Having checked again, I concur.
I’m not sure if it’s been mentioned elsewhere, but Hattori Hanzo is also the name of a character from the video game Samurai Showdown.
Some neat things I have notice…
The beginning scene with the gun hidden in the ceral box. The name of the ceral is KA-BOOM ceral.
There are some references back to 1970s kung-fu movies. There are some shots where Uma was send sprawling backward - all we see is a top-down camera view of her flying back. This is the technique used in old Kung-fu show of yore before “wire-fu” has been perfected.
“The Blood Splattered Bride” recalls a rather famous Chinese martial art move, “The Bride with White Hair” (Ba Fai Mo Ri Zhuan, pardon my imperfect hanyu piyin), which is something about a bridge and her groom being ambushed on their wedding day by various members of the martial art world because the groom is from the sect of the good guys and the bride is from the sect of the bad guys, and so the ‘good guys’ plan to stop the wedding. The movie is ahem, all about the Bride with White Hair seeking revenge on those good guys, one by one. The novel, from which the book is based on, is written by Gu Long.
The mace-thingy which Go-Go uses is known as the “Xie Di Zhe”, or literally “Blood Disc”. At the beginning it was just a morning star, a varitation therefore, but when the spikes are out, it’s what old Kung-fu movies called the Xie Di Zhe (again, imperfect hanyu piyin).
[spolier]
The showdown at the House of the Blue Leaves is very typical of katana fight-scenes, as anyone who had watched Japanese anime would know. The typical scene of two samurais dashing at each other, passing through and then freeze a distance from each other, and one making a comment of a sort before collasping, is very, very Japanse
[/spoiler]
Something about Kill Bill vol 2
Having seem a shot of Kill Bill vol 2 of Gordun Liu’s character, he looks like a typical Kung-fu master from a Chinese show and he was teaching the Bride some tricks with the sword. Seriously, white-hair and all, but it’s really from those 1970s or 1980s show, not the stylish Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Hero.
I am looking forward to vol 2, 'cos they sa it will be based on influences from Kung-fu movies, my favourite genre.
The Bride with White Hair has a sequel. It is in part 2 where the Bride goes on a killing rampage.
One more correction - the wedding was not disrupted by people attacking, but by the so-called good guys maligning the bride of doing some evil deeds. The groom believed the good guys and the bride was so disraught that her hair went white in one night (yes, that’s urban legend, I know).
FYI
This really bothered me, especially since I saw the movie in a theater full of Japanese people.
There are very few “well-pronounced paragraphs” in this movie. Uma Thurman’s tough-guy Japanese admonishments made most of the people in my theater giggle. She gets props for speaking as well as she does considering that she learned it for a movie and had to study sword-fighting at the same time, but her pronunciation is pretty rotten for a lot of it. Lucy Liu does quite a bit better, which is why it was all the more annoying when she would suddenly lay down a real clunker in the middle of an otherwise solid reading.
And Uma Thurman’s pronunciation of “Ishii” that makes it sound like “Easy E.”
I was also really thrown off by Sonny Chiba’s “Hey hey! You Amerlican! You supiiku berry berry goooo Japaneeeez!!” ridiculousness when Uma first walks into his sushi shop.
On further consideration, though, it occurred to me that Chiba’s over-the-top performance might be based on the silly English in old Kung Fu movies, and that (get ready for a stretch here) Uma and Lucy’s bad pronunciation is meant to be a reversal of that old Kung-Fu movie convention. That is, they are Westerners speaking bad Japanese instead of Asians speaking bad English. A possibility.
But c’mon, how is O-Ren Ishii gonna become the queen of the Japanese underworld without ever learning to speak properly??
Oh, and one more thing to Uma’s credit: Her pronunciation was good enough that the Japanese distributor did not feel any need to give her subtitles. That’s probably saying something.
And I guess her line about “leave all your arms and legs here. They belong to me now” was pretty cool.
There was a reason for dragging it out. If you look at the name on the airplane ticket she purchases, it says “Beatrix Kiddo”.
http://elitemrp.net/killbill/hername.jpg
Of coarse she had many passports to chose from…
When I saw the scene in which The Bride is coming from Tokyo and noticed her sword by her side, I immediately wondered how she got it past Customs.
Then I figured that since she was coming from Tokyo, it might not be out of the ordinary for passengers to have them. Not knowing a darn thing about Japan, I figured that the culture was such that when a person is carrying such a sword, he or she would use it with honor and not go slaying all the other passengers or the pilots. Or something like that.
I can convince myself of a lot of things while watching a movie!
The Bride also calls herself Beatrix, as does Vivica Fox’s character.
Possible reference to Beatrix Potter? (Silly rabbit)
Uh, no, that’s mighty far off the mark! But I don’t expect non-Americans to get the joke.
In the U.S., Trix is the name of a fruit-flavored breakfast cereal for children. Commercials for that cereal feature a cartoon rabbit who’s always coming up with some ridiculous scheme for getting some Trix. His schemes always fail, and the commercials always end with children saying “Silly rabbit- Trix are for kids!”
I thought the same as you, The Griffin.
No matter how bad she did it, she can always take comfort in knowing she did a better job than Sean Connery in Rising Sun.
I don’t think Hattori Hanzo was a real person. I can’t find the link I want to use right now to back that claim up, but if you look at Sonny Chiba’s IMDB listing, you’ll see that he’s played characters with that name a few times. I think it’s more of an homage to his earlier work than to a person who actually existed.
Anyone catch the out-of-the-trunk shot with Sophia? It’s Tarantino’s trick shot, and he works it into every movie. See the beginning of Reservoir Dogs for an example.
I saw Tarantino a few days ago on some talk show. He said that he actually is in the movie for a couple of seconds. It’s in the shot in the House of Blue Leaves when the camera pans over all the writhing, twising bodies and severed limbs. He’s in there someplace, he says, all covered in blood with a Kato mask on.
The name actually comes up a lot in Japanese legends and folk tales. Whether Hattori Hanzo was real or not, the name goes back a lot further than classic Sonny Chiba movies.