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DVD Tuesday: Kill Bill and exploitation nostalgia
DVD Tuesday: Kill Bill: A trip down exploitation-movie memory lane!
I like Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse (2007). But I love Tarantino's Kill Bill. Both tap into fond memories of haunting the real grindhouses of New York's then notorious Times Square.
Times Square was never what it used to be: There was always someone around to tell you that you should have seen it when. Cue some nostalgic tale that starts, "it was so sleazy that…." Trust me, back in the 1970s it was plenty sleazy, and today it's like the Las Vegas casino version of its bad old self. But what a place to see low-budget American horror, yakuza pictures, spaghetti Westerns, Eurotrash thrillers and sexploitation, martial arts epics, mondo movies and assorted weirdness, all of which (and more) go into the Kill Bill mix.
The plot is simple, if digressive: A professional assassin code named "Black Mamba" (Uma Thurman) is murdered on her wedding on her wedding day. Except that she doesn't die: After four years in a coma, she wakes up and begins plotting her revenge against everyone who had a hand in destroying her life: Her four partners in crime (Daryl Hannah, Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu and Michael Madsen) and big boss Bill (<a href="http://www.tvguide
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