Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by halfnote (A) on December 08, 2005 at 21:42:17

Some might remember the rather harsh comments I posted in connection with my viewing of KBV1. So when I had occasion to view it successor, I was not hoping for much. But what unfolded from the very first frames of the film was absolutely captivating -- imbued with a visual richness and dramatic tension that harkens back to the best of John Ford and Howard Hawks (in fact, one shot from "The Searchers" was quoted several times throughout the film), impelled with deliciously clever dialogue and stunning shot selection, and peopled with characters who were at once two-dimensional comic book cliches and yet mythic and filled with pathos at the same time. This was not simply more of what impressed so many of us in "Pulp Fiction;" it was a more articulate and masterful realization of many of the same artistic aims.

Yet, KBV1, in comparison, seems flat, obvious, and lacking in comparison. It's almost as if all the dross and plumbing was filtered out of an epic tale, so that the pure distillate could shine more brightly in the second volume.

Together, the films seems like a dialectic, each tending toward a totally opposite end of the cinematic spectrum, yet masquerading as a single continuous story. These two volumes are not the bookends that their titles might suggest, but polar opposites, with different artistic aims.

The first, an exercise in kineticism for it's own sake; the second, a more mediative, expansive, and poetic expression of the same story line. Perhaps V1 is a kind of setting for the real diamond that emerges in V2.

Maybe so. It may also be that V2 is simply a better film than VI, that VI is a kind of grinding exposition that sets the stage for the real fireworks in V2. Yet, VI has so many flat scenes, you have to wonder if it couldn't have been better.