Kill
Bill, Vol I
Review
By Gokhra
CAST
The Bride: Uma Thurman/ Bill: David Carradine/
Elle Driver: Daryl Hannah/ Budd: Michael
Madsen /Vernita Green: Vivica A. Fox/ O-Ren
Ishii: Lucy Liu/Hattori Hanzo: Sonny Chiba/
Alburt (Da Moe): Michael Jai White / Pai Mei (Crazy
88 Fighter): Chia Hui Liu/ Go Go Yubari: Chiaki
Kuriyama/ Sofie Fatale: Julkie Dreyfus/
Organ Player: Samuel L. Jackson
Kill Bill is Quentin
Tarantinos latest exploitation of his arsenal of cinematic masterpieces.
It is an action film with one major difference from all other movies.
All of the major characters except Bill are women, the men having
been emasculated right out of the picture. Well, at least in this
first part.
Story:
The story is short enough to be written on the corner of a napkin.
In fact that may have been what the writers done. It is about one
woman's revenge for brutality against her. Uma Thuran plays The Bride.
Why the Bride? It's because that's exactly what she was form the start
of the movie. The brief, startling opening is a close-up of the Bride
after she's been brutally assaulted on her wedding day. The story
is more about how it is told rather than an actual storyline.
The intro is shot
in black and white. It shows Bill killing off all the guests of her
wedding along with her bridegroom. She is left for dead and wakes
up after a 4-year coma by a mosquito's buzz. That was an interesting
detail.
Not
much is revealed about the lead character. Even her actual name is
bleeped out repeatedly by what's made to sound like malfunctioning
sound equipment. All you can infer form the movie is that the Bride
used to be a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (snake
nickname: Black Mamba). As an agent she was somehow intimately involved
with ringleader Bill (David Carradine) who instigated the killing.
Your guess is as good as any as to why Bill is doing al the killing.
When she awakens,
the Bride writes out a list of her five betrayers and sets out to
cross them off one by one, ending with Bill. So the question is never
what she's going to do but rather how.
The movie is interspersed
with a touch of humour and a lot of boastful one liners. Take for
example when The Bride arrives in Tokyo, she stops off to obtain a
sword from Hattori Hanzo who has been retired for years and is done
with killing. He manufactures a sword for her and tells her "This
my finest sword. If in your journey you should encounter God, God
will be cut."
An unusual part
of the movie centres around an extended sequence in anime which is
set in Tokyo and supplies the history of O-Ren. It deals with a Mafia
kingpin's paedophilia.
The movie ends
with a massive sword battle that sends fountains of red spraying through
a Japanese nightclub and a stunning shot in which the carnage-filled
nightclub's doors open to reveal a tranquil winter garden.
The story revolves around crossing off five names from a hit list,
and the lead character gets to only two of them leaving you wondering
what will happen with the rest of the three.
The
movie has a stunning fight sequences with Uma Thrumans lanky frame
perfectly suited for the kicks. Enjoy the movie with complete suspension
of belief.
Malaysian
Superstar
Michelle
Yeoh
Michelle's
background
Born on August 6, 1962, in the mining town of Ipoh, in Western Malaysia,
Yeoh's ethnically Chinese parents taught her Malay and English well
before she learned Cantonese. She began ballet dancing at the age
of four, and, inspired by "Fame" (1980), she enrolled in
England's Royal Academy of Dance, where she eventually earned a BA.
Though a back injury ended her career as a ballerina, she returned
to her home country to be crowned Miss Malaysia of 1983. From there,
she appeared in a television commercial with Jackie Chan, which caught
the attention of a fledgling film production company called D&B
Films.
Her rise to fame
Taking the stage name Michelle Khan, she acted in bit parts in a number
of forgettable films until her breakout role in the girls-with-guns
action comedy "Yes, Madam!" (1985), alongside noted kung
fu femme fatal Cynthia Rothrock. Though she did not know any martial
arts before signing on to the film, Yeoh reportedly spent nine hours
a day in the gym, working out and learning to take a punch. She had
come a long way from the Royal Academy of Dance. Within the first
five minutes of Madam, Yeoh emasculates a flasher and wastes a quartet
of thieves. Yeoh immediately became one of Hong Kong's biggest female
action stars and was soon appearing in films at a dizzying rate. Always
performing her own stunts, she teamed up again with Rothrock in the
kung fu fest Royal Warriors (1986), and she starred in a violent 'Thomas
Crown Affair' remake 'Easy Money' (1987). While making the Indiana
Jones-style action epic 'Magnificent Warriors' (1987), she got engaged
to department store tycoon and studio head Dickson Poon (the D in
D&B Films). Taking the lead of earlier martial arts divas such
as Angela Mao, Yeoh retired from the movie biz in 1988 and retreated
to a life of quiet domesticity. It didn't last long. The marriage
was not a happy one (the Hong Kong press reported (falsely it turns
out) that Poon suffered two broken ribs after a well-placed kick)
and it ended in divorce in 1992.
