BC-KILL-BILL-MUSIC-$ADV26-NYT

THE 'KILL BILL' SOUNDTRACK: DJ QUENTIN'S RECYCLED MIX

(For release Sunday, Oct. 26)

By ELVIS MITCHELL

c.2003 New York Times News Service

Much has been made of the kung-fu grip of Quentin Tarantino's constantly
morphing "Kill Bill Vol. 1." But the commentary has missed one essential
fact about Tarantino: he is the movie world's DJ, and "Kill Bill" is
another one of his mix tapes. He nestles his flamboyantly shallow film in a
comforting bed of recycled music.

When Uma Thurman, as the back-from-the-living-dead Bride, hot on her
mission of vengeance, goes knuckle to knuckle against one of her foes,
Vivica A. Fox's Vernita, the sweaty, bloody dust-up is accompanied by one
of the most outrageous needle-drop ripoffs in movie history: the shocking
eruption of Quincy Jones' funked-up "Theme From Ironside," from the
"Smackwater Jack" album. (An indicator that action can commence, the music
is repeated later in a climactic swordfight.)

DJ's watching "Kill Bill" will easily tick off the number of times the
jazz/R & B classic has been sampled by musicians, but old-school film fans
know it best from "Five Fingers of Death," one of the first non-Bruce Lee
martial-arts pictures to hit it big in America. (Jones probably still
strokes his throbbing temples when he recalls that "Ironside" was stolen,
and used without permission in "Five Fingers" each time a fight scene
began. At least this time he's being paid. Movie buffs will also nod when
they learn that Vernita's other name is Jeanne Bell. Here Tarantino wedges
another layer into his thick sandwich of allusions: Jeanne Bell was the
star of the blaxploitation throwdown "TNT Jackson," and in one of the
movie's best-known scenes, she took out a phalanx of thugs while topless.

The stacking of multiple references is reminiscent of the 1998
song-compilation "The Document," in which DJ Andy Smith connects the Jungle
Brothers and Jeru the Damaja to the James Gang's suburban "Funk No. 49" and
Peggy Lee's version of "Sittin' on the Dock of the Bay" and, finally, to
excerpts from a couple of the greatest blaxploitation soundtracks ever,
Marvin Gaye's for "Trouble Man" and Barry White's for "Together Brothers."
Like a DJ so on top of his spins that he spreads the next jam just before
you can think of it, Tarantino gives the "Kill Bill" audience a bit of
crunch with Isaac Hayes' "Truck Turner" soundtrack and a bit of honey with
Ennio Morricone's "Death Rides a Horse," from the score for "The Good, the
Bad and the Ugly."

Music gives Tarantino a laser pointer that he uses to guide his audience
through the film's stockpile of information. He begins a section of "Kill
Bill" with Al Hirt's "Flight of the Bumblebee." Hirt's trilling trumpet
joins all of the Bruce Lee references together -- it's the theme from the
film that introduced him to America, "The Green Hornet." Lee played the
Hornet's lethally floating sidekick Kato -- and stole the show from him.
Just before "Bumblebee" vibrates soulfully from the soundtrack, a division
of yakuza bodyguards turns up wearing Kato's uniform from "Hornet" -- black
suit, white shirt, an E-string of a necktie and a black mask with raised
corners. The sequence ends with the Bride in a yellow track suit with a
black stripe -- an imitation of Lee's outfit in "Game of Death." It's an
epochal conflation, and an explosion of visual flair from a filmmaker who
thinks like a graphic artist and never got the chance to show it until this
film.

Tarantino's not simply a film geek; he bridges several worlds of geekdom.
There's a Japanese thrash girl band in the movie that could be something he
picked up at Japan Music Night at the South by Southwest music festival in
Austin, Texas. If you heard a DJ drop Nancy Sinatra's version of the Sonny
and Cher corpse "Bang-Bang" and Santa Esmeralda's "House of the Rising Sun"
-- which Tarantino does on the soundtrack here -- you'd run over and beg
for the DJ's card. But unlike professional mixmasters, Tarantino is so
eager to show off his collection of music and film information that he
jumps to the next reference before you can start nodding your head in
recognition.

Tarantino's movies pile up the visual references, high and low, with
similar abandon: he's surely the first to use anime -- though not
particularly well done anime -- and the French New Wave in the same film.
"Kill Bill," after all, flows from Francois Truffaut's "Bride Wore Black,"
based on Cornell Woolrich's grim-reaper novel in which a young woman tracks
down the men who ruined her life. In the Tarantino version, though, the
Bride's enemies are often women. One of them, Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah),
enters whistling a theme from Bernard Herrmann's "Twisted Nerve" score. She
is lifted, complete with her Modesty Blaise trench coat, from a luridly
engrossing piece of drive-in fodder from 1974, "They Call Her One Eye."
Elle sports the same eye patch and costume as that film's young female
protagonist, who was mutilated and raped and left to die at a brothel. (The
movie gave me nightmares for years after I saw it, because it had the lack
of affect and surreal flatness of a bad dream.)

"They Call Her One Eye" emerged from a genre in which guitar-heavy
soundtracks, a particular Tarantino enthusiasm, were key: the last R-rated
flowering of double-bill, body-count specials. They had less plot than an
Old Navy commercial and titles that were about as ambiguous as a death
certificate -- "I Spit on Your Grave," "The Honeymoon Killers." Tarantino
clearly cherishes films in which willowy starlets --whose acting chops put
them a notch below spokesmodels and ring girls on the talent scale --
endured horrible violence before grabbing a gun, knife or the metal
fasteners that bound the scripts to inflict several reels of mayhem.

His love of female-trouble action movies may even explain his peculiar
obsession with a B-list 1980s TV show that provided the inspiration for Uma
Thurman's Mia character in "Pulp Fiction." Mia was the star of a failed TV
pilot called "Fox Force Five"; there are enough revenge-plot parallels that
"Kill Bill" could be the feature-film version of "Fox Force Five." And
Tarantino based "Fox Force Five" on "Codename: Foxfire," the 1985
television show featuring three of the sexiest babes ever to take on the
forces of evil: Joanna Cassidy, Sheryl Lee Ralph and Robin Johnson. The
women had so much chemistry that it almost didn't matter how astonishingly
awful the show was (almost).

Tarantino's endless catalog of references does not serve, as it might, to
enlarge his film's meaning. Even the exploitation-movie scores that
Tarantino appropriates served, on some freakish level, as social
commentary. But he shows no interest in any social context. He also doesn't
seem to understand that the blaxploitation films he loots were a delivery
system for underground cultural transmissions. The theme from "Across 110th
Street" (1972) roasted the status quo. When Tarantino uses it in a film
like "Jackie Brown," he's ... well, exploiting black talent in the same way
the original's white filmmakers did 30 years ago -- another example of a
white man's profiting more from African-American culture than
African-Americans. Still, there's something guileless in his relentless
quotations from movies and albums -- you can't arrest a man for movie music
love.

NYT-10-22-03 1753EDT

