Kung Fu Panda 2 (Jennifer Yuh Nelson, 2011)

If the best sequels build off their predecessors in ways that progress and deepen the shared material, then good sequels must at least avoid simply rehashing the original. In many respects, Kung Fu Panda 2 feels like the first installment of a franchise that, to be frank, never needed to be a franchise. But apart from a too-comfortable relationship with fat jokes in times of crises, the film never comes off as a retread. My favorite aspect of the first film was its respect for Chinese culture, incorporating its art and architecture—the latter, in my opinion, being the most beautiful in the world—with reverence as it played around in the digital sandbox. That sense of appreciation of the culture, even if it is a background for Jack Black's decidedly non-classical style, extends to the sequel, and I found it funny how the faithfully rendered Chinese palaces and pavilions almost seemed a flight of fancy on the part of the animators because of their beauty and grace.

If the first film occurred in tucked away villages and training halls, Kung Fu Panda 2 moves deeper into the urban sprawl of feudal China, massive collections of homes under the watchful eye of a pagoda so large that, were it any taller, God would strike everyone in it with different tongues to stop all communication. But the religious elegance of the pagoda, like the rest of Gongmen City, also carries a grim sense of oppression, one heightened when a wrathful prince returns to reclaim the throne his horrified parents denied him so long ago.

Domino

Tony Scott's Domino is simultaneously one of the sloppiest yet most fascinating American mainstream films made in the last 20 years. It combines the slapdash abilities of two of the most off-the-wall filmmakers working today into a hodgepodge that displays the best and worst of both. It contains Richard Kelly's swirling eddy of jumbled, half-baked ideas as filtered though Tony Scott's postmodern pseudo-poetry. The entire film has, as someone in the film says of a television executive, "the attention span of a ferret on crystal meth." And yet, when the film clicks, it manages to push the most outlandish elements of Kelly and Scott's élans to their extremes, to the point that the whole thing goes collapses in on itself, a red giant becoming a denser white dwarf. Somehow, it works, precisely because it doesn't.

Perhaps the only bit of honesty in the whole damn thing is the opening disclaimer that flashes, "Based on a true story" on the screen before another bit of text, almost as an afterthought, fades in: "Sort of." From the start, voiceovers and shots add exposition even as they bewilder. Scott loops sections of Keira Knightley's dialogue with his layered shots, starting in medias res not only within the narrative but within the background Domino Harvey (Knightley) provides about her life and her missions as a bounty hunter. Every so often, the film folds back in on itself, filling in details of the plot, some of which rearrange seemingly resolved stories with new perspective.

Scott cast Knightley in the role of Harvey, a model-turned-bounty-hunter, after seeing her in the first Pirates of the Caribbean film, but there wasn't much in The Curse of the Black Pearl to hint at the part she plays here. Domino represents the opposite of the majority of Knightley's other roles, an anti-glamor punk who turned to busting noses to vent her Soho and Beverley Hills-injected ennui. She works in a team with Ed Moesby (Mickey Rourke), the greatest bounty hunter in L.A., and Choco (Édgar Ramírez), a street urchin getting out his own psychopathic rage through chasing down bail skippers. Together, they break down doors, crack heads and generally confuse everyone who sees two juiced-up apes with a lithe, petite pixie in tow, a sight all the more confounding in that the lumbering, more experienced masses seem to follow her lead.

Domino unfolds in flashback as the protagonist recounts a horrifically botched job to an FBI psychologist (Lucy Liu). The first action we see is a shootout in a mobile home involving a locked freezer filled with money and a decoder ring on a severed arm, and just what the hell just happened is not fully explained for another 80 minutes. This is one of the more normal sequences of the film. Kelly went hog-wild with his treatment, connecting Domino's early life with her bounty hunting career by having her first assignment end with a lap dance to diffuse a tense situation (natch).

Scott, meanwhile, takes his leap forward with Man on Fire and makes it look like the most aesthetically conventional action movie around. The framing device setting up a flashback leads to a narrative that flashes back, forward and seemingly sideways at will, duplicating the image literally with Scott's production effects and recreating the image in broader terms when each scene is invariably echoed down the road with new details.