The
comeback
Yeoh's career came roaring back after her show-stopping performance
in Police Story 3: Super Cop (1992), where she matched the notoriously
fearless Jackie Chan stunt for jaw-dropping stunt. At the beginning
of the shoot, Chan was sceptical as to whether women could fight,
preferring them to look pretty and to sit on the sidelines. By the
end of the film, Chan was legitimately concerned that he might be
upstaged. Yeoh's hair-raising high-speed motorcycle jump onto a moving
train (she learned how to drive the motorbike the day before the stunt)
was bested only by Chan's death-defying leap from a minaret to an
airborne rope ladder hanging from a helicopter hundreds of feet above
Kuala Lumpur.
Action superstar
The film was a massive success, making Yeoh the highest paid actress
in Asia. Now being billed as Michelle Yeoh, she starred in a string
of popular action flicks, including 'Heroic Trio' (1992) opposite
Maggie Cheung and Anita Mui, 'Tai Chi Master' (1993) along with kung
fu phenom Jet Li, and 'Wing Chun' (1994). Her career of high-flying
stunts resulted in many a dislocated shoulder and broken rib, but
in 1995, while shooting Ann Hui's Ah Kam, Yeoh managed to seriously
injure herself. She misjudged a jump off an 18-foot wall (an easy
stunt according to her) and landed on her head, cracking a vertebra.
Yeoh was put in traction, and it was feared that she would never walk
again. Yet within a month, she was back on the set as if nothing happened.
Success in the US
The American release of Supercop caught the eyes of western producers,
and soon she was cast opposite Pierce Brosnan in the James Bond-epic
'Tomorrow Never Dies' (1997). Once again, Yeoh's natural charisma,
along with her effortless ability to dispatch bands of baddies, threatened
to outclass the male lead. That same year, Yeoh was named one of People
magazine's 50 sexiest people of the year. Back in Hong Kong, Yeoh
received accolades not for her kung fu abilities but for her acting
skills in her role as Soong Ai-ling in the widely praised historical
melodrama 'The Soong Sisters' (1997).
Worldwide superstar
Michelle then went on to star in the martial arts epic, 'Crouching
Tiger, Hidden Dragon' (2000). It became the highest grossing foreign
film of all time by overtaking "Life is Beautiful". The
film was a massive success winning many awards including 4 Oscars
making Michelle a worldwide superstar.
Quote:
"The most important thing is that you have really good friends
and family, and when you go back to them, it's like 'what?' You carry
on as who you are." -Michelle Yeoh
Nickname:
Choo
Languages: Cantonese, Malay, English,
some Mandarin
Personal Information
· Date of Birth: August 6, 1962
· Place of Birth: Ipoh, Perak (Malaysia)
· Nationality: Malaysian
· Current Residence: Hong Kong
· Hair Colour: Black/Dark Brown
· Height: 5' 3" (162cm)
· Weight: 100lbs (47kg)
· Religion: Buddhism
· Chinese Zodiac: Tiger
· Astrological Sign: Leo
Professional Achievements
· Occupation: Actress, Producer (Mythical
Films)
· Martial Arts: Tai Chi and improvised
kicking style
· Education: BA in Dance, Minored in
Drama at the Royal Academy of Dance in
London
· Awards Won: Miss Malaysia in 1983,
1997 People Magazine's 50 Most
Beautiful People, 2001 BT Ethnic
Multicultural Media Awards Best Actress
(Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), 2001
ShoWest International Star or the Year
The
Eclipse
By-
Synergie
The
dusty ground was bright, reflecting light from the sun above. Squinting,
Jack scanned the curved horizon. There: a smooth spot in the distance.
"Perfect," he thought as he bounded toward it, bunny-hopping
Apollo-style.
"OK, Jack,"
the radio crackled after a while. "You better stop now and get
ready. The eclipse starts in a few minutes."
"Dad... I
know what I'm doing," he radioed back, his 14-year-old voice
gruff. To prove it, he took one more hop--then stopped. Jack didn't
want to miss anything.
Grunting, he reached
behind his back--not so easy in a pressurized space suit--and tugged
at some Velcro straps. A little fiddling and he had it: his great-grandfather's
camping chair. Nearly 100 years old, made of green canvas and aluminum
tubes, Jack's family treasured the old thing.
Jack pressed the
chair into the moondust, maneuvered around and wriggled the bottom
of his space suit between the narrow armrests. A button on his glove,
pressed, sent an electrical current surging through his visor, which
darkened like welding glasses. "I love these advanced materials,"
he grinned. Staring straight up at the sun, his eyes felt good.
