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Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (2025)

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2004’s Kill Bill: Vol. 1 was the first—and to this day—only movie I’ve ever watched on a bootlegged camrip. I was a senior in high school at the time, and there was something still novel about torrenting a movie online before it was officially released in theaters, no matter the quality. A friend smuggled a copy of the movie on two CD-Rs into our high school art class, where we cheered & squealed over Quentin Tarantino’s newly achieved levels of cartoonish bloodshed & overwritten dialogue. I’m sure I also saw the movie in theaters that same week, but I don’t remember that experience. I do remember Kill Bill: Volumes 1 & 2 being in constant rotation as second-hand Blockbuster liquidation DVDs during my college years though, casually thrown on the living room TV when no one’s sure what to watch (the same way Boomers in no particular mood end up listening to the Beatles as an automatic default). Vol. 1 was always The Fun One, Vol. 2 was always The Boring One, and they were always buried behind a layer of standard-definition fuzz and only half-paid attention to, like animated dorm room wallpaper. So, twenty years later, I might have just experienced The Kill Bill Saga the way it was meant to be seen for the very first time, despite having been in the same room with “Tarantino’s 4th Film” untold dozens of times. Only, not exactly.

The Whole Bloody Affair is a new, seemingly finalized edit of the two Kill Bill movies, now smashed together to create one monstrously ginormous butt-number. Tarantino has been casually playing around with this project since 2006, undoing the Weinsteins’ work of splitting his mid-career epic into two separate parts by occasionally trotting out this one-long-cut version into prestigious venues like the Cannes Film Festival and his own vanity movie theater The New Beverly Cinema. The original uptown location of The Prytania recently secured a 70mm print of the film and has been running it on loop for the past few weeks, giving its local New Orleans rollout a prestigious feel it wasn’t afforded when DCPs were screening out at the Metairie AMC Palaces last December. So, it’s funny that I still left the theater feeling like I’ve only seen Kill Bill in a compromised, mucked up form. It seems that in Tarantino’s current, meaningless pursuit to land the “Perfect Ten” filmography, he’s gotten distracted by some George Lucas-style tinkering with the original texts. I’m willing to forgive the new silly title cards underlining that both halves of this picture technically count as “The 4th Film” in the Tarantino oeuvre, since the original project was split into two parts by meddling producers. Still, though, I’m skeptical that his original intention was to make a 5-hour movie with a Fortnite cutscene epilogue (“Yuki’s Revenge”), which is what The Whole Bloody Affair ultimately amounts to. I’m also unsure why he felt the need to extend the original films’ anime segment with newly commissioned footage, other than that no one is around to tell him “No” anymore because his most looming collaborator is currently, rightfully imprisoned. All of the newly printed material inserted into the Kill Bills of old are a waste of time & resources, but if putting up with those distractions is what it takes to revisit these films on celluloid with a savvy crowd I’m willing to go along with this fussy nerd’s legacy-curation bullshit just a little bit. At least he didn’t retroactively add a CGI Bruce Lee into the picture, Jabba the Hutt style.

