Errata is a web journal written by Robert Davis who has neither spent a night in a ghost town nor pulled a turnip from the earth. He doesn't even know if turnips grow in the ground. Perhaps on trees, like candy corn. Therefore, Errata is a non-commercial project.

Observation #1: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious."

Observation #2: It may be appropriate, when leaving a movie theater, to say "mysterious" at the top of your lungs. Bring your eyebrows together before you say it. Effective!

Observation #3: Same for books. Even at libraries.

There is a prize for people who correctly guess the thing about Metropolis, Nevada.

Except where the text specifically states otherwise, Errata's vagaries are indicated vaguely and its authors are indistinct in the traditional way of the Internet, except where the authors lay claim to their work. In some cases Robert Davis lays claim to work that is not his own but has been abandoned like so many ghost towns. Except where held presently, fistfuls of dirt are suspended via dispersal, or dispersed via suspension (in the air), and thus their dissolution is their transcendence, or their transcendence is their dissolution. And yet our eyes tear, and our vision is impaired, demonstrating for the umpteenth time that one entity's gain is another's fit of sneezes. Except where indicated, storms shall outlive the clay upon which they rain, unless storms are improperly delimited by their clouds, which dissolve, rather than by their inevitable return. Thus the clay loses, unless the clay is said to own the storm, to use it to make itself heavy, to make itself cling to white garments, refuse dispersal, cake upon the facades of abandoned buildings, and sit like Man [sic] upon the earth where it is pelted by a storm that it owns. In which case the clay still loses, if you ask us.

Some of the above is legally binding and should be considered a mental contract between Errata and those upon whom it acts. The bit about the prize should be considered an overstatement insofar as prizes differ from dirt and prize dispersal differs from dirt dispersal. Please recall that ownership is a weight and, therefore, hope that you do not win the prize.

One day Errata or its representatives will call upon you for a favor. It is expected that you will hop-to without delay.

You may contact Robert Davis by email unless it's about the rock that was thrown in anger. The rock is more properly called a clod. Why do you continue to raise the topic?

10 October 2003

Kill Bill: Volume 1

2003, U.S.

director: Quentin Tarantino

Kill Bill is a martial arts movie in which beautiful women battle to the death. They wield swords, knives, chains, tables, and heads of people, but mostly swords, and Quentin Tarantino no doubt identifies with their manic determination and willingness to use whatever weapons are within reach. He obviously still considers this medium to be his playground, and Kill Bill is all the more thrilling for it. Every turn holds a little surprise, but the movie still follows the conventions of its genre, which is another way of saying that Tarantino has found new ways to tell old stories, no small feat.

The movie is a basic revenge tale, the kind in which the hero must defeat a hierarchy of minions before she takes out the boss, whose name is — I don't think I'm giving anything away — Bill. The story develops in chapters that seem at times so disconnected and out of sequence that the movie risks becoming bogged down by tangents. But once it gets going, as it does when Uma Thurman meets up with Lucy Liu, Tarantino lets the events play out at full speed without interrupting them, and although he keeps altering the landscape of this set piece — changing musical styles every few minutes, switching to black and white at one point, and killing the lights so that sword fighters become black silhouettes against an abstract blue grid — the components interlock like jigsaw puzzle pieces, fitting together so tightly that the momentum carries a sequence that must be nearly an hour but feels like 15 minutes.

The opening credits say that the the movie's original music was written by The RZA, the same artist who wrote the trancelike score for Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog, but it's hard to tell which of the songs in Kill Bill were pulled from B-movie soundtracks and which were created recently with the same groovy-retro sensibilities. This is also true of the movie as a whole. Tarantino puts elements of modern culture and his favorite movies into a blender, leaves the lid off, and ends up in a room full of bloody limbs and broken furniture, the floor writhing and moaning like a civil war battlefield. From the movie's first seconds, Tarantino tinkers with things that we take for granted, like the opening credits. He puts numbers next to certain names, the significance of which is revealed in due time. (Even his own credit is numbered: "The 4th Film by Quentin Tarantino.") He continues to play with text on the screen throughout the movie, partly for fun, partly as a nod to Jean-Luc Godard, and partly to help us sort out who is who and when is when.

Several movies in recent years have featured beautiful women fighting, but Kill Bill stands apart from these. Charlie's Angels is mostly interested in silly jokes, whereas Kill Bill's humor is deadpan and spare. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is interested in beauty — of natural settings and choreographed violence — and it's unfair to say that Kill Bill is not beautiful, because it is, but it finds most of its beauty — and indeed most of its humor — in broken bodies spurting fluid. The movie's most violent sequences are stylistically self-conscious, switching suddenly to animation or black and white just before a black mist sprays from every wound.

The image that dominates the movie from beginning to end is Uma Thurman's wide-eyed, often bloodied face framed by matted, shoulder-length hair. Thurman is just perfect as a fighter with a rational brain but an unforgiving heart. Her code name is Black Mamba, but her real name is bleeped every time it's uttered, a wink that recalls the moment in Hitchcock's North by Northwest when a roaring plane engine obscures seemingly important dialog. This creates an odd kind of suspense, because we assume that her name will be meaningful one day, but even if it's not, this flourish elevates the character to mythical status by giving her a name we aren't allowed to hear.

One of Tarantino's strengths is his ear for crackling dialog, but he doesn't use it here, doesn't even try. Then again, this movie doesn't rely on dialog like his other movies do. Here, Tarantino is working with one hand severed behind his back. I still miss his wit, however, because without his words, his humor feels a little less assured. One character has a truck with a funny name painted on it, and we see the funny name 4 or 5 times; in previous movies Tarantino would have been confident enough to tell a joke only once. More interesting than the jokes, which are few, is the recurring, disturbing motif of the creation of assassins, a cycle presented almost in its entirety: pre-assassin little girls, girls who experience violent trauma, girls who seek justice for the trauma, adolescent girls mentored by assassins, and finally assassins as mothers, or nearly mothers. It's the same sort of origin story required for super heros, further enhancing the mythical aura around any character caught in the never-ending swirl of revenge.

Much has been made of the fact that Miramax's Harvey Weinstein unsheathed his own sword and chopped this long movie into two pieces, volumes 1 and 2. Volume 1 feels incomplete but still satisfying; Tarantino's Lego-like plot was probably pretty easy to cleave. One day maybe Tarantino will get tired of the blood and make a serious movie about real people, but for now this prismatic curio stands, by many measures, as his most accomplished work.

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