If Man on Fire showed Tony Scott broadening his artistic palette, Domino shows him upending his bag of tricks on the table. Besides the sickly yellow gauze that washes over the film, Scott shifts film speed, exposure and lighting on a dime, overlapping images, his long lenses blurring the edges of the frame and capturing the object of focus in almost uncomfortable detail. Domino shares more than a few tricks with Scott's previous adaptation of a narratively daring upstart's script, True Romance, albeit in a more frenzied tone. The reveries in which Domino pours out her thoughts in the narration over half-connected imagery recall the lilting "Gassenhauer" sections of True Romance, and the final shootout is a bigger and bolder take on Tarantino's humorous climax. Even as Scott heads into new territory, he finds ways to tie himself back to his earlier work.

That referential streak extends beyond Scott's own corpus into a host of pop culture items that are paraded about the film on stakes. Domino's father, Laurence Harvey, was an actor, and we see him when The Manchurian Candidate comes on TV -- "I knew Frank Sinatra," chimes in Ed, to which more than one person at different parts responds, "Who didn't?" (Ed also claims to have jammed with Stevie Ray Vaughan and hooked up with Pat Benetar.) The Jerry Springer Show gets lampooned directly with Springer himself joining the fray, while the aforementioned executive (Christopher Walken, who communicates solely in his various tics as if someone made a supercut of his weirdest and funniest moments) signs up the bounty hunting team for a Dog the Bounty Hunter knockoff that glamorizes them in a manner that both disgusts and allures the Hollywood-detesting Domino. Tagging along for that show are former Beverly Hills 90210 stars Ian Ziering and Brian Austin Green, whom Scott torments with constant references to their age and faded profiles, to say nothing of the physical punishment he metes out to them. The film even references Alf via the Afghani driver/demolitions expert. "He once ate a cat," Domino randomly supplies in a voiceover before clarifying: "We don't know how to pronounce his fucking name so we call him the cat-eating alien."

Had Kelly himself directed the film, he might have attempted to make some form of satire out of these references, but Scott uses them to contextualize his aesthetic and the offbeat, absurdist humor of the piece: the attention-deficit visuals grow out of the odd assortment of cultural touchstones assembled here and arranged by a man who trained as a painter. It's the perfect marriage of class and tastelessness.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of the film, however, is the manner in which Scott, whether intentionally or not, heads off any attempt on Kelly's part to try for any depth. Donnie Darko was riddled with symbols and metaphors that opened up interpretations beyond the bog-standard nature of the actual narrative, but Scott seems to take particular delight in throwing every potentially meaningful image at the wall until all that's left is a splattered collage. Domino constantly returns to the metaphor of a flipped coin to discuss her chances of survival during a job, and Scott shows a coin flipping in the air endlessly, often in front of a backdrop of an icon of Jesus, which in turn sometimes flashes back and forth between Jesus' and Choco's face. Domino's goldfish also enters into the fray, and given how many shots are repeated to the point of becoming motifs, even a seemingly meaningless image becomes a deliberately empty "symbol" through suggestion. The scene involving Tom Waits (ever the show-stealer) as some mystical wanderer in the desert proves this best of all: he speaks in portents but is divorced from the narrative even as he envisions the finale. The message is that there is no message. By stripping Kelly's more esoteric and muddied aspects and making them at once even more vague yet streamlined, he makes the strongest and most cohesive work Kelly's ever written, keeping all the fun and engaging doublebacks and misdirections while leaving out the thin satire (here, it's just dark comedy, and it works magnificently).

Despite the ridiculous pace the film maintains, Domino sags under the strain of its moving parts, most of them barreling ahead in opposition to the rest. But I still can't help but love the movie. Scott's visual style is so playful, overshooting someone and drifting back to proper framing as if someone accidentally put the outtake reels of setting up the blocking into the canisters for copying and distribution. He does not attempt to make the film about anything, instead using his knack for detail to paint an emotional abstract of what would otherwise be a painfully uninteresting film. I can not get the memory of the college kid's foot shaking in antsy impatience, the actual lion roar that comes out of Choco's grimacing mouth while on mescaline or the illuminated glimpses of Knightley's furious face in the climax as she fires assault rifles in darkness. Domino allowed Scott the chance to take stock of all that he'd learned with both the camera and the editing suite. He would refine the best of his abilities for use in his next project, and he'd end up making his masterpiece.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1

Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill is a two-part "movie-movie" that tells one story yet begs to be considered separately of its two films, not simply because the they project largely different moods but because each is such an orgiastic display of obscure film knowledge that even a reviewer who largely does not recognize and identify the majority of the references to Western and Eastern cinema outside of broad genre familiarity (such as this reviewer) cannot hope to contain the films' sheer sense of mimetic revelry in one review.

