Kill Bill, Vol. 1 – 2 stars/Kill Bill, Vol. 2 – 0 stars

After taking my boy to Django Unchained, we started a concerted effort to watch the Tarantino catalogue. When he asked about the Kill Bills, I told him they were films made primarily for children, but were so violent, if cartoonishly so, that children probably shouldn’t be allowed to watch them. Of course, Tarantino is a visionary, having anticipated an audience of children of a wider breadth than I could have imagined, scads of 24 to 36 year old slacker geeks, still living in Mom’s basement, deathly terrified of footballs and baseballs and supervisors and real women, banking retirement on mint condition comic books, their only meaningful relationships having been 2 to 3 minute internet trysts with the various Jenna Jamesons cranked out of the San Fernando Valley with increasingly worrisome regularity.

This is their crack cocaine.

Volume 1 is stylish, meticulous, occasionally funny and inventive but a mostly tiresome abscess of a picture. As if any enjoyment derived from the first picture required penance, Volume 2 is that contrition.