I saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 yesterday, and, while I enjoyed it, I felt the movie was neither "the personal reverie that generates a dramatic power of its own" as Variety's Todd McCarthy rhapsodized (the first review a lot of us read on the film, but now only accessible to Variety subscribers, so I apologize for the sketchy link), nor the "shapeless mess" as opined by The New Yorker's David Denby, or evidence of our incipient "cultural retardation" as pointed out by the pugnacious Armond White of The New York Press.
This is Tarantino: the man clearly loves cinema. He lives it and breathes it. This is a good thing. This cannot be more evident than running through the trailers leading up to Kill Bill, where one can practically smell the stink of cynical merchandising and Hollywood manipulation behind the bullshit of Van Helsing and I, Robot. Tarantino makes movies because he loves movies. Unfortunately, I fear that may be the only thing he loves (apart from the pop ephemera of growing up in the 70s). The man is 40 years old. He should be hitting his artistic and intellectual stride. Instead I find in his films, as fun and as visceral as they are, the work of a very smart, very talented, very precocious 16 year old. Which is not to say they are strictly immature, but there is a shallowness of emotion and experience that comes from a life ensconced in dark sticky theaters and in front of TV sets with smouldering bong in hand. I'm perhaps being harsh, but that's only because I think Tarantino has it in him to be a truly great filmmaker. Playing "spot the reference" is great fun for movie lovers, but its nothing more than a parlor game. It may sound trite, and it's been said a thousand times, but it's the universality of the human condition and experience that makes art truly great and transcend whatever perimeters we may place on it. Sometimes movies need to be more than to be about movies.