Miramax has, however, been screening it for British press. And if an early-reaction piece that ran last Sunday in the London OBSERVER is any indication of what's to come from the critics (and I'm not saying it will or won't be), Quentin and Co. may want to put shiny tin buckets over their heads for the next two or three weeks.

The basic point of the Sean O'Hagan OBSERVER article ("So has Quentin Just Shot Himself in the Foot?") is that Tarantino has produced a let-down experience that amounts to "a crash course" in his Asian martial-arts cinematic obsessions, one that is weakened by Tarantino's decision to not deploy his usual arch and sassy pop-flavored dialogue

O'Hagan also suggests KILL BILL is a martial-arts action film that "crosses over into the realm of pure pastiche" by offering a pure recreation -- rather than a reworking -- of the grindhouse films Tarantino immersed himself in as a teenager. The only people who will be wholly delighted with KILL BILL, he suggests, will be chopsocky fans and the Tarantino-is-God crowd.

"Put simply, KILL BILL is an all-action martial arts movie with some nods to Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns," writes O'Hagan. "Stylistically, it is breathtaking, not least in the fight scenes and in the central section where O-Ren Ishi's young life is portrayed in Japanese manga-style animation." But he also describes KILL BILL as "CROUCHING TIGER made by [Martin] Scorsese during his cocaine phase."

Tarantino "has already, ominously described KILL BILL as 'the movie of my geek-movie dreams'," and as "30 years of grindhouse moviegoing in a duck press,'" O'Hagan relates. "For the uninitiated, this means all the tropes of both the old school martial arts movies of the '70s, and the more violent Hong Kong and Taiwanese action movies of the '80s and '90s. In short, that means blood, gore, guts, and fights that are choreographed to the point of baroque.

"It means samurai warriors who can balance on the blade of a sword despite the distraction of a thunderously intrusive soundtrack. It means a thin plot line that follows faithfully the honor-through-revenge motif central to the martial arts genre, and features Uma Thurman as an unlikely ninja, who awakens from a four- year coma, dons a nifty brown and yellow tracksuit, borrows a samurai sword, and sets out to dispatch the former friends who betrayed her.

Another thought put forward by O'Hagan is that nine years after PULP FICTION, Tarantino has become so familiar a flavor he's now boxed in. He's become so influential and copied to the point where stylistically he had to go somewhere else.

"Tarantino is in a uniquely difficult situation," film historian and critic Mark Cousins tells O'Hagan, 'because all the things that made him new and fresh when he burst on the scene a decade ago have become over-familiar and hackneyed through their over-use by other, often lesser, directors.

"It reached a kind of tipping point a few years back where every movie seemed to have a scene where the characters argued over pop cultural trivia. More worryingly in the long run is the sense that, like Scorsese before him, the second stage of his career might be characterised by that long, sad search for a subject."

If this is true, KILL BILL "could mark a long retreat into the kind of over-the-top stylistic conformity that will appeal only to his most adolescent-minded fans, of which there are many," O'Hagan writes.

One aspect of this is the (reported) reduced presence of Tarantino's signature dialogue, he observes.

"Curiously, the most radical aspect of KILL BILL is also the most baffling: Tarantino's decision to pare the dialogue to a bare minimum which, though faithful to the genre's unspoken ground rules, is akin to Ronaldo deciding to stop scoring goals in order to concentrate fully on his passing."

"As a fan, I wanted him to play to, and expand on, his strengths... I wanted more talk, and more comedy," film essayist and critic David Thomson tells O'Hagan in the piece. "He's a natural filmmaker in terms of his ear for everyday speech. So to dispense with that is perverse to say the least. As Quentin gets older, I thought he would have a willingness to take on subjects other than cinematic forms. He seems, though, to have gone in the opposite direction, and totally immersed himself in a cinematic form, which is not, I have to say, a good sign."

I called Thomson at his San Francisco home on Monday to make sure this quote was precise, and he told me he hasn't yet seen KILL BILL. This doesn't invalidate his views, but he said them in response to O'Hagan's descriptions of the film.

Tarantino's decision to dispense in KILL BILL "with one of his key signatures -- snappy, street-wise, often chillingly funny dialogue -- [reflects the fact] that he has also chosen to move outside America, both literally in the filming of KILL BILL" -- a good portion of which takes place in Japan -- "and in terms of the subject matter. He has, in short, retreated from the the one big subject he must one day undertake in order to place him among the greats of American cinema.

KILL BILL "illustrates [that] Tarantino has moved further away from real life into the realm of pure filmic reference. The problems that KILL BILL highlights are not new in Tarantino's still small ouevre, but they are writ large. Only time will tell if this is a momentary loss of confidence, or the beginning of another long American directorial decline.

