It is ridiculously easy -- and, simply, ridiculous -- to dismiss Tarantino's hyperstylised take on Shaw Brothers cinema and his martial arts influences as just another pastiche of homage following homage.

Indeed, Tarantino claims that nothing in the film is original as virtually every sequence owes its origin, context or stylistic treatment to film or TV show or comicbook.

Yet it isn't where the ideas come from as much as what Quentin does with them, and this film finds the auteur-director at his most joyous, chopping through convention with a cheeky wit so bloody sharp it might well have been made in Okinawa.

This glorious anime sequence, for example. With horrified eyes the young Oren-Ishi-I watches as her family is brutally murdered before her eyes. She is watching from below the bed and is about to react as she sees her father's corpse skewered by an unforgiving sword.

In one of the most ingenuous uses of animation in a modern motion picture, Oren's lips quiver and the letters W-H-I-M-P-E-R leave her mouth, only for her to gasp as she stuffs them back in, muzzling herself with her hands.

The violence continues as we are narrated her apocryphal backstory, of how she survives a fire and gets herself her revenge.

Watch the video, and I dare you to look away from this tremendously compelling sequence.

Kill Bill is, quite simply, one of the finest-crafted revenge sagas in the history of the format. Tarantino plays fast and loose with the format, leading lady Uma Thurman rises up to any occasion thrown in her general direction, and the rest of the cast, from David Carradine to Michael Madsen to Darryl Hannah, is plain super.

The film is known for borrowing from its influences; and only a man like QT -- who casually throws in gems like this impossibly fluid tracking shot -- can end up making a homage the most influential martial arts film of its generation.

Also Read: The Review

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