Kill Bill Volume 2 last night with Victor. Uma Thurman has an impact on me similar to the way Marilyn Monroe, in her more serious roles, affects me. Both are stunningly beautiful, but I think that I want to like their acting more than their skill warrants. Marilyn’s comedic roles are brilliant–her timing, delivery and body language superb–but when she screams “Murderers!” in The Misfits, I just cringe. Same with Uma, I’m just too aware of her acting. Think of someone like Meryl Streep–one’s certainly aware of her artifice–yet she so inhabits her characters that I’m taken in by her transformation. So anyway, Uma is Quentin’s star, so I’ve gotta love her. And I loved the movie. The tone was a little less frenetic than the first Volume, with references more specific to the spaghetti western and the Hong Kong Action flick than than to the myriad sources culled for the first film. The scene where Uma is buried alive had me squirming in my seat, opening my shirt collar for air, and about to race from the theater screaming. And then we suddenly cut to a scene of Uma’s training, all the while thinking of her suffocating in that box, under all that dirt, as we meander slowly through her learning to punch her fist through a block of wood, the crucial skill that will save her.
Earlier in the week Big Chrissy and I were treated to Charles Ludlum’s The Mystery of Irma Vep at Berkeley Rep, which I saw Everett Quinton, Ludlum’s lover, perform solo in New York in ’93 or ’94–or maybe it was Camille? The play was a real fun campy Rebecca meets Wolfman. The audience, oddly, was mostly blue-haired ladies–and us.