That's Entertainment

In reference JB Doubtless's post below, let's add Star Tribune columnist Colin Colvert to the list of local media types still living their dreams of nihilist, post adolescent geekdom. And thanks to their positions in the elite media (relatively speaking), they get to tell us all about it, in the pages of our local paper. From Colvert's review of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill:

"Kill Bill" is a grindhouse revenge picture made by a mad mastermind. The film opens with three great inside jokes and a shock cut to a battered, gasping Uma Thurman that hits like a Louisville Slugger to the ribs. ... The unseen Bill, wiping the blood from her face with his handkerchief, murmurs tender nothings, then shoots her in the head.

So let me get this straight, for our entertainment purposes, Tarantino presents a battered, gasping woman who is then sadistically shot in the head by a man. All in 70mm, widescreen, Technicolor glory. And this is just the opening sequence of a movie saturated with this particular artistic vision.

It sounds absolutely horrendous. Watching it would be, should be, torture, to any reasonably sane, non-criminally inclined adult. And maybe that includes Colin Colvert, who admits its affect on the viewer is that of a baseball bat to the rib cage. Because nobody likes that, right? Getting your rib cage hammered with a baseball bat, it's a miserable, destructive experience, correct?

Wrong. In Colin Colvert's world, it's awe inspiring and brilliant. And it bears repeated exposure. His summation of the film:

As it stands, Tarantino's film is the "Gone With the Wind" of splatter movies. ... What makes this more than a filmed massacre? The staging, the sound and film editing, the berserk ambition yields the most artful and awe-inspiring fight sequence since Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull." Using his spatters of red like daubs and slashes of pigment on canvas, Tarantino makes us fully aware of the sheer graphic excitement of bloodletting. With four months to wait until the concluding chapter, I expect to see "Kill Bill, Volume 1" several more times."

Maybe after three or four more viewings of this sadistic carnage, he'll be properly desensitized to it all. (Isn't that the inevitable effect of repeated exposure to violence and gore?) Then Colvert can start his search for the "Citizen Kane" of snuff films, or maybe the "Seven Samurai" of car accident and autopsy movies and then give these a glowing recommendation in the pages of the Star Tribune. I'm sure that's just the kind of entertainment tips folks in Eden Prairie and Woodbury are looking for.