Just as Kill Bill has changed over the years (through newly added animation, alternate takes, and a self-imposed intermission), so have I. It’s difficult to say anything about how this project’s place in the larger cultural zeitgeist has shifted, since it’s been so long since I’ve engaged with it and, more importantly, I’m no longer a teenager. I hadn’t personally seen much anime, wuxia, or kung-fu cinema when Kill Bill first came out, so the film’s stylistic flourishes are no longer as impressive to me now having seen The Original Texts like Lady Snowblood or The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. Like all Tarantino pictures to date, there’s nothing in Kill Bill that represents the best of any genre he liberally borrows from, but he has admittedly remixed them all into something undeniably entertaining & cool — like a video store DJ. Allow me, then, to play overly-opinionated video store clerk for a moment myself and talk about where this outing ranks in Tarantino’s filmography. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 has always been Jackie Brown‘s strongest competition for the best of his best, and the newly restored cartoonish violence of the Crazy 88s fight sequence (previously censored for MPAA approval) only strengthens that case. It succeeds through the same method that Jackie Brown does, by employing real-life participants from the vintage genres he’s riffing on: Blaxploitation superstar Pam Grier & Hong Kong fight choreographer Yuen Woo-ping, respectively. If The Whole Bloody Affair does Kill Bill any favors in the greater Tarantino rankings, it does so by elevating Vol. II, integrating it more smoothly with its better half by dropping the “Until next time …” teaser that once divided them. And yet, the newly, needlessly extended anime sequence drags the first half down a little, so who knows (or cares). Everything else that’s changed about these movies is a jumbled mix of passing time and personal maturity. The choppy bangs, flip phones, and low-rise jeans scattered throughout the revenge epic have marked the passing of time since it first premiered in the early aughts, when all those props & fashion accessories felt as natural as oxygen. I’ve also found a new appreciation for Lucy Liu’s performance as the unlikely assassin turned yakuza figurehead O-Ren Ishii, with her Big Speech about her gender & heritage bringing unexpected tears to my eyes through sheer fierceness. I’m sure that in 2004 I was just happy to watch her decapitate an underling in the following seconds. It was a simpler time; I was a simpler man.

You will find no plot summary here, as I’m already embarrassed to have added this much text to the server space reserved for discussing Tarantino’s filmography. All I can muster the energy for is observations about how the passage of time can dull or distort a movie that means a lot to you when you’re a teenager. For instance, it’s much easier to be dazzled by a live-action Hollywood film indulging a brief diversion into anime when you’re not as hyper aware that there’s much better anime out there; extending that sequence with five additional minutes of footage doesn’t help either. It’s also much easier to enjoy Tarantino’s work in a vacuum without decades of hearing him say things that range from idiotically petty (taking out-of-nowhere potshots at Paul Dano as “the worst actor in SAG”) to outright evil (showing support to IDF soldiers during the ongoing genocide in Gaza). Even if you want to engage with the movies themselves and ignore the man behind them, he’s now stuck in a navel-gazing thought loop that makes the task impossible. Tarantino is currently terrified of directing another feature film because he might mess up his self-assigned “Perfect Ten” filmography, so he’s turned himself into a lowly film podcaster instead, and his niche topic of discussion is his own work. It’s shameful. There are two unqualified positive things I can say about Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair: 1. Its theatrical release is the only good thing to have come out of Tarantino’s current self-analysis era, and 2. It was smart of him to bury his newly commissioned Fortnite animation sequence after the 20 minutes of end credits, where few people are likely to see it. Otherwise, everything that I like about The Whole Bloody Affair I already liked about Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2: two solidly, separately entertaining pieces of post-modern pop art from one of Hollywood’s sweatiest loudmouth bozos.

-Brandon Ledet

Presence (2025)

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There’s a playfulness in the basic tech and form of every Steven Soderbergh picture that invites us to wonder what new toy the director is going to be most excited to play with. However, there isn’t much time to wonder in his new haunted house picture, where his playful tech-tinkering is at its most immediately conspicuous. Shot in a single house over the course of eleven days, Presence is a ghost story told from the 1st-person point of view of the ghost. It’s a clever premise that frees Soderbergh to be as playful with the camera as ever, handling the equipment himself as he follows around his small haunted-family cast and constantly directs the audience’s attention to the act of observation through his wandering lens. The resulting image is a kind of supernatural found footage horror that leans into the improbability of the genre by strapping its GoPro to a ghost, so we don’t question why the camera continues rolling once the violence starts; we only question why that camera operator is choosing to observe what we see (and to ignore what we don’t). The last-minute answer to that question gave me a shock of goosebumps and made me want to immediately rewatch in the way that the best ghost stories do. It’s in the asking of the question where Soderbergh gets to have his fun, though, and it’s delightful to see a filmmaker this many decades into their career still excited by the opportunity to play with the basic tools of their craft.

