So I watched Tarantino's Kill Bill vol. 1 this morning, finally wading past the intangible feeling of resistance that I developed listening to other people shake their heads in reproof of what they deemed the film's gratuitous violence.

It's been a long time since I watched a film that was so completely tailor-made for me.

It is in its entirety a stylistic, aesthetic experience; like Pulp Fiction, this film doesn't really tell a revenge story so much as it tells a story about certain film genres. As is typical for Tarantino, the dialogue deserves an award -- it's a loving parody of classic samurai and western films. They even do the action zoom-in on the characters' eyes just before a fight breaks out!

From the moment the film opens in "Shaw Scope," devotees of Saturday afternoon kung fu cinema will know that this baby is for them. What I thought was simply a kooky way to start the credits morphed into shock and finally thrill as I saw that Tarantino pays homage not only to conventions of sixties and seventies action films, but to the stars of those films themselves. Most notable: the presence of Sonny Chiba and Gordon Liu. Chiba, for those not familiar with his work, starred in some of the most enjoyable, most violent martial arts films in Japan during the seventies -- such as the Street Fighter series (no, not the Capcom franchise -- think karate experts and pressurized fountains of blood) films. His character here, swordmaker and ninja descendant Hattori Hanzo, is a reference to the character Chiba played in the long-running series Shadow Warriors. Gordon Liu was the star of umpty-ump Hong Kong martial arts films: for his magnum opus, you want to see 36th Chamber of Shaolin, where he plays the part of a young man who goes to become a monk at the Shaolin Temple, er, bent on revenge, and uh, oh just finish the story yourself. There's massive buttkicking, okay? Well worth seeing, I can assure you.

And let's not forget references to the great one himself: Thurman's costume for this film is taken from that worn by Bruce Lee in the incomplete film Game of Death, wherein Lee actually fights Kareem Abdul-Jabbar!

The "Bill" to be killed here is played by David Carradine, who knew no martial arts whatever when he got the lead role in the TV series Kung Fu, which likely accounts for why that series bored the holy hell out of me. We see almost none of him in this first volume, which for my money is just fine. Carradine = fruitcake.

And the fights -- oh, man, the fights; they're choreographed by Yuen Wo Ping, whom you may recognize as the fight designer from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. The knife fight between Thurman and Vivica Fox is about the best thing I've seen -- better than CTHD, and even better than the requisite finale fight with the Kato Klone Battalion near the film's end.

In other words, this is the last time I let somebody warn me off of Tarantino, who I think must be riding the same cultural sine wave I do. I loved Pulp Fiction, but this film is even better. Even without Samuel L. And for me, that's saying something.