01:00 AM EDT on Friday, April 16, 2004

Pretentious and derivative and even soap-opera-ish as Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill Vol. 1 (Miramax, $24.99 cassette; $29.99 DVD) is, it's unlikely you'll be able to take your eyes off the screen.

Arms, feet and even heads go flying in its more graphic moments as a beautiful bride (Uma Thurman) seeks revenge on the five people who invaded her wedding party four years earlier, killing nine and leaving her and her unborn child for dead. Influenced by Hong Kong martial arts films, Tarantino attempts to go beyond their violence quotient and mostly succeeds.

As he did in his groundbreaking Pulp Fiction, Tarantino toys with time, shunting back and forth between the present and the past, so viewers must pay close attention. Later, he presents the tale of a pretty Chinese-Japanese-American killer (Lucy Liu) as a super-violent Japanese anime. (This would have been too precious had it not also been so violent.)

The Bride finds her quarry in unlikely places -- a suburban home where she and another woman battle each other for their lives with knives, an assassination attempt in a hospital, a Tokyo restaurant filled with an army of sword-wielding Yakuza gangsters all wearing black masks.

There's not much dialogue. Kill Bill Vol. 1 is the very definition of an action film. Yet the willowy Thurman boldly creates a strongwilled, one-directed character on a mission. Don't get in her way.

Perhaps the best thing is that after watching Vol. 1, you can go to a theater and finish the Bride's story in Kill Bill Vol. 2. Gee, do you think they planned it that way?

A sweet surprise from McCartney

Paul McCartney has come up with a charming surprise for his fans and for children -- a collection of three short animated films for which he worked on the stories and composed the songs.

It's called Paul McCartney: The Music and Animation Collection (Miramax, $29.99 DVD) and its three stories are directed by Geoff Dunbar in classic style. In fact, Rupert and the Frog Song, done in pastels, looks like something that might have been turned out by Walt Disney in the 1930s. Rupert is a white bear who goes out into the country behind a waterfall to watch a secret performance of frogs who are putting on a musical extravaganza. One frog says it "Happens only once every couple of hundred years." As they all sing McCartney's "We All Stand Together," there's potential trouble from an owl and a pair of cats, though things turn out right in the end.

The two other short films -- Tropic Island Hum and Tuesday -- also feature frogs. "I guess we like frogs," says McCartney in an interview about the making of the films that's part of the disk's extensive behind-the-scenes material.

Tropic Island Hum revolves aroung a squirrel who is chased by hunters, rescued by a peg-legged frog in a hot-air balloon and taken to an island sanctuary for endangered animals. Tuesday is a truly magical film in which frogs sail off on flying lily pads late one Tuesday night and go to town where they do such unusual things as tune in to David Letterman on TV and chase a barking dog. The punchline, which involves pigs, is a marvel.

Mystery and magic in Tokyo

A story centering on three homeless people in Tokyo on Christmas Eve may not sound like anyone's idea of a heartwarming idea. But mix in an abandoned baby and it becomes a spin on the tale of the Three Wise Men in anime director Satoshi Kon's Tokyo Godfathers (Columbia TriStar, $26.96 DVD).

The three -- an alcoholic man nicknamed Gin, an aging drag queen called Hana and a teenage girl named Miyuki, on the run from a violent past -- decide to find the baby's parents rather than take it to the police. Their only clue is a locker key. They embark on a string of hair-raising adventures involving a murder at a wedding feast, a kidnapping and a burned-out building, while meeting such unusual characters as a Latin American gunman who is living in Tokyo and the baby's mother. Tokyo Godfathers is engrossing and much of it is quite poignant, including a hospital visit that leads to Gin's own long-lost daughter.

There are a lot of lucky coincidences in Tokyo Godfathers, but in the context of this magical tale, they work. The artwork is in that spare, psedo-comic book style of Japanese anime which suits this dark and mysterious tale just right.

From Tinseltown to Little Rhody

North Smithfield filmmaker Christian de Rezendes' Rhode Island-made Getting Out of Rhode Island, about a national celebrity who returns to his Rhody hometown to escape the pressures of Hollywood and to dry out, is on DVD from Film Threat. Shot in less than 2 1/2 hours, the feature film was improvised by a cast of 44 actors and non-actors. Shown at film festivals and on Channel 36 last January, it is available for $19.95 at www.filmthreatdvd.com.