James just pointed me to the latest issue of The New Yorker, especially noting David Denby's review of the new Tarantino flick. I quote verbatim: In this Quentin Tarantino fantasy pastiche of samurai and martial-arts films, the trunk of a body, its head lopped off, will spurt blood like a fountain. We know that the non-stop violence is not meant to be real: for starters, the blood looks like cranberry juice. Yet Tarantino is working in a photographic medium, and the real-world associations are not so easy to shrug off. Tarantino's heroine, Uma Thurman, kills another female warrior in front of the woman's little girl, and the child doesn't react. Tarantino wants the shock of a mother killed in front of her daughter without the audience undergoing any discomfort at all. The movie is what's formally known as decadence and commonly known as crap. Saying that it's an homage to long-established genres in Hong Kong doesn't reduce its pop-nihilistic stupidity. Some of the sequences have a scintillating visual flair, but you come out feeling nothing at all. And this is only the first half.
Meanwhile, Ingmar Bergman favourite Liv Ullman has issues with the violence in Hollywood and Bollywood movies ("When people see a movie, they should be able to identify with the characters. Films should deal with family life and values"), but is perfectly fine with the excessive song and dance: Ullmann said she is impressed with the amount of Indian culture and tradition visible in the country's cinema. "There is a lot of song and dance and, at times, it is far over the top. But there is so much of culture," she said