'Film doesn't mean what it once did,' Thomson says at the end of the piece, 'but for a while there, with Tarantino, it did."

All I know is, I tried to read Tarantino's KILL BILL script twice and for some reason I couldn't get through it. Maybe because Uma's out-for-revenge story line never seemed to allow anything else in. It reads pretty good, but I didn't care that much about the story. It may be that Warren Beatty had figured something out when he decided to drop out of playing the "Bill" role way back when (which led to Tarantino casting David Carradine instead). We'll all know soon enough.

Then Again...

To hear it from Tarantino, KILL BILL: VOLUME TWO is more substantial than the first part. VOLUME ONE "is a pure burst of adrenaline," he recently told EMPIRE ONLINE. "[But with part two] we slow it down a little bit, [and] you get to know the characters more. Especially Bill -- he's in every other fucking frame. Two's more like my other movies -- the dialogue comes to the fore, and it's more chronologically fucked. And it really ain't gonna end pretty."

Scarface Wows

If you were looking for real moviegoing electricity last weekend, you didn't have to look any further than the SCARFACE showings. Brian De Palma's 1983 gangster classic opened in 13 major-city theatres as a promotion for the upcoming SCARFACE DVD that hits stores on September 30th. The return of Tony Montana took in $253,659 and averaged about $19,512, which is pretty damn good. It did so well that Focus Features, the distributor, is holding it over this coming weekend in about half of the 13 venues.

I tried to see a 7:30 pm showing of SCARFACE at Hollywood's Arclight last Friday evening and nearly didn't get in. I was told at 6:45 pm that it was sold out, and that the 11 pm showing in the Dome was nearly sold out except for scattered singles. I bought a ticket to see Ridley Scott's MATCHSTICK MEN (a much better film than some of the reviews suggested -- L.A. WEEKLY critic Scott Foundas's comment that Nic Cage's performance is "near his all-time worst" is staggering), and slipped into the second half of SCARFACE after it was over.

Nearly every classic Tony Montana/Al Pacino line in the film (i.e., almost every one) got either a laugh or applause. There were some young guys in the front row who were laughing and talking along with the dialogue a la ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW. The scene that got perhaps the biggest reaction was the one in which a drunken, besotted Montana delivered his big damning speech to the hoity-toity patrons of a posh restaurant, and particularly when he declared, "I always tell the truth, even when I lie." Some people in the audience were telling the talk-alongs to shut up. They were told by others to shut up themselves.

The print looked great and the sound was strong and clear. Al Pacino looks so young, I thought to myself. And Michelle Pfeiffer looks like she's 19 years old -- a perfect porcelain doll with an insolent expresson and snide tone of voice.

I went back to see SCARFACE again on Monday night, when it was again sold out. I was suffering through an all-media showing of Audrey Wells' UNDER THE TUSCAN SUN (a deeply drippy and unsatisfying chick film...trust me) and slipped out at the 25-minute mark and ran upsairs. Same packed house, same responses. It was "event" moviegoing at its best. Everyone in the house knew they were part of more than just a film-watching experience. It was like attending a Baptist church service, in a way.

According to a website I visited last weekend, there are 218 "fucks" in SCARFACE. That's about one every 45 seconds or so. That's not just the four-letter word, but all the permutations and extensions. (Fucked, fucker, fuck, motherfucker.) If you add in all the profane terms the total is 278 -- one every 36 seconds.

If you're in a SCARFACE mood, there's a great Tony Montana sound board webpage (http://www.electricartists.com/scarface/soundboard.html) that has all his famous lines.

Repairable Tragedy

On September 20th, Warner Home Video is releasing three of the greatest WB films produced under the old Jack Warner regime -- THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE, YANKEE DOODLE DANDY and THE ADVENTURES OF ROBIN HOOD. I've seen all three and I'm two-thirds delighted (as would be the ghost of Michael Curtiz if he could operate a DVD player), but that disappointing one-third really hurts.

ROBIN HOOD is nothing less than a Technicolor orgasm. It's full of wonderfully crisp detail, and the extras (including a making-of documentary) and voice- over narration by film historian Rudy Behlmer are intelligent and intriguing. The YANKEE DOODLE DANDY DVD is fantastic in every respect. It looks and sounds better than it ever has on the small screen before, with Behlmer providing another first-rate commentary. But I'm somewhere between shocked and appalled at how substandard certain portions of THE TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE appear.

Most of this John Huston-directed 1948 film looks okay, but some of it looks haggard as hell. Needless sandstorms of grain. A layer of desert dust hovering over certain portions. Scratches and gashes here and there. Mainly in the real-life location footage sections. The studio-shot stuff looks fine.

