Tuesday October 14, 2003
WHEN BLOWHARDS ATTACK! I thought for sure this Thomas Hibbs thing would be the stupidest piece of written on the subject of Kill Bill:
Now, Tarantino is to be credited with forcing on his viewers a cognitive awareness of his film's liturgy of blood. The question is whether the surface irony is sufficient to justify the willing suspension of moral judgment, not moral judgments about the film's hypothetical causal effects on the behavior of already deranged adolescents but the indispensably moral element we bring to any work of art.
Makes Immanuel Kant sound like the Yellow Kid! But then this monstrosity emerged from the swamp, spewing hyperbole, and topped it:
Set aside what it says about contemporary Hollywood culture that the supposed liberal progressives of this city now ceaselessly mass-market presentations of butchering the helpless as a form of entertainment, even, as rewarding self-expression. Why do we suppose that, with Hollywood's violence-glorifying films now shown all around the world to billions of people... young terrorists around the globe now seem to view killing the innocent as a positive thing, even, a norm?
Me, I had already planned to give Kill Bill a miss, not because it causes terrorism, but because Tarantino sort of sucks.