Lucy Liu stars as the high-strung, wine-guzzling matriarch of a nuclear suburban family. She’s poured all of her hopes and self-worth into the athletic achievements of her jock teen son Tyler (Eddy Maday), whose burgeoning persona as an egotistical bully is directly correlated with the effort she puts into supporting his swim-team dreams. Meanwhile, her daughter Chloe (Callina Liang) is treated as the mother’s genetic leftovers, molding in the back of the fridge while the father (Chris Sullivan) solemnly shakes his head in exasperation. It’s not an especially complicated family dynamic, but it’s one that becomes increasingly eerie & foreboding as it’s filtered through the security-camera eyes of a ghost. At the start of the film, the ghost is trapped in an empty, echoey suburban house, and what fills that void once its tenants arrive (with the help of a comically unprofessional real estate agent played by Julia Fox) are the typical horrors that haunt the modern American family: loneliness, mental illness, drugs, alcohol, the violent radicalization of young men, etc. As the most isolated member of the family, Chloe is the most vulnerable to those horrors, and so the ghost (and, by extension, the audience) spends the most time watching over her, eventually stepping in to protect her from whatever harm can be prevented by a noncorporeal force . . . since no one alive seems especially motivated to actively help.

Since it’s a formal experiment more concerned with what’s implied by every subtle movement of the camera than it is a mechanism for delivering routine scare gags, most audiences are going to be reluctant to engage with Presence as a horror film, likely likening it to titles like A Ghost Story, Nickel Boys, and Here. Personally, I found its icy, distancing approach to form to be effectively chilling, and the movie I most thought about during its runtime was the creepypasta novelty Skinamarink. Both films repurpose the filmic language of the found footage horror genre to coldly observe the isolation & cruelty of modern domestic life from an impossible supernatural vantage point, dwelling on an eerie mood that most people only feel when we’re alone in an empty home. Presence ultimately forms a more traditional narrative than Skinamarink thanks to the mainstream professionalism of screenwriter David Koepp, choosing to answer the question of its ghost’s mysterious identity in a final explanatory reveal instead of letting it hang in the air. I appreciate Soderbergh’s eagerness to bring distancing, arthouse abstraction into mainstream venues in that way, along with implied political commentary that reaches beyond the boundaries of his increasingly small, generic stories. Like other recent Soderbergh successes Unsane & Kimi, Presence is high-style genre pulp that only becomes complex & nuanced when you poke at the decisions behind its creation – most importantly, in this case, the decisions on where to point the camera and when to look away.

-Brandon Ledet

Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle (2003)

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Gen-Z nostalgia for the early aughts aesthetic has been a tough adjustment for me, a Millennial nerd who suffered through that era in real time.  I do not think back to frosted tips, muddy JNCO strips, or Paris Hilton DJ sets with any lingering fondness.  If anything, I see that time as the nadir of modern pop culture.  I recognize that this is the same personal bias that my parent’s generation felt when Millennials aestheticized the 1980s during my college years.  Where I saw new wave neon punks & synths, they flashed back to cheap beer and overly teased, fried hair.  Likewise, there’s a novelty to hearing Limp Bizkit & Linkin Park for the first time in the 2020s that I can’t share as someone who vividly remembers my own cringey years as a nü metal dipshit when those groups first premiered on Alt Rock Radio™.  So, no, I cannot share in any cultural reclamation for the early-aughts movie adaptation of the Charlie’s Angels TV show, in which music video director McG amplifies all of the cheese & sleaze of the era to maximum volume.  Opening with a KoЯn guitar riff, a casually racist gag in which Drew Barrymore goes undercover as Black man in LL Cool J’s skin, and nonstop thinspo ogling of uniformly skinny women’s exposed midriffs, Charlie’s Angels wastes no time with its vicious onslaught of eraly-2000s kitsch.  It’s cinema’s most efficient, thorough crash course in the grotesque cheapness of the early aughts, celebrating everything I loathe about the era and my own participation in it with alarming gusto. 