I'm not saying SIERRA MADRE is unwatchable, but we all know how good films can look on DVD these days after the right digital treatment, and the look of this DVD doesn't cut it. For VHS, fine, but DVD customers expect and deserve much better. Scratches, dirt and grain can easily be removed from the look of a film these days, and everyone knows this.

SIERRA MADRE has a great making-of documentary, and the voice-over narration by Humphrey Bogart biographer Eric Lax is a fascinating education. But the movie has been mastered in a completely second-rate way. Buy it or rent because it's one of the great Hollywood classics, but Warner Home Video should re-do this film some day and honor it properly. All that grain in those outdoor scenes doesn't have to be there. It's really a shame.

A Warner Home Video spokesperson claims that "a full restoration from the original camera negative and soundtrack" were done in creating the TREASURE DVD, using nitrate fine grain materials to create insert sections to cover damage. "Admittedly the original camera negative for TREASURE was in rather poor condition due to theatrical re-issues," the spokesperson adds. "We completed a good amount of dirt cleaning and the resulting DVD is far superior to the laser-disc release."

I respectfully disagree with that last statement. The DVD looks just like the laser-disc version. I own both and I did a comparison. There's not a dime's worth of difference.

I spoke to film restorer Robert Harris about this yesterday. He told me he's examined the SIERRA MADRE negative and says it's in much better shape than the CASABLANCA negative. And yet digital cleanup artist John Lowry did wonders with that film, producing a CASABLANCA DVD last July that is easily the best-looking ever released. Lowry, who's done superb work for Warner Home Video on DVD's of CITIZEN KANE and NORTH BY NORTHWEST, wasn't hired to do the work on SIERRA MADRE. WHV's in-house team did it instead.

WHV execs can talk about restorations and covering up damage all they want, but they obviously didn't make any serious effort to make SIERRA MADRE look its very best. As Tony Montana once said, "The eyes, Manolo. They never lie."

Don't expect any of the DVD websites to chime in about this. They always give substandard mastering jobs a pass because they want to keep the free flow of DVD's coming in from the publicists.

Bill in Venice

Here's an allegedly accurate Bill Murray-meets-the-Japanese story that should have made its way into LOST IN TRANSLATION.

It comes second-hand from Joel Murray, Murray's younger brother (age 40) who acts in films (THE CABLE GUY) and television (DHARMA AND GREG, THE SWEET SPOT). It was passed along by a documentary filmmaker named Mike Bonifer who's friendly with the younger Murray.

I wasn't told how long ago it happened, but I'm assuming not too long ago. At the invitation of someone who looked like a street vendor selling electonic trinkets but who was actually a doorman in disguise, Bill and Joel Murray once wandered into an underground karaoke bar in Venice, California. It turned out to be this super-elegant private club for very wealthy Japanese businessmen and their wives.

Bill shook some hands, and then the owner persuaded him to sing a song. He sang "Sukiyaki" which he had developed for his lounge singer act on SNL but never performed on air. He knew all the lyrics in Japanese.

The place went nuts. Thus encouraged, Bill hoisted one elegantly-dressed Japanese woman over his shoulder like a sack of feed, hiked up her skirt and showed her panties to the audience. Everyone cheered appreciatively. Murray picked up another woman and did the same thing. More and louder applause. Soon Japanese men were telling their wives to line up for their turn to have their panties exposed to the crowd by Bill.

According to the younger Murray, older Bill has two films lined up -- one with (or for) JACKASS creator Johnny Knoxville, and one for director Jim Jarmusch -- that he'll do after the currently rolling Wes Anderson film THE LIFE AQUATIC. Bill appears in Jarmusch's COFFEE & CIGARETTES, but apparently has an arrangement to do a follow-up feature of some kind.

Dust Taking Shape

I've read Robert Towne's script of ASK THE DUST twice over the last four or five years. Based on the John Fante novel and set in 1930s Los Angeles, it's a strong, touching piece about a struggling writer named Bandini (Fante's fictional alter ego) who falls into a tumultous love affair with a feisty woman. Towne has been telling me for the last year or so he's hoping to direct it with Colin Farell and Eva Mendes in the lead roles, but now it's a done deal and good for that.

A deal has come together via producers Tom Cruise, Paula Wagner and Jonas McCord by which ASK THE DUST will be financed with South African money and shot in Capetown, and then distributed by DreamWorks. Towne tells me the South African shooting will mostly cover interiors, with some extra shooting being done in and around Los Angeles. A lot of the film takes place in L.A.'s Bunker Hill section, which of course has changed radically since the '30s and barely resembles the neighborhood Fante lived in and wrote about.

