I don’t think that’s true that your wife will hate it, Hampshire. I’m female and I didn’t catch any of the references in the movie, even though I went with someone who absolutely did. Not ONE damned reference. Except for the part where Uma Thurman’s character makes the square sign like she did in “Pulp Fiction.” I enjoyed it greatly…I’d definitely see it again.
I got very, very few of the references, but I didn’t care. This movie was cooler than cool. I can’t wait for volume 2.
If i’m not mistaken, that square only had 3 sides. I don’t know why, but that kind of things bothers me. And in Pulp Fiction, she made a rectangle!
“Come on, don’t be a” (silence while she makes a rectangle.)
Don’t be a rectangle?!
The rectangle/square thing in Pulp Fiction is an aspect-ratio joke for cinephiles.
Kill Bill is to kung fu movies as Femme Fatale is to erotic thrillers. It isn’t about it’s story, it’s about it’s genre
Yes, yes, yes. Give Number Six a cookie.
The fact that, stylistically, it is so clearly referencing established genre conventions (spaghetti western, kung fu, samurai, etc.), indicates that the film is looking at itself. And the fact that the story is an almost defiantly by-the-numbers revenge plot, not to mention the flat and oddly direct verb-object structure of the title, suggests that the actual subject of the film is that very plot: not the specific plot of this specific movie, necessarily, but the extremely basic “you wronged me, so I get to wrong you” formula to which Tarantino barely bothers to add narrative adornment.
Menocchio above and even sven in the linked thread are making a case for interpreting Kill Bill as some sort of feminist parable, but I would assert that there’s a lot more evidence to look at the movie as an examination of revenge itself. In the genre movies from which Tarantino is borrowing, vengeance and payback are understood and accepted as part of the world: Bad guys kill your teacher, or your child, or your partner, or your brother, or your friend, or whoever, and that gives you carte blanche to go after them. According to the rules of the genre, this is only fair, and it’s part of achieving balance: an eye for an eye and all of that.
But actually look at what Tarantino is doing in this movie. The Bride is so consumed by the need for vengeance, she’s barely a human being. She doesn’t even have a name, for crying out loud; it’s bleeped out the couple of times it’s referenced. There’s a deep undercurrent of sadness in what she’s doing, as if she’s trapped by obligation, by a duty imposed by some unwritten universal law. Note what she says after the first revenge killing in the film, when the mother is lying dead in the kitchen. To the daughter who stands looking blankly on her mother’s corpse, the Bride says (and I paraphrase): I didn’t want to do this, but your mother had it coming; and if you still hate me when you grow up, I’ll be waiting. In other words, the cycle of revenge cannot be broken, cannot be completed; debts are never fully paid. What looks like completion may in fact merely be another beginning.
This is hardly an original theme, of course. Clint Eastwood has made a career (since 1990) of directing movies that are about the consequences of violence, and the loss of humanity that comes with indulging the need for revenge (the last act of Unforgiven, for example, is a shocking return to bloodlust by a man who swore he would never surrender to those impulses again). Also, one of the movies referenced by Kill Bill is Golden Swallow, which includes a scene in which Silver Roc (Jimmy Wang Yu) single-handedly slaughters a hall of thugs in pursuit of his misguided quest for revenge. Sound familiar?
What sets Kill Bill apart, however, is that instead of simply looking at whether revenge is ever justified, as many other movies have, Tarantino (I believe) is specifically examining vengeance in film. As I said, the stylistic choices in Kill Bill make it clear that the movie is hyper-aware of its own genre, and the requirements thereof. And in my opinion, the question of whether or not revenge is justifiable in a general sense is very different from why revenge is so satisfying in storytelling.
I’m still formulating this hypothesis, and I have to see the film again. And needless to say, much clarity will come with the release of the second half. I think I’m on the right track, though.
