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The following interview was conducted on behalf of 'Filmtwat' magazine or 'Cinecunt' or something, but was never published because I just made those magazines up.

Quentin Tarantino is the fan boy's fan boy. The fuckwit is single handedly responsible for the post-lad reinvention of film criticism. Shit magazines like this one only even exist because he made cine-nerdism temporarily chic again in the mid nineties. It's because of him that people pretend that Star Wars is their favourite film instead of Citizen Kane these days. Wasn't that fucking nice of him.

Now he's returned from a lengthy period of not having any fucking ideas, with his new film Kill Bill, a self indulgent homage to a bunch of films that the people at this publication really aught to know all about, but have never even fucking heard of.

Mantis:
Quentin, fob us off with the same self promotional spiel about your new film that you've been flogging all week, so that the readers will all conform to the same preconception about the things presented before them, while deluding themselves that they have some grasp of industry mechanics.

Quentin:
Yeah man, so I grew up watching forms of cinema other than those made immediately available, which is really what you all should have been doing, but seeing as you are all too fucking lazy I've conveniently repackaged foreign culture for you into the ultimate, balls out, in your face homage to things you've never even heard of or give a shit about. I've pushed back the boundaries of credulity to bring you a tapestry of post-modernism that will blow your 'nads clear through your body and right out of your mouth. That's what I've done. I'm new-cinemas wunderkind.

Mantis:
So, Uma Thurman's track suit is a clever reference to the Bruce Lee film Game of Death? By pointing this out this I lend an air of authority to this publication, even though I only even know this because it says so in the press pack that Miramax sent out. Anyway. Tell us more about that.

Quentin:
Yeah man. My films full of shit like that. Its like a whole cultural collage, you know. I've taken all this superficial shit from a bunch of films I've seen that were made by better film makers than me, and, like, recontextualised them for white middle class cretins. It's like a sort of post modern 'Where's Waldo'. You know, it's like, the amount of references you spot is directly proportionate to your value as a human being. Some of them are TOTALLY obscure and if you spot them then you're like a pop culture genius or something.

Mantis:
You mean like the masks on those bad guys? Those are like Kato's mask from Green Hornet, aren't they?

Quentin:
Hey, yeah. You spotted that.

Mantis:
Yes. I 'spotted' that because you pointed it out in the fucking dialogue. So you used to watch Green Hornet when you were a kid? So what? What do you want, a fucking medal? Is it not enough just to have these things in your film? Do you REALLY need to actually point them out in the fucking dialogue in case we don't pick up on quite how fucking clever you really are? What the fuck is this? Tiny Toons?

Quentin:
Sorry?

Mantis:
I mean, correct me if I'm out of line here honey, but your movie, is it not a piece of shit? I mean is it me or is it not totally fucking boring?

Quentin:
No way man, its a rip roaring rollercoaster ride of revenge. Its in your face action all the way.

Mantis:
Really? See I remember the whole thing being retardedly slow. I remember you milking each one of your small hand full of sight gags for about three minutes at a time, and always refering to the sight gags AGAIN in the dialogue in case we missed out on quite how post modern you were being. I remember the whole thing being a huge amount of padding for about ten minutes of fight sequence at the end. I remember the whole thing being a mixed metaphor. I remember it presenting the imagery of a particularly stupid chinese movie, but having the mechanics of a sixties Japanese movie - thus denying us the freneticism of the one, and the elegance of the latter. I remember slouching back in my seat and constantly wanting to yell 'JESUS CHRIST UMA, YOU ANEMIC BITCH, READ YOUR FUCKING AUTO-CUE A LITTLE FUCKING FASTER AND GET THE FUCK ON WITH KILLING SOMEONE ALREADY!'. I saw a film that looked like it was written by a fourteen year old. Not a film that looked like a thirty year old had dug up a bunch of ideas he had when he was fourteen. No, that would have been fun. The film I saw just reeked of an unpleasent adolescent sort of blood lust that lacked the mischeivousness of, say, Evil Dead II and conveyed an overwhelming disrespect for women. AND every time you did something, you couldn't just DO it and get on with it, you had to rub our fucking noses in it. 'All my characters are female. Ive made an intertextual reference. Ive got an anime sequence. Look at me. wheee!'
THAT was the film I saw.

