Watched Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2, back to back on Friday night/Saturday morning. Took the first train home. Am still suffering from sleep deprivation.

But it was worth it. Every minute. Vol. 1 looked better the second time 'round, somehow. Vol. 2 is very different. Not as zany. More a homage to '60's and '70's Westerns. The Pai Mei scenes were hilarious and closer to Vol. 1. Gordon Liu plays Pai Mei (a distillation of eccentric, grumpy, funny and amazingly-skilled curmudgeonly kungfu masters) to a T. Tarantino's knack for dialogue comes to the fore here and the uncanny fusion of violence and the mundane, a sense of poetic justice and more fine acting from Uma Thurman make Vol. 2 every bit as good as the first.

My Saturday was spent in a sleep-deprived funk.

More film on Sunday afternoon. Ai Nu (lit. "Love Slave" but somehow the film got saddled with the burdensome "Intimate Confessions Of A Chinese Courtesan" for an English title.) was screened as part of the Film Fest, under a series of erotic Shaw films from the 1970s. Very little character development, fight scenes were a nice touch but the main focus was the revenge theme that have been lifted right out of a pulp novel. The sex and S&M was mostly implied which led to some cheesy (by our standards today) transitions and abrupt cuts. What was shown however, was probably shocking for its time. Some female frontal nudity and lesbians kissing and so on.