Coming back to say this movie kicked my ass, and I can’t wait to see it again, and the 2nd half. The only nitpick I could find in the entire thing, was I didn’t care for all the “FOUR YEARS LATER”, “ONE MONTH LATER”, “THIRTEEN MONTHS EARLIER”, “FOUR YEARS EARLIER”, etc. etc. I had no problem with the non-linear storyline, but in such situations as when the sword maker tells her her sword will be ready in a month, do we really need “ONE MONTH LATER” before we see him hand her the sword? Or am I assuming incorrectly that 99% of the general population is not drooling idiots? 
Hey! I have a question. Saw KB last night and I REALLY loved it, but:
When the police officers are investigating the massacre at the wedding, they say “Nine dead.” Then we find out The Bride lived, bringing the total, you would think, to eight dead. But in a later scene, The Bride says “they killed nine people that day, but they should have killed ten.”
So my questions are: A. Are they including Uma’s baby in the tally? Is Uma?
B. Who were the rest of the dead?
C. What the heck is a “spaghetti western”?
You got it right with A. The police were counting the nine people laying on the floor drenched in blood, but Uma was counting her baby. So yeah, nine people died, just not the nine the police were counting.
B: I think we’ll find out in Volume 2
C: An Italian-made Western
Refers to any of the American-style Westerns shot by Italian directors during the 1960s and early 1970s. The most famous are the ones by Sergio Leone starring Clint Eastwood: Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More, and The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly. Oddly, even though these movies are generally thought of as Italian, most of them were in fact made in Spain. There’s a very entertaining (if quite a bit overlong) Spanish movie called 800 Bullets that plays on this history; it’s about a bunch of aging stuntmen who were essentially abandoned in their depressed desert town when the spaghetti-western market disappeared.
This is important to Kill Bill for two reasons: First, many spaghetti westerns use the revenge motif being examined in Tarantino’s film (unsurprising, seeing how many of them were either inspired by or directly ripped off from the Asian martial-arts flicks that focused so closely on the revenge formula; Fistful of Dollars, for example, is a remake of Yojimbo), so there’s a thematic connection. And second, Tarantino uses a lot of the genre’s music in the film. It has an extremely distinctive sound (more info here), and has become so iconic that we don’t even really notice when it’s used idiosyncratically (e.g., as soundtrack to part of the anime sequence, which seems awfully incongruous at first blush but which turns out to work remarkably well).
Based on the last line in the film, I would think, eight people died, no?
Going from the script, we have:[ol][li]Arthur Plympton, the “safe” husband that the Bride picked when she realized she was pregnant and running with the wrong crowd to raise up a baby with.[]Tim, his best friend/the best man.[]Janeen, Tim’s girlfriend.[]Erica, the Bride’s best friend from her new job.[]Reverend Hillhouse, the minister.[]The minister’s wife.[]The organist. (You’ll recognize his instrument-- it’s the one that says BAD MOTHERFUCKER on it.)[]The Bride (but not really.)[]Her unborn child. (But not really)[/ol]In that early script however, the Bride’s narration for the Origin of O-Ren includes: “At twenty five she did her part in the killing of eight innocent people, including my unborn daughter.” (My emphasis.) Some time between now and then, an extra corpse was added to the wedding party. [/li]
My best guess: There’s a character in the credits for Vol. 2 that’s not in that script – Da Moe, played by Michael Jai White. I think he could be our mystery corpse. (The script also had the organist as a woman, so maybe these two changes are related?)
I read someplace a few months ago (probably on AICN) that QT rewrote the wedding scene during filming and dropped a subplot involving Gogo’s sister. He may well have added a character to the wedding scene. The early draft of the script does have a few differences from what was on screen, though much of it is the same.
I think it’s best if you put that in a spoiler box for those who have yet to see film…or heck, Volume 2(which means everyone) because that stuff is straight out of the next installment. Also refrain from answering people who want to know the Bride’s real name, if you please. These things cannot be gained from watching the film, so you are not being helpful by openly revealing them.
Achernar: technically, yes. But The Bride, of course, doesn’t know that. 