Of the two, Vol. 1 is the more audacious: who else but Tarantino would dare to open his film with a stark black-and-white shot of a pregnant woman begging for her life, then jump from that scene and the somber opening credits to a brightly lit, dazzlingly quaint suburb where two hot chicks engage in a kung fu fight straight out of an exploitation movie? Yes, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is a film that announces that it's style over substance from the start, one built on a story of vengeance that affords more emotional weight to a samurai sword than the plight of its wronged heroine (in this installment at least).


The style, though speaks for itself. Vol. 1 is, quite possibly, the most immaculately composed action movie since Kurosawa's Yojimbo or High and Low. Even as someone whose understanding of visual composition extends only so far as a loose grasp on the rule of thirds (which this film helped me learn), I stand mesmerized by Tarantino's acuity.

Good thing, too, as it keeps me from focusing too deeply on the plot. Tarantino, of course, tells the story out of order, so we meet The Bride (Uma Thurman) when she's beaten to a pulp and awaiting the worst. She only has time to tell her tormentor, "Bill, it's your baby" before she's shot in the head and sent into a coma. Then we leap four years into the future as she tracks down one of the people of her old squad of assassins who betrayed her. The woman, Jeannie Bell a.k.a.Vernita Green a.k.a. "Copperhead" (Vivica A. Fox), a colleague in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, is not the first name on The Bride's list, we later learn, and Tarantino eventually doubles back to cover that as well.

Where the non-linear storytelling of Pulp Fiction added a degree of excitement to its freewheeling joy, the temporal distortion of Kill Bill is more an affectation, a holdover from the writer-director's apparent need to live by Jean-Luc Godard's maxim, "A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end...but not necessarily in that order." Vol. 1's structure exists, it would seem, to ensure that the final, more outlandish, fight occurs at the end of the film rather than its chronologically appropriate time before the shorter duel between Copperhead and The Bride (once code-named "Black Mamba"). Couldn't Tarantino have simply written the film so the less epic fight came first? Well, perhaps not, as Vol. 2 shows the fights growing increasingly anticlimactic (more on that later).

Of course, if the film's temporal structure is nothing more than an affectation, it certainly doesn't stand out against the rest of the film. One can defend his Death Proof primarily on the grounds that "it's supposed to be cheesy and dull," an argument built on sand but largely true, as Tarantino is so loyal to his beloved B-movies that he would design a film to deliberately ape their banal segments as well as their exciting ones. You see the first traces of it here, though Vol. 1 is anything but boring: after adding his own voice to Elmore Leonard's work in adapting Rum Punch into Jackie Brown, Tarantino here filters his unique voice through the sieves of Chinese wuxia and Japanese yakuza flicks, jidai-geki and kung fu; thus, characters spit out hilariously stilted dialogue focused solely on warrior codes of honor, vengeance and purity: ex-Viper O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), a half-Japanese half-Chinese woman born and raised on an American military base, climbs to the top of the Yakuza power ladder, she only expresses rage when one chauvinistic, xenophobic lieutenant decries her mixed blood ("expresses rage" might be too soft a phrasing to communicate the severing of a head).


For those who wish to catalog the specific spoken and visual references, godspeed. Vol. 1 takes Pulp Fiction and snorts Vincent's prime heroin, resulting in a bloody, foaming frenzy of film quotation. The most obvious form of genre reverence is easily witnessed in the casting of Sonny Chiba, king of the Japanese martial arts films, as Muramasa-esque master bladesmith Hattori Hanzŏ, a character itself named for the real-life ninja Chiba played in Shadow Warriors. The plot itself, of a woman exacting revenge for the death of her family, comes from a 1973 Japanese film Lady Snowblood. Those with time to kill might enjoy perusing an unofficial list of the various films and television shows references and marveling at the obscurity of some of his choices.