Towne told VARIETY's Michael Fleming he's been trying to get ASK THE DUST made for over 20 years. "If my mother could have turned me down, she would have," the writer-director commented. "Every studio sure did." His last serious effort happened in 1993, when Johnny Depp was "desperate to do it." Getting the increasingly hot Farrell (now shooting Oliver Stone's ALEXANDER) to agree to pay Fante is what made it finally happen.

"Some pictures are jobs but others become obsessions you cannot not think about," Towne told Fleming. "I grew up in L.A. and Fante's story affects me in ways impossible to articulate. John gave me a first edition of his book way back and wrote, 'To Bob Towne, in the hope he will take this to far places.' I never expected it to be 30 years later and in South Africa, but that is certainly a far place."

Towne has been getting some attention in another way lately. His face is currently peering out from a billboard at the corner of Sunset Blvd. and Horn Ave. The Writers Guild has launched a promotional campaign that pairs the faces of normally unrecognizable authors with a famous line of dialogue they've written, and it's been Towne's good fortune to be given one of the best billboard locations in town.

Marc Norman, who won an Oscar for co-writing SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, came up with the ads to celebrate the Writers Guild of America's 70th anniversary. The purpose, Norman says, "is to celebrate the Writers Guild [and to] consider how influential screenwriters and television writers are. Here are lines of dialogue you use in everyday speech, and here's a picture of somebody. You may not know who it is, but if you're in the entertainment business, you should."

Brief Return

I will not go back into that pit of drudgery that doing "What's That Line?" condemned me to. Not with any regularity, anyway. But write in if you recognize this. It's from a period film about Hollywood. A group of filmmakers have just looked at a screen test.

Director: My dear, [name]. Since you paid me $100,000 -- quite a lot of pound sterling -- to direct this picture, presumably you want my kind of picture. This girl, I'll tell you flatly, could not be in my kind of picture. She's impossible.
Director's Assistant: Quite.
Director: She's wooden, gauche, artificial. Completely out of the question.
Director's Assistant: Quite.
Producer: [Assistant's name]?
Assistant: [Name], since you hire me partly to "yes" you...
Producer: You're fired.
Sid: She stinks.
Producer: You're hired.

Translation and Wong Kar-wai

"What did I really think of LOST IN TRANSLATION? It's a sweet, sincere, low-budget effort from a promising young director who's obviously fulfilling her genetic destiny. Throughout the film, Coppola shows great taste in music, design and mood. (And for the record, I thought brother Roman Coppola's CQ wasn't half-bad, either.) I'm sincerely glad people are excited about and supporting this kind of offbeat moviemaking.

"But let's be honest. At its core, LOST IN TRANSLATION is a paradox. It's a Wong Kar-wai movie for people who feel superior to Asians.

"Coppola's condescension toward Tokyoites runs through nearly every scene, with the notable exceptions of the radiant floral arrangement lady, the wedding couple, and their collective 30 seconds of screen time. The directorial approach wasn't intentionally racist, no doubt, but it often played that way. At least, the audience I was with interpreted it that way -- snickering complicitly with every mocking gesture and eye-rolling reaction from the Caucasian leads. Considering the entire movie takes place in Tokyo, why wasn't a single Asian character developed at least to the extent of the one-dimensional Giovanni Ribisi role?

"In a larger sense, the bias is more evident on the part of the rapturous viewers. Those who proclaim thsi Sofia Coppola filmto be a masterpiece really should get out to the local artplex more often. Because LOST INTRANSLATION's look (neon opulence), setting (Asian mecca), theme (hesitant relationship unable to blossom) and style (nuance over plot) are all trademarks of Wong Kar-wai. And the whispered-but-not-heard final line of dialogue is straight out of his IN THE MOOD FOR LOVE

"I also noticed that Coppola's husband, Spike Jonze, lifted Wong's Cannes-awarded signature finale to "Happy Together" and used it at the end of ADAPTATION, but without giving credit or even acknowledging it in the publicity materials. I won't even go into Jean Pierre Jeunet's AMELIE and its uncanny plot and character similarities to CHUNGKING EXPRESS.

"At least Coppola deserves credit for making a movie superior to most of her (American) male counterparts this year. One day she might become as good a director as Lynne Ramsay (MORVEN CALLAR), Claire Denis FRIDAY NIGHT), and Alison Maclean (JESUS' SON) -- three brave, international female directors who deserve the kind of hype being lavished on Coppola. I hope the positive reaction to LOST IN TRANSLATION inspires moviegoers to check out more female and foreign directors." -- Redbeard Simmons