cunningly self-serving sagacity.
The movie plays on Carradine's persona as Cain, the totemic star of the TV series Kung Fu, referenced by Jackson in Pulp Fiction. Yet Carradine bends the lines to his own shaggy willfulness; he delivers a superman soliloquy lifted, in part, from Jules Feiffer's book The Great Comic Book Heroes, which also summarizes the director's ideas about character.
The immensely talented Michael Parks was also built for Tarantino's volubility. His respect for Parks -- the former Then Came Bronson and Bus Riley -- and Parks' ear for confession is a sign of his appreciation of craft.
But the movie, which quivers with a geek-adrenaline rush, in some ways feels like its time may have passed; it seems like a film Tarantino might have made before Pulp Fiction.
Vol. 2 works like a multimedia mix tape, and Tarantino rides the tempo of his films like a DJ, abetted in the wheel-in-a-wheel trickiness by the deft fingers of his editor Sally Menke. When one of the characters in Vol. 2 makes an offhand remark about "undisputed truth," Tarantino's actual forebear is clear: the R&B producer Norman Whitfield.
With his regal reserves of arrogance and unstated sexual paranoia, Whitfield was the link between Detroit slick (Motown) and funk (Parliament/Funkadelic). While adding a few licks of his own, Tarantino, like Whitfield, gets goose flesh from the evil that lurks within.
RSS