Quentin Tarantino
Kill Bill (Vol. 1 e 2)

Before anything else, I'd like to say that Kill Bill by Quentin Tarantino means, first and foremost, "cinema": more precisely, in my humble opinion, excellent cinema.
In the face of the "filmic material" that Tarantino presents to us with Kill Bill, one might be positively or negatively impressed, but certainly one cannot remain indifferent, and this is a fundamental factor for any type of expression of art or thought.
I felt it was important to make this point because recently I've seen many films that have left me deeply unsatisfied in this respect.
As a viewer, typically, when I go to the cinema, I expect to leave the theater with a few more emotions: with Kill Bill, this happened to me, going against the trend of what usually happens to me lately, after watching films that leave behind only an artistic and intellectual void.
That said, one can easily identify in Kill Bill characteristics that I would define as quite typical on a substantive level, whereas they appear decidedly more original on a formal level.
In other words, Kill Bill, in terms of substance, is a story built around one of the most typical themes of action films, namely the theme of revenge which the protagonist executes with extreme ferocity and rationality, while on the formal level, Tarantino's film showcases its true driving force.
During the screening, it was indeed the formal stylistic elements that made me jump out of my seat: styles, editing techniques, photography, color switches that in any other film would be filmic substance or "specific filmic" here gain even greater and absolute importance, being elevated to the status of art.
Even the "banality" of the plot might be intentionally wanted by Tarantino to further highlight the stylistic aspect, although he seems to revisit with extraordinarily subtle irony certain "types" of genre cinema: the master sword maker, the paradoxically affectionate mother killer, the mysterious boss, the heroine, etc.
The fact that he played with the extremization of violence to grotesque levels to "paraphrase" certain action cinema fights is also an original stylistic move by Tarantino, allowing him to avoid the slapstick parody route used by Jackie Chan.
Not by chance did I speak of "filmic material" because watching a screening of Kill Bill is much like zapping between films of extremely different nature and tone.
With great simplicity, the film contains references to Akira Kurosawa, Sergio Leone, Takeshi Kitano, the Blaxploitation genre, Japanese animations, the splatter genre, Ennio Morricone (for the music) just to name the most evident.
Now, what seems important to me to highlight is that Tarantino, with this film, has managed to achieve, in my opinion for the first time in the history of cinema (or at least within that type of commonly called "Hollywoodian" industry cinema), a true cinematic "fusion".
The only amazing precedent to Kill Bill might be "Tears of the Black Tiger" by the brilliant Wisit Sasanatieng: a film, however, destined to limbo in cinema discarded by major distributors and hence practically nonexistent (in this regard, I specifically refer to the considerations I've previously elaborated on market fundamentalism).
In other words, it's certainly not the first time a director creates a film characterized by a mix of genres, but it's the first time someone does so in such consciously striking, entertaining, and mass-appealing terms.
To draw a parallel with artists who, in my opinion, have much in common with Tarantino, one could say that watching Kill Bill is very similar to listening to Frank Zappa's music, or even better, John Zorn's.
These are artists who, like Tarantino, have achieved the awareness that the most current and substantial form of "fusion" (understood as a stylistic signature) is possible in cinema, as indeed in music, in the ways they present it to us.
Like them, we are all exposed to an enormous amount of stimuli from the world of cinema, music, mass media: an avalanche of propositions unfortunately guided by the logic of marketing that risks flattening our tastes and opinions unless we manage to carve out a niche of expressive freedom as Tarantino or Zorn do. A freedom that becomes symmetrically enjoyable for the viewer/listener.
Transcending genres, deconstructing and recomposing them at will, these alchemists manage to escape those sticky swamps that would otherwise bind them to styles and genres that are now overused, thus achieving a sort of non-style style that becomes a form of free and paradoxically pure expression.
There is nothing left for us viewers/listeners but to learn the lesson and experience the exciting journey we seek when we go to the cinema or listen to a CD.