I don’t know how to review this movie, but I also don’t know how not to review this movie. I’m going to be hearing criticism and praise on all sides, but I want my impression of it to be pure at least in one place.

“Kill Bill” flaunts what is great about American cinema while being an homage to American cinema’s past and still appeals to those who consider American Pie to be cinema.

You don’t have to read the rest. There are spoilers. Not ruining ones, but some people are purists. I’ll complain about that later.

Those who want their thirst for blood and degenerate, evil acts slaked will find their bellies over-full at the end of this film. There will be college boys with their baseball hats bent in that perfect curve and Vietnam vets who will be outside the theater slapping hands at the bloodbath the movie eventually becomes. There will be yuppies warming their hands with Starbucks coffee complaining that Quentin Tarantino just wants to overemphasize the blood to prove he hasn’t lost his edge. There will be gamers and IM’s with personas based on the characters. There will be media fiends who will attempt to filter the film into its base components of one-liners and scenery. And there will be people who “just don’t understand what the big deal is.”

What these people are missing is the brilliance with which the director captures different styles and blends them into his own. O-ren Ishii’s story is handled completely differently than the bride’s or Vernita Green’s simply in its style. Ishii’s background is given to us in animated form, utilizing many of the techniques that made Japanese animation so famous.

After giving us this preface, the rest of Ishii’s scenes are filmed as a brilliant half-breed of modern and precursor Anime and 70’s Kung Fu, the character herself an allusion to the fine blend that Tarantino will use. The overuse of gushing severed limbs and spatters of blood drops *are the style* and the direction does not shy away from it. It is a bold stroke that delivers powerful results.

Vernita Green’s scenes are directly out of “Switchblade Sisters,” a Blacksploitation (sp?) film that Tarantino re-released duing his period of inactivity after Jackie Brown. This also is done with perfect candor about its homage to the genre.

Already, my friends are putting this film on the shelf with movies like “True Lies,” but “Kill Bill” retains a dignity to its bloodiness that cannot be reproduced by many. There’s more here to be said, but I’m at work…