For the next hour
he patiently waited, watching the sun's disk glide behind something
big and dark: Earth. From the moon, Earth looked three and a half
times wider than the sun. Sometimes Earth was amazingly bright, blue
and cloudy-white.
Today, though,
the planet's night side was facing moonward.
Finally, the sun
vanished. This is what he had been waiting for.... Lit from behind,
Earth's atmosphere began to glow around the edges, ringing the dark
planet with all the colors of a sunset. And from there sprung the
Sun's corona: pale white, sticking out like Jack's sister's hair when
she rubbed her stockinged feet on the carpet back in the lunar habitat.
Jack cleared his
visor to enjoy the view.
The ground around
him wasn't bright any more. It was dim and deep red--aglow with sunlight
filtered through the edge of Earth's atmosphere. All at once every
sunset on Earth was shining down on Jack.
"I bet he
would love this," said Jack. He was thinking of his great-grandfather,
Don Pettit, the science officer of the first International Space Station.
Don had loved to watch sunsets and the red edge of Earth's atmosphere
from orbit. When his tour of duty in space was done, he used to sit
in this old chair by the campfire and tell his boys all about it,
or so Jack's dad claimed.
The radio crackled
again: "Jack, are you seeing this?"
"I sure am,
dad, thanks." He completely forgot to be gruff.
The astronomy
in this story is real. The rest is science fiction--at least for now.
One day, lunar
colonists will stride outdoors to enjoy such eclipses. They happen
about twice a year whenever Earth passes directly between the sun
and moon. Our planet's shadow darkens the moon, while sunlight filtering
through the edge of our atmosphere turns it red.
How dark and red
the moon appears during that interval depends on what's floating in
Earth's atmosphere. Dust storms and volcanic eruptions can fill the
air with particles that redden sunsets and eclipsed moons alike. Sometimes
the moon is so dark it's nearly invisible. Other times it's a lovely
shade of bright copper.
Naturally,
eclipses are not visible from the Moon, but that's only because there's
no one there to see it ... not yet.
Chevy
Sledgehammer
world's
fastest car
The
formula1 cars are the fastest racing cars in the racetrack. But outside
the racetrack there is a car, which is the fastest car in this modern
era. Yes, I'm talking about the Chevy Corvette Callaway Sledgehammer,
the fastest car in the world. To some people it seems that the fastest
car in the world is Bugatti EB 16-4 Veyron 2003 model. Indeed the
EB 16-4 Veyron is one of the fastest cars around. It's not the fastest
one. This car is currently the 2nd fastest in the world. And this
Bugatti is the production one which is almost like the prototype EB
16-4 2002.
Chevrolet
is the top car manufacturer company in USA and this company always
attracted people by creating innovative designs like Corvette Z06
and Camaro SSR. Last year Chevy Corvette celebrated their 50th anniversary
by lunching all new Corvette Coupe, Corvette Z06 & Camaro SSR
Convertible. Z06 is the best Corvette ever made by the Chevy and to
buy one it will cost around US$56,400 & almost Tk40, 00,000 (excluding
tax & vat) in Bangladesh. This car has 202 mph (limited) top speed,
which earned itself the nickname of 'super car'. Chevy knows very
well what a car enthusiast wants and Chevrolet designed their cars
exactly that way throughout the last century.
As
an advanced design of the super car Z06 the Corvette Callaway Sledgehammer
is the fastest V8 engine designed car with a massive top speed of
254.7 mph (409.9 kmph) with a beautiful traction control. Manufactured
in the year of 1988 it's amazing to believe that this Callaway Sledgehammer
is leading the world's fastest cars' list for the last 15 years. This
fifteen feet car has a gigantic 48 Valve, V8 Twin-Turbo engine that
makes it to go 0-60 mph within 3.9 sec. With a speed limit chip this
car can easily do 250 mph and that is really fast. Standing in 9.5-inch
wide tyre and 17-inch classic alloy this front engine RWD car has
better traction control. Its engine has a massive 880.0 bhp @ 6250-rpm
power and the displacement of the car is 5733 cc. The 6-speed manual
transmission is the normal design like other cars but it has a different
taste to change the gear ratio.
This
super car exists only one in the world and this one stand in Chevrolet
Callaway main office in United States. Although the Chevrolet says
that if any customer wants to buy this car it will cost to build a
new one almost US$4,00,000 & almost Tk240, 00,000. But within
these 15 years there has not been a single customer. Upsetting isn't
it?
After
all this I believe no one is going to say that there is an even faster
car in the world. By the time this article is published it may so
happen that any car manufacturing company may produce swifter car
but the actual fact is in this advanced world automobile companies
are now thinking about more advancement in aerodynamic system for
swift acceleration, more advancement in design for safety and better
traction control. There are fewer comparisons regarding the top speed,
luxury or price in this modern age where these are seen as secondary
objective.
Ps:
Information and data - supercars.net
