Michael Madsen in Kill Bill 2.

There’s a five-minute scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill 2 that any wannabee actors should, IMHO, study for the impeccable timing, expressions and intonation. Here’s the end of it:

If you haven’t already seen the entire movie — that is, movies, plural — Kill Bill 1 (2003) and Kill Bill 2 (2004) (the original four-hour final cut was chopped in two) and you appreciate smart, over-the-top, black-violent-fun flicks, you have a treat coming, Tarantino at his best. Plus one of my favorite actors, Michael Madsen, at his best. Madsen’s breakout role was in Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs in which he redefined the word sadism (this is a guy who in real life hates violence). He was also slated to play the Vincent Vega role in Tarantino’s neo-noir comedy Pulp Fiction, but had prior commitments. Lucky for John Travolta, whose career was revitalized by the role.

In the clip above, Madsen is Budd, brother of the titular Bill, and takes place outside Budd’s trailer in the desert somewhere near Phoenix. Bill (David Carradine, of the awesome Kung Fu TV series of the 1970s) is trying to convince little brother Budd (Madsen), who has seen better days — he’s now an alcoholic “bouncer in a titty bar” — that he needs to get serious about defending himself against the “roaring rampage of revenge” that Beatrix Kiddo (Uma Thurman) is engaged in (for good reason!). Here’s Bill trying to warn Budd, and Budd, pragmatic, a bit stewed, has dialog leading up to the line (Shakespearean in its understatement!): “That woman deserves her revenge … and … we deserve to die.”

While I’m riffing on Kill Bill 2, you gotta listen to a really fine mash-up: how on earth did someone make the connection between Bessie Smith and The Zombies? It plays a few minutes before the movie’s climax (played out to Ennio Morricone’s wrenching theme for the execrable Navajo Joe, described by Joe/Burt Reynolds, as “so awful, it was shown only in prisons and airplanes because nobody could leave”). 

Sorry, got carried away there, I was referring to this mash-up, in which Malcolm McLaren and the Zombies’ She’s Not There is interspersed with Bessie Smith’s intro to W.C. Handy’s jazz classic St. Louis Blues: “Ma man’s got a heart like a rock cast in de sea.” The audio comes from the soundtrack of the 1929 two-reeler of that name, one of the first “talkies.”

Back to the present — or future, Christmas Day, to be precise — when Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight will be released, with perennial Tarantino baddie Samuel Jackson, not to mention Kurt Russell, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Tim Roth and Bruce Dern. And, of course, the subject of today’s ramble, Michael Madsen.

Merry Christmas!