This mimetic orgy more or less allows Tarantino to get away with murder. Critics have accused the director of glorifying violence from the on-set of his career, but Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown largely alluded to the violence. Even the infamous ear scene in Dogs was blocked from our view by the assailant. Tarantino's movies, including his recent Basterds, create the illusion of gratuitous violence by teasing out situations with suspense that is practically, well, not Hitchcockian, as it relies on strength of character; where Hitch drew us in with the ominous threat of some device, Tarantino uses his loquaciousness to make us give a damn about these characters and to hang on every threatening word. When violence at last erupts, it's brief and brutal, occasionally funny in a gallows way but even in those situations carrying an undercurrent of vicious finality.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 doesn't much give a damn about that; after suffering the abuses of misrepresenting critics for years, he finally decided to become what they'd always cast him as and absolutely let loose.Tarantino takes the so-called "blood explosion" from the end of Kurosawa's Sanjuro and uses it for every severed appendage -- and oh boy are there a lot of them. Refusing to use CGI, QT uses the wire works that made a return to prominence with the Matrix films and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but for all the skill of the choreography, the violence is decidedly campy. People fly through the air after receiving a normal punch or lose arms in comedic fashions; Vol. 1 presents all the violence Tarantino supposedly injected into all of his films, but it's so absurd that the swifter kills of his other films maintain a severity and an unsettling feeling where this is just the hyperviolent equivalent of a sugar rush. Even in a film as unsubtle and meaningless as this, Tarantino's sly enough to make the film's animated segment its least cartoonish part.


The House of Blue Leaves showdown in particular stands as a hallmark of contemporary action sequencing even if it's all one big joke. The prolonged fight with the Crazy 88 is a madcap free-for-all as wildly visceral and unhinged as it is meticulously crafted. Before the fight breaks out, Tarantino's camera roams the restaurant as if searching for the action, but in his Scorsesian tracking shots he builds a mood of tension simply by breaking from The Bride's POV for a few minutes. In Uma Thurman's tall, powerful presence we feel safe, but Tarantino turns the patrons and employees of the restaurant all into devices because by following them we assume that they will soon prove important. The actual fight is an exercise in formalism, using flawless editing, framing and mise-en-scène all while keeping our attention rooted in the action of the characters and not those behind the camera. Supposedly, the proposed conjoined version of the two films, dubbed "The Whole Bloody Affair," reinserts all the censored footage and plays in color (I guess the decision to film most of it in monochrome allowed it to pass the MPAA board, which for any other body would be the stupidest thing you could imagine them demanding but for them is something more akin to a typical Tuesday). Having seen the color version, which appeared in the Japanese release, I have to confess a certain fondness for the high contrast black-and-white that gives the OTT bloodbath a certain elegance.

Yet while that sequence works and works brilliantly, aspects of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 are trapped in the director's movie-movie euphoria. As with Spielberg and the Indiana Jones films, Tarantino is so loyal to the B-movies that inform his project that he also ports over some of the unfortunate racism of those movies; in one extraneous scene, a Japanese man with the most hideous fake buck teeth since Mickey Rooney offended his way into our hearts in Breakfast at Tiffany's accosts O-Ren's psychotic 17-year-old bodyguard Gogo (Chiaki Kuriyama). Furthermore, the music selection, normally a Tarantino staple, is the weakest of his career. It's not that the music is bad, and indeed its broad sampling of the Green Hornet and Twisted Nerve themes along with contributions from the RZA, Japanese guitarist Tomoyasu Hotei, all-gal garage rock band The 5.6.7.8's and more is perfectly appropriate for a film that exists on the strength of its odd references. But where the music of his other films helps not only to create a world but invite the audience into it, here it's simply another part of the referencing.

Still, the worst thing I can say about Vol. 1 is that, compared to Tarantino's more substantive use of references and violence, it is merely a "fun" movie, an bizarre charge to level against a film and even more useless when you consider how absurdly enjoyable the film is. In The Bride we find the greatest example of a female character kicking butt with a blatantly phallic weapon since Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And there is some depth when we reach the end, when The Bride emerges from her slaughter to face O-Ren and, without ever making it explicitly clear, the director lets us know that the two assassins used to be friends. Tarantino's non-linear structure finds its relevancy here, as we see the first emotional consequence of The Bride's quest for vengeance, followed by a reminiscence of The Bride's time with Hanzŏ, where he gives her his final sword with a warning: "Revenge is never a straight line. It's a forest. And like a forest it's easy to lose your way, to get lost, to forget where you came in." With this line, juxtaposed harshly against the cartoony glee of the preceding bloodbath, Tarantino sets the stage for a more mature rumination on the theme of revenge, one that he would explore not only in the film's next chapter but in his most recent opus.