....LMB: "Public Service Announcement"....

I admit I had my adolescent fascination with Tarantino movies. Yes, his movies are violent, but they're all fluff, pandering to the hipster crowd. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy his stylistic direction of trashy pulp themes and genres, but I can't help to think that he's probably one of the more overrated directors out there (no more than Kevin Smith though). History well tell, I suppose.

Agreed. Kill Bill is Tarantino spending the studio's money to recreate the chopsocky movies he was obsessed with. They were lame then, they're even lamer now. To call this movie violent is to give it credence it doesn't deserve. Yes, limbs are severed willy-nilly, but it's so over the top that it's cartoonish -- but not in a good way.

The whole thing is just a jumble of recreations of shots/scenes QT must have admired as a fanboy and it reeks of on-the-set "Hey, I've got a cool idea, let's try this!"

Obviously, I didn't think much of it.

I liked it. I think I've learned not to take Q seriously, and not to expect more from him than him making a film for himself and maybe the movie-going audience will like it. The anime for the story of Oren Ishii was a nice touch. The blood-spurting was gratuitous, and the film had its cheesy moments, but yeah, I liked it.

An over-the-top cartoon. That would be my assessment too.

But obviously we all saw it on the opening week, so we all bought into the spectacle. Heh.

I didn't see either film, but my wife says that Gangs of New York is the most violent American film. Anyone who both, which do you think?

I didn't see either film, but my wife says that Gangs of New York is the most violent American film. Anyone who saw both, which do you think?

I've seen both, but KB is more recent in my mind. KB is graphically violent in an overkill fashion. There were closeups of decapitations, amputations, blood spurting, but it was pretty much cartoonish. GONY is violent, but it seemed restricted to the fight scenes. But it's been awhile since I've seen it and it wasn't all that memorable to me anyway.

I am thinking I must be jaded a tad because, really, I don't get the whole "Kill Bill was so violent" claim. Yes, the movie did have fighting but the whole portrale of this film was in a humorous manner. I mean if your arm gushes blood as though it were a fire hydrant when you're cut then you might want to see someone for that. In fact, when I saw the way that these people bled, it reminded me forcefully of when King Arthur was fighting the Black Night in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. To answer the Gangs of New York being more violent question, I have seen it, and it was violent, but well I thought the movie was too hollywood for it's own good, much like chicago and moulin rouge. Don't get me wrong, they were good movies, but a little bit forced in their plots in my opinion and were hard to take seriously.

Was it more violent than Natural Born Killers?

Wow, lotta comments for an entry where I really didn't say much of substance.

I enjoyed the movie. Frankly, I mainly go to the movies for visual spectacle. Any movie that I think won't benefit from being seen on a big screen, I figure I'll just rent it later and save money. But I almost never rent movies, which means that I almost solely see movies with visual style by the mile.

Kill Bill is about 90% style, so much so that it's not a matter of style over substance, but style IS the substance. And as long as I'm not looking for deep insight about the human condition, I'm fine with that.

Yes, I feel that Kill Bill was more violent than Gangs of New York and Natural Born Killers. Maybe "violent" isn't the right word, I'm thinking of some combination of "violent" and "gory." "Viory"? "Gorelent"?

I wrote this entry because I felt that the movie publicity establishment was just not driving home the "watch out, really really violent" message. I mean, there was one part where a guy got stabbed, and for a split second, you saw some of his organs fall out of his body and onto the floor. That's pretty over the top, if you ask me.

I think violence is psychological a lot of times. With NATURAL BORN KILLERS, you had cold-blooded killers doing the violence with no consequences and that disturbed many people. I actually didn't think NBK was all that violent, in graphic terms. It's just that many, including even the religious moralists, LOVE violence if it's the good, macho, All-American guy slitting the throat of some Satan worshipping villain. If Mickey and Mallory would have died a horrible death (in Hollywood fashion) at the end of NBK, would it have been as controversial?

So the whole concept of "gratuitous violence" is funny to me. What exactly isn't gratuitous violence? Isn't capital punishment just as gratuitous as a terrorist attack? Far too many people say no.

i think its funny that so many people consider the blood spurting in Kill bill gratuitous and unrealistic. Youve obviously never witnessed an artery being punctured. I am a doctor, and i have spent many years working in emergency. While the blood spray may not be so volumnous as the movie portrayed, the pressure within our arteries causes blood to be sprayed quite a distance when punctured. Many other hollywood films tone down the gore, making it appear more clean when someones limbs are severed. In reality the mess is much more horrifying and, well, messy.