tjkkenn

I'm a fan of QT and much admire his earlier films, but sorry sports fans, Kill Bill is a tedious piece of junk. That Tarantino planned at one point to release both "volumes" as one three-hour film is astonishing. After the first hundred severed limbs, I couldn't stop yawning. With its inexorable cartoon violence; the predictable BS posturing of virtually every major character; and the obvious trajectory of its threadbare plot, Bill is technically flawless, emotionally antiseptic, and dramatically dormant. Clearly, QT has spent himself. To be fair, Reservoir Dogs was a masterpiece; Pulp Fiction, audacious and brilliant...tick tock tick tock... Then Jackie Brown, a nice adaptation, but hardly earth shaking. And now comes Bill, which owes everything to cheesy, grade-C, 1970s Japanese fight-flicks. Buckets of blood and meat-grinding mayhem do not of themselves make for scintillating cinema. The trick that eludes Tarantino is how to keep the viewers' attention while he attempts a hybrid of Seven Samauri and the World Wrestling Federation. The sensual aspects alone should have been enough to sustain interest, but no. Ultimately, Bill becomes an exercise in fever-pitched tedium. Perfecting the cinematic equivalent of crap is hardly an achievement, no matter how well-crafted the montages.

Pay no attention to dispeptic, angst-ridden critics who find this kind of fare unfunny and out of favor. (Well, maybe it is out of favor.) Who cares, it's funny. House Calls is a thoroughly enjoyable tale of mis-matched, middle-aged singles working their way toward romance (or a loose approximateion thereof). No car chases, space ships, or wild sex antics here. Instead, a cast of likeable people (Matthau, Jackson, Richard Benjamin, et.al.) and the great Art Carney as one of the more incompetent physicians ever portrayed on screen. The film puts a smile on your face and keeps it there. Ambitious? Of course not. The stuff of sitcoms? Yeah (in fact, it became one). Enjoyable? You bet. This is one of those films that reminds you how much fun it can be simply to sit down and be with old friends.