KILL BILL
Rated R

Three bits of advice after viewing “Kill Bill Vol. 1” at a late afternoon showing:

• Wait for the DVD with both volumes put back together if you would prefer the picture make some sense, storywise.

• Do not take young children under any circumstance (rated R, and they are not kidding this time). This is not a date movie either, unless you know each other extremely well. Maybe not even then.

• Give it a pass if you are tired of yakuza, samurai, anime, or Tarantino.

I like Tarantino. I don’t know him all that well, though we used to run into each other fairly often, every day or so for a time.

At the Hollywood Arms — I think that was the name of the courtyard apartment place on that boulevard where they lived — his door faced that of a good friend, Jimmy Huston (“My Best Friend Is A Vampire,” “Running Scared,” “Dark Sunday”).

Tarantino came to the screening of “Running Scared” and the trip to eat somewhere afterwards with all of Jimmy’s other pals. He was funny. He made three movies that are among my favorites. Usually, I can watch one of his pictures over and over.

Don’t think so, this time.

Not that it isn’t good. It is really well done, sort of. There are great scenes, and his send-ups of grouchytiger/biddendragon-flying-fighter flicks had me laughing right out loud.

Gushing goo got tiresome, though, after awhile.

There are only so many spurting arteries you can watch before you start to wonder how much those little pumps cost, or whether he uses plain old lawn sprayers stuck down in the fake neck stumps.

When you find yourself admiring scene structure all the time, you know the movie lost you somewhere along the way. You are usually supposed to be too caught up in it for that. Of course, Tarantino expects you to admire these scenes, recognize the references, and be transported to a higher level of simultaneous awareness.

That’s what he is after, and it works a lot of the time. Amazing.

But not enough of the time.

Starting with a girl-in-a-coma beginning looks promising, until the bizarre quality of the first scene hits you, complete with hospital equipment beeps on the soundtrack both times her character’s name is mentioned.

Okay, she’s in a coma. Pretty soon, she will wake up. Don’t be too sure. My bet is, that’s in the half of the movie they are cutely calling “Kill Bill Vol. 2.”

Just when you think there will be some of the delicious dialogue you might remember from “Pulp Fiction,” he throws in the clumsiest of contrived cliché chitchat. You know he means to mirror comic book conversation as a metaphor, but there isn’t any metaphor. Just bad dialogue.

Just when you think he will turn a corner in the plot, and there will be some twist into a less predictable sort of story — after all, his trademark, along with cinematic reference — he drops that and returns to the comic book. Drat.

Too bad.

The story is that he made “Kill Bill” as one movie, but for reasons lost (at the moment) Miramax, with his agreement, split the show in two parts. Four months from now, you can see the other half of your movie.

Save your stub.

You can try telling the theater this was an unusually long intermission, and they should let you back in. Lots of luck with that.

If you’ve been seeing the classic shows on Wednesdays, you are among those who found out Sandhills Cinemas doesn’t own, and did not rent, the right lens for academy ratio pictures like “Casablanca.”

This was particularly irksome during “Citizen Kane” — the one picture on more lists as the best movie made so far in film history.

Orson Welles’ classic is famous for many things, but one thing is his framing. He made wonderful use of every square foot of the silver screen in “Citizen Kane.”

There are very important sequences where the face of one character fills the lower left quarter in a close up and others appear in a long shot in the far background, top right.

At the showing, either the top or the bottom edge of every frame this great picture was entirely cropped out. Heads were cut off from the nose down, or from the eyes up.

Welles’ notable closing credits, in which he introduces the members of the Mercury Theatre, all of whom were making their screen debut, were all gone.

Nobody could read the names Joseph Cotton, Agnes Moorehead, Martin Gabel, and so forth. Since many members of the audience were just as fresh to these actors as the first audiences, it would have been lovely for them to have enjoyed the effect Welles planned for them.

It is a good thing for Sandhills to show these pictures. The idea of showing classic films in a theater, “as they were meant to be seen,” is worthy of admiration and support. Go. Especially go to see “Lawrence of Arabia,” which is in CinemaScope and will not, one hopes, be trimmed.

“As they were meant to be seen,” however…should mean exactly that. Please lease a lens.