Quentin:
I thought this was an interview.

Mantis:
Fuck that shit. I'm bored of that gag now. I wasn't getting any mileage out of it anyway. I want to yell about your crappy film instead.

Quentin:
I LIKE my film.

Mantis:
Well I DON'T. I mean, It's a film that starts with the old Shaw Brothers logo, you know. Tee fucking hee. But then it proceeds to be less fun, less demanding and less compelling than almost any old Shaw movie-of-the-week knock off I care to mention. WHY? Because the whole time you are TRYING so fucking hard. The whole thing is perpetually trying to be so fucking cool that it never loosens up. It borders on the ridiculous. It almost becomes ridiculous, but then cowers away from BEING ridiculous for fear of looking ridiculous. The 'intentionally bad' moments only come at the expense of your source material. The humour is never self mocking, only derisory. That's pretty fucking cheeky under the circumstances. Disrespectful, I would say.

You proclaim to be exceptionally versed in the mechanics of Asian pop cinema, yet you've made a film which panders to the lazy western conceit that Chinese and Japanese films are 'silly' and deserve to viewed only whilst 'drunk with the boys' on a Friday night. To make a martial arts film takes a fantastic amount of directorial talent, dear boy, and far more technical expertise than almost ANY other form of cinema. It's the genre which separates the wheat from the chaff. Ang Lee, for instance, turned his attentions to martial arts and made Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and it is therefore safe to say that he has gonads the size of lemons. Zhang Yimou tried his hand and produced Hero thus proving his directorial penis to be incredibly enormous. Kill Bill, dear, proves only that you masturbate too much. Frankly, you've invested in a project that is FAR above your station and the whole thing reeks of effort.

Quentin:
Hey, my film kicks ass.

Mantis:
No it doesn't. It merely displays its ass, then expects to be congratulated for it.

Quentin:
I've got one chick fighting eighty guys. Eighty! And they're all REAL, so it's better than The Matrix.

Mantis:
Yes its better than The Matrix. Much better. But if I shit my pants right now, my pants would make better viewing than The Matrix. So you have a fight with eighty guys? Whoopy fucking doo. Tsui Hark would START a film that way, then continue to build from there. You END your film like that. So some guy gets killed at an evil board meeting. Big deal. That happens in Star Wars for fucks sake. If you want to play in the big boys league, you gotta work at their level. You're working at Buckaroo Banzai level. You got a bunch of good components and a few good gags, but your spread thin. REAL thin. Maybe that's Disney fucking with one really busy picture and dragging it out into a series cos every fucking movie has to be its own franchise these days. So maybe that's not entirely your fault. I don't know. But there are whole other issues at work.

Example. You've appropriated the imagery of Asian cinema, but with no apparent understanding of the culture behind it. In that respect you've just made a sort of brightly coloured analog The Matrix. The joy of a Shaw Brothers movie or a Jackie Chan vehicle or the like, is that they are carefree and frivolous and thoroughly unpretentious. Kill Bill by contrast is INCREDIBLY self conscious, like it just came out the hair salon and hasn't gotten to a mirror yet or something.

You could learn a thing or two from your friend Mr Rodriguez and his recent Once Upon a Time in Mexico, which as a slice of ludicrous comic book Americana works far better than your sorry effort. Why? Because it works on its own terms. The strengths of American cinema are character dynamics, dialogue, pretty faces, collateral damage and pyrotechnics - and these are the levels upon which this film operates. Its an American film which is silly and ludicrous in an American way. So it works on American terms. You, young Quentin, have made an American film which purports to be silly and luduicrous on oriental terms, but I'm afraid the stakes over there are much MUCH higher, and your effort just doesn't cut the mustard. It's not a terrible film, in all fairness, but it doesn't even come close to standard. Stop trying to play the Chinese game you stupid white bastards. All of you. You know who you are!

So anyway. Kill Bill. Pointless. So fuck off already. End of interview.

I'm now going to go watch the first five minutes of Dead or Alive followed by the last five minutes of Shaolin Soccer, just to purify my mind of your stupid fucking movie.

Quentin:
Can I come?

Mantis:
No.

NB: Quentin Tarantino probably doesn't talk like that in the slightest.

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