Western Courier

Issue date: 4/23/04 Section: The Edge

Grade: A-

Quentin Tarantino should quit making movies and earn a living by charging people to watch him brainstorm. Fans know him just as much for his hilariously passionate love of pop culture that comes out in mile-per-minute verbal outbursts as they do for his cinematic tales. One imagines that upon seeing Tarantino make the rounds of late-night talk shows ‚ even the manufacturers of Ritalin throw up their hands and say‚ "We don't know how to help this guy."

Only a person with crazed senses of uninhibited creativity and devilish humor could have conceived some of the scenes in "Kill Bill Vol. 2‚" the conclusion to last year's exhilarating kung-fu revenge flick. Take‚ for example‚ a segment in which the Bride (a seriously peeved Uma Thurman) travels to New Mexico to confront her former boss‚ who left her for dead in a wedding-day massacre. She is buried alive inside a crate. Henchmen pound the final nail into the makeshift coffin‚ and the screen goes black with nothing for audiences to focus on other than the sounds of Thurman's breathing and dirt being piled on top of her wooden cell.

The darkness fades into a flashback in which she comes under the tutelage of a seemingly ridiculous‚ kung fu master who looks like a wizard from the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy and talks in four-lettered proverbs like an incredibly drunk Yoda.

Far be it for me to spoil any potential thrills‚ but let me just write that the way this anecdote ends - in a middle-of-nowhere diner with an understandably dumbfounded waiter at the counter - is so nutty and yet so perfect.

Please forgive the profanity‚ but there is simply no other way to put it: This is bad-ass filmmaking.

And just think‚ these are merely the ideas that Tarantino settled on. One wonders what some of his earlier ideas were that got scrapped because they seemed too darned wacky.

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