Mitchell v. Tarantino, Vol. I

Elvis Mitchell drops some mad movie geek science in this article on the Kill Bill soundtrack. It almost seems like a throw-down, with Mitchell proving he can dissect the kung-fu, blaxpoitation and b-movie allusions as fast as Tarantino can assemble them.

I thought this riff was particularly impressive:

Music gives Mr. Tarantino a laser pointer that he uses to guide his audience through the film's stockpile of information. He begins a section of "Kill Bill" with Al Hirt's "Flight of the Bumblebee." Hirt's trilling trumpet joins all of the Bruce Lee references together — it's the theme from the film that introduced him to America, "The Green Hornet." Lee played the Hornet's lethally floating sidekick Kato — and stole the show from him. Just before "Bumblebee" vibrates soulfully from the soundtrack, a division of yakuza bodyguards turns up wearing Kato's uniform from "Hornet" — black suit, white shirt, an E-string of a necktie and a black mask with raised corners. The sequence ends with the Bride in a yellow track suit with a black stripe — an imitation of Lee's outfit in "Game of Death." It's an epochal conflation, and an explosion of visual flair from a filmmaker who thinks like a graphic artist and never got the chance to show it until this film.

There's a trenchant criticism buried in this article: Tarantino has a huge vocabulary and yet manages to do so little with it. Mitchell also has a large vocabulary (as he shows above) and writes about the racial politics of movies like 8 Mile, Matrix Reloaded and, hell, even Pootie Tang with humour and insight.

It's hard not to like a guy who namechecks Gwar, and writes lines like "The most astonishing thing about 'Daddy Day Care,' a comedy that would have to work harder even to justify the appellation uninspired, is that a kick in the groin is now a joke for toddlers."