than II. A weapon has not only a utilitarian value to it, it has [and must] have an aesthetic value as well. Beautiful is the correct word. The master sword maker, played by Sonny Chiba in this case, now only makes katana samurai swords of the highest quality, but does so for, in his own words, "for aesthetic and sentimental value". Such concepts seem to run counter to the western image of weaponry. [This is not entirely true! Weapons that "look" good quite often ARE good. Humans seem to have an intuitive sense that when it "looks good", it probably IS good.]

Strangely enough, Sonny Chiba plays the role of the retired sword maker Hattori Honzo, who now works as a sushi chef. Perhaps NOT so strange. Perhaps the last use of swords in modern Japanese society is the wielding of four foot long flensing swords by big, beefy Japanese men [yes, there are such people], who have the job of dividing a seven hundred or eight hundred pound tuna carcass into manageable pieces. The men that make these swords to this day are extremely conscious of quality, and are reputed to have only one or two swords meet standards for each five attempted.

Contrasting imagery is used by the director during the filming of the climactic sword fight between the heroine [Uma Thurman], and the villainess [Lucy Liu]. Such images as the appearance of blood sprinkled on newly fallen snow and the working of a Japanese garden Shishi-Odoshi - Deer Chaser contrast the seeming contradiction of violence on one hand, and beauty on the other.

See these movies for the entertainment that they are. Contradictions to westerners yes, but to the Japanese, NO!!

coolbert.