Kill Bill Fallout

New Republic blogger Gregg Easterbrook, whose anti-semitic comments included in his slam of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill caused a media shitstorm last week, has been canned from ESPN.com as a result. Details here at yourish.com.

Former Reason Intern and current Los Angeles Business Journal staffer RiShawn Biddle has suggested that Easterbrook's dismissal from ESPN.com something to do with attacking Disney (the owner of Miramax, which released Kill Bill, and ESPN).

I had the misfortune of seeing Kill Bill over the weekend. As many of the commenters to this blog noted last week, it's amazing that anyone could have been so righteously offended by the cartoonish, stylized violence of the movie (it's also staggering that anyone would see that movie and then start talking about Jews). What Easterbrook called "filth" is in fact boring and tedious–it's a shame no one at Miramax had the cojones to edit the two volumes of Kill Bill into one good, two-hour flick instead of letting it run as two over-long, slow-moving segments (think of it as a mediocre double album that might have made a fun, peppy single album). But in the disturbing violence category, Kill Bill doesn't even rise to the level of Reservoir Dogs (where the violence was especially menacing and uncomfortable) or Pulp Fiction, both of which are not uncoincidentally far more interesting movies. (I'd also place Jackie Brown) far ahead of Kill Bill in terms of being a well-wrought urn).