I'm not saying Daniel Mendelsohn of the New York Review of Books ripped off General Stuff's review of Kill Bill, but consider the similarities and the fact that General Stuff published his opinion back on November 13, over a month before Mendelsohn sounded off.
Here's the Mendelsohn piece:
It's Only A Movie
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/16836
Here's how Mendelsohn summarizes his argument:
"The problem with this—and, ultimately, with the "movieness" argument in general—is that the writing and the actors do "have to do" something. What, after all, if you don't know who Pam Grier or Robert Forster is? Tarantino's devotion to his B-movie idols is touching, but it shows up the flaw in the argument that (as the admiring New Yorker writer put it) the reason that "Tarantino is as good a filmmaker as he is is that he is an audience member first and a director second." But audiences are necessarily passive, whereas directors must transform what they have seen into a new vision. Tarantino ingests, but it isn't clear that he digests. Watching Tarantino's films—and none more than Kill Bill—is like being stuck in a room with someone who, like so many of this director's characters, can't stop talking about the really neat parts in the movies he's seen. This is entertaining if you share his mania, but if you don't, he ends up being a bore.
Here it is worth mentioning that Tarantino emphatically rejects the notion, advanced by some critics, that his paraphrases and quotes of other films are meant to be ironic. "I mean this shit," he has said. "I'm serious, all right." Tarantino, in other words, has absorbed whole all of the movies he has seen, from the vampire flicks to the Douglas Sirk melodramas he so admires; in his filmic allusiveness, there is no "take," no postmodern frame— no point of view. He just loves these movies without judgment, without critique. "It's hard to pin down Tarantino's taste," the New Yorker writer commented, "because he likes nearly everything." Another way of saying this, of course, is that he has no taste at all.
The lack of a sense of intellec-tual process or judgment that characterizes Tarantino's approach to his movie influences helps explain the ultimately vacant quality of his work, no matter how clever it often is. This is certainly true of Kill Bill, but it also goes for the earlier films—the ones "about people." When they first came out, I enjoyed the structural cleverness of Pulp Fiction, the comfortable plot machinery of Jackie Brown, the taut, depraved claustrophobia of Reservoir Dogs. And yet when I saw them again recently, I was surprised to find myself bored by all three. In the end, they feel wholly disposable—they're not really about any of the elements they are made up of (crime, guilt, race, violence, even other movies), and it occurs to you that Tarantino doesn't have any ideas about them either. He just thinks they're neat things to build a movie around.
This, in the end, is the most troubling thing about Tarantino and his work, of which Kill Bill may well be the best representative: not the violence but the emptiness, the passivity, the sense that you're in the presence not of a creator but of a member of the audience—one who's incapable of saying anything about real life because everything he knows comes from the movies. (It occurred to me, after I left the Kill Bill screening, that Tarantino may well think that "revenge is a dish best served cold" really is an "Old Klingon Proverb.") People worry about Tarantino because they think he represents a generation raised on violence; but it's as a representative of a generation raised on televised reruns and replays of videotapes that he really scares you to death."
Consider these selections from General Stuff's original review a month ago:
"The problem with Kill Bill – and Tarantino’s movies in general – is that they not only partake of genre conventions, they celebrate their complete absence of originality. These are not genre films: They are imitations of genre films. One leaves Kill Bill entertained, for sure, but also wondering: Why didn’t I just rent the originals? I’ve seen this before.
A recent article on Tarantino in the October 20, 2003 issue of The New Yorker celebrates the very attributes of his films that make them second-rate genre films. Writer Larissa MacFarquhar explains, “One of the reasons that Tarantino is as good a filmmaker as he is is that he is an audience member first and a director second.” Well, no, bitch, that just means The General could write one of his movies. What makes a good filmmaker is that he is a filmmaker first, untalented audience member second. If Hollywood only made films audience members want to see and are capable of making themselves, it would be all amateur porn all the time. While The General loves his porn, he doesn’t consider it “filmmaking.”
Tarantino embodies the gluttonous and indiscriminate consumption of culture that is ruining North America. For Tarantino, watching films doesn’t seem to be an aesthetic experience marked by selection, but rather a fix for an addiction. He doesn’t want films; he needs them."
And:
"The Coen Brothers have used genre filmmaking to their advantage on many occasions, testing the boundaries of the detective genre (The Big Lebowski) and film noir (The Man Who Wasn’t There), for example. Often in Coen Brothers movies it is the clash of genres that creates comedy, or reflection on generic conventions.
Unlike Kubrick or the Coens, Tarantino offers no such innovation. He trots out staple characters and subjects them to familiar treatment, occasionally offering some wry dialogue, interesting casting, or evocative musical selections, to add a scent of the original to what is otherwise just the daydream of a video store clerk without a vision of his own."
Aside from the obvious fact that Mendelsohn is a better writer than The General (hey, you can't call yourself General Stuff and demonstrate a judicious approach to language at the same time), the two arguments are surprisingly similar:
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Tarantino doesn't digest movies and imitate them with his own vision: he just imitates "without judgment, without critique"
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The General used The New Yorker piece on Tarantino to demonstrate several points, in particular the idea that he is an "audience member first, director second"; Mendelsohn did the same
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Mendelsohn rejects the "postmodern frame" argument for Tarantino; The General did the same (in an unquoted portion)
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Both reviews end by referencing, directly or indirectly, Tarantino's tour as a video store clerk and how it informs his aesthetic; Mendelsohn calls it a "generation raised on television reruns and replays of videotapes"; The General called it "the daydream of a video store clerk without a vision of his own"
I know, I know: That's a pretty weak case. But time and time again The General is ahead of the curve. And when I tell the truth, I use words like "fuck" and "motherfucker".
4:01:46 PM 
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