I remain too distracted to produce contemplative opuses detailing my recent experiences, so here is some brusque vagueness about my tremendous weekend and some recent adventures in cinema:

Kevin Cornell’s bachelor party meant food, booze, billiards, and video games all night at Dave & Buster’s on Friday. The Table’s opening reception for the Land Lines exhibition meant beautiful photographs from Nicki Stager and Micah Danges on Saturday. The Incomparables’ second annual warehouse party meant rock ’n’ roll, wrestling, projections of Jan Svankmajer shorts and other experimental video oddities, a live burlesque stripper, and quality time with some friends I hadn’t seen in a long time.

Kill Bill: Volume 1 is low on plot but high on style, the first half of a revenge odyssey that tips its hat to spaghetti westerns and samurai flicks the world over. Uma Thurman is out to lay her vengeance upon the disparate members of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad for the violent disruption of her wedding four years ago. This volume sees her dispatch Vivica A. Fox, Lucy Liu, and hordes of sword-wielding Yakuza thugs in a blur of spurting blood and severed limbs. I’m used to Tarantino contorting his pulp influences into something a bit more meaningfully layered, but despite its shallow narrative, Kill Bill: Volume 1 was expertly crafted and every bit as entertaining as I wanted it to be. As the final showdown will be with a 66-year old David Carradine in Kill Bill: Volume 2, its tentative February release date can’t come soon enough.

Dirty Pretty Things is a drama billed as a thriller. It thrives on Chiwetel Ejiofor’s and Audrey Tautou’s excellence in creating sympathetic characters, in this case, illegal immigrants struggling amidst the heinous realities of London’s underground black market organ trade. The leads’ efforts triumph over a nearly cardboard villain (played by Sergi López, a poor man’s Dan Hedaya) and a rather melodramatic conclusion, making this a very worthwhile film.