It’s a Tarantino picture, obviously - his 4th as the screen proclaims in the credits, as if he had nothing to do with From Dusk Til Dawn, Natural Born Killers, or True Romance. Do you think when the next one comes out they’ll put it’s his 5th film? His 4.5th film? Maybe he’s doing this just so one day he can make his own 8 1/2. In any event, this one, like his earlier pictures, fiddles with chronology to the point where the first chapter of the movie (there are five in total in Vol. 1) is actually the last piece of the story chronologically, which centers around an unnamed character called The Bride, played very powerfully by the increasingly attractive Uma Thurman. Four years ago, The Bride was nearly killed and left for dead by associates in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad: O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), Budd (Michael Madsen), and Bill (David Carradine). Miraculously alive, she decides to get even, even steven, and kill every last one of them. Vol. 1 finds her in deadly mortal combat with Green, in her idyllic American suburban home, and Ishii, at a club named the House of Blue Leaves in Tokyo.

Tarantino has pulled off a pretty impressive juggling act to my eye. He’s made a fun action picture that will satisfy a mainstream audience - granted, a mainstream audiences willing to withstand an exorbitant amount of blood and gore for a Hollywood picture - and he’s also managed to indulge deeply into his love of samurai movies, grind house culture, anime, and who knows what else. There are big fight scenes bookending this half, but a great deal of the middle is slow, and Tarantino’s dialogue isn’t really that prevalent, and often carried out in subtitled Japanese. So audiences have to struggle with the subtitles, and the massive leaps of temporality, and the references to dozens of movies they’ve never seen, but when it’s over, judging from the two audiences I’ve been in and my own reactions, he’s got you completely hooked and craving part two like a zombie wants brains.

The picture gets better as it goes along and as adrenalyne-rushing, visually-stunning, cool-as-hell sequences go, the final Chapter in the House of Blue Leaves is just about perfect. From start to finish it is just an exercise in cool, in style. Tarantino’s really just going hog wild here, experimenting with color, with editing, with music, you can really tell he had free reign on this thing, not to mention that he went way over budget and schedule, particularly in this one sequence. But hey, what’s a couple dozen million dollars between friends and conglomerates? It paid off artistically in the end. Or the middle I guess, since there’s still half the film left.