rewatched kill bills (1 & 2) last night. is this the most compelling film about motherhood or what? i've always enjoyed how stilted and stylized tarantino's dialogue is, the precision of the mannequin-like reality of his aesthetic. reminds me of a film studies class i took freshman year in college and writing my final paper on pulp fiction though my instructor had expressly asked me not to because she disliked violence and didn't want to be forced to go see the movie. this condition created one of those breakthrough early college papers where you see your thinking synthesize in ways for the first time. apart from simple scene by scene explication, i made it my mission to prove that the film itself is such an artifice, and that this is hardwired into every element: mise en scene, plot, dialogue, acting performances, etc. that the violence is simply another stylized element that resists a viewer's belief, thereby sidestepping the usual ethical grounds that would make it repellent. at this time i had no formal knowledge whatsoever of postmodernism, self-reflexivity, the renegotiation of the maker and receiver relationships, ideas of the genuine, etc. i only intuited this from my own experiences with art to that point, the most notable of which was seeing the warhol retrospective at moma in '89- an experience more useful than all of high school as far as i'm concerned.