Its sequel, however, is innocent.  If you do find yourself wanting to indulge in some delicious 2000s kitsch without making yourself sick on day-old fast food, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle is the much healthier option.  You don’t even have to bother rewatching the 2000 original, since the sequel reintroduces its central trio of undercover lady spies with newly sharpened personalities for a fresh start.  Drew Barrymore plays a tough-but-girly tomboy, Lucy Liu plays an overachieving perfectionist, and Cameron Diaz plays a goofball ditz with a heart of gold.  They’re all best friends and frequently save the world while dating cute guys; it’s pretty easy to follow without any additional background info.  It also repeats a lot of the more successful gags (along with some of the more racist ones) from the first movie but does a much better job connecting them in the edit instead of throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks – not much, in the original’s case.  The only way Full Throttle is inferior, really, is that it’s significantly less gross than the first Charlie’s Angels film, making it less accurate as a time capsule of pop culture’s darkest days in the early 2000s. It makes up for it by continuing to pummel the audience with nonstop needle drops & cameos, though.  P!nk, Eve, The Olsen Twins, and members of OutKast, Jackass, and The Pussycat Dolls all appear onscreen while Kid Rock, Nickelback, and Rage Against the Machine rage on the soundtrack.  You never lose track of the movie’s place in time.

Regardless of Full Throttle‘s relationship with the first Charlie’s Angels film or with early-aughts culture at large, it’s a consistently entertaining, maximalist novelty.  Full Throttle is, at heart, a charmingly goofy action movie that makes great use of McG’s candy-coated music video aesthetic, disregarding the guiding laws of physics & good taste to deliver the most joyously over-the-top pleasures it can in every frame.  The girls now have the superhuman power of flight, Crispin Glover frequently disrupts scenes as a feral goblin assassin with no effect on the plot (wielding a sword and only communicating in yelps), and every set piece is an excuse for kitschy costume & production design stunts, often set against a full backdrop of CG flames.  The Angels are costumed as nuns, shipyard welders, strippers, hotdog vendors, and car wash babes during their world-saving adventures as they fight off a bikini-clad Demi Moore and an oiled-up Justin Theroux sporting an Astro Boy fauxhawk.  Whereas the first film was entirely about the fashionista posturing of those outfit changes, McG wastes no time getting to the action this go-round.  Within 10 seconds of entering the frame, Diaz hops onto a mechanical bull to distract a bar full of Mongolian brutes while her teammates rescue a political prisoner, eventually erupting the room into a free-for-all brawl.  Soon, they’re flying through the air in and out of exploding helicopters, and staging wuxia-style gunfights on flying motorcycles.  It took the Fast & Furious franchise seven films to get to the delirious CG action nonsense this series achieved in two.

Full Throttle might be McG’s best movie, but its only strong competition is the straight-to-Netflix 80s-nostalgia horror The Babysitter, so that’s a weak superlative.  What’s more important is how much of an improvement it is over his first crack at this franchise, to the point where he’s somewhat rehabilitated my disgust with the early-aughts pop culture that’s currently making a comeback.  You can even feel that positive shift in which respective Prodigy song the two films choose as their central motif: “Smack My Bitch Up” for the first Charlie’s Angels, betraying its underling baseline cultural misogyny, and “Firestarter” for Full Throttle, punctuating its ludicrously explosive action payoffs.  It’s even apparent in the two films’ appreciation for the Tom Green brand of shock comedy that was rampant in that era.  In the first film, Green appears onscreen himself as an empty symbol, relatively restrained in an extended cameo role that references his real-life tabloid romance with Barrymore.  By contrast, Full Throttle is not afraid to get its hands dirty, prompting Diaz to participate in the live, gooey birth of a baby cow in a sight gag that would’ve been perfectly suited for Green’s magnum opus Freddy Got Fingered.  Having just fallen in love with her sadistically prankish romcom The Sweetest Thing, I’m starting to develop a genuine fondness for Diaz’s gross-out goofball humor in that era, which I suppose means I’m warming up to the idea of appreciating early 2000s culture at large.  I’m just not quite ready to hear KoЯn score a fight scene yet without a little winking irony to soften the blow.  Those Issues Tour memories are still a little too fresh.

-Brandon Ledet