Bill is D-E-A-D! I can’t believe this is even being discussed!
Thank you. We’ve cleared it all up.
Sophie lost ONE arm.
Bill is dead.
Men actually like the silent treatment.
As long as I’m the Emporer and you’re the General, you get the sake.
The toilet’s overflowing again.
Uhh…actually, that’s a reason Bill’s dead. Someone who is acting “true” to the martial arts doesn’t perform a move they don’t know will work. So Beatrice must have been practicing it on someone, i.e. pizza delivery boys (or, you know, the people she’s been hired to kill dozens of times over).
Just to muddy the waters yet again…
I distinctly remember Bea cutting off Sophie’s HAND while looking down at her in the trunk of the car. Renewed screams, more blood, everything. So, from my recollection, although she still had an arm whilst rolling down the hill, she had no hands.
I’d check my DVD, but it’s in the States, and I’m still in Japan. And yes, I saw (only!) the Japanese version.
How else is the American version different?
I’ve heard (probably here) that ALL of the fight with the Crazy 88’s is in color in the Japanese version. Here, most of it is in black & white.
There is no clear indication in the version I saw that she cut off Sophie’s hand. She threatens her with losing something (“and it will be something you’ll miss”) and then I think it cuts to her tossing her down the hill.
Wow, just like Coconut Monkey (ridiculously obscure pop-culture trivia challenge).
Sometimes the brothers bring pliers and a blowtorch to help out.
Seen the ending a few times–it’s a flashback when Sophie’s in the hospital already, with Bill behind her. We see Bea say something like “…and I promise you, they’ll be things you miss. Now (cut to Sophie trembling in hospital again)–give me your other hand!” <Sophie screams>.
So it was left unclear exactly what more Bea did to Sophie.
And FTR, in the American version the movie changes to black and white the moment before she plucks out that guy’s eyeball to a CU blink in the blacked-out upper room, where she spanks the baby yakuza.
Live in America in air-conditioned splendor?
(Seriously it tickles me to death every single time I get an obscure pop culture reference. It’s one of my greatest pleasures, I think. Where do you buy those things called lives again?)
Yet oddly, I’ve no idea what you mean. Perhaps we speak of different monkeys.
Please do not stare at my bad eye. It makes me crazy.
Go back and watch Bill die. Count his steps.
There were 6!
One step to turn around…5 steps then he fell.
Explain that.
One more…I watched the credits all the way through…
No strike through David Carradines name.
I’m telling you…Bill ain’t dead.
If he made her eat the pizza using chopsticks with her hurting hands she probably started killing pizza boys at the base of his Temple just to not deal with it.
“NO! Do not lift anchovies off cheese like a DOG!”
PC Gamer’s mascot.
As for the exploding heart manuever, I think it’s the sort of thing you learn to do by having total understanding of the body’s chi. Or pressure points. Or the habits of the Aorta Elves. Bea knows it will work because she knows how it works, even if she’s never done it before. It’s probably something like, “The first strike hits the Hunan pressure point, stunning the foe. The second strike disrupts his Astral energy. The third and fourth strikes redirect that energy into his Deva chakra, and the fifth creates a sympathetic resonance that causes the heart to rupture.” Because of her training, she knows what all of those things are, how they work, and how to break them as catastrophically as possible. It’s like a doctor performing his first surgery. He’s never cut into a living human before, but he knows the circulatory system, where the nerves are, functions of the various bits that are inside the body, etc. It’s not just a specific way of waving his arms around that he’s mimicking. He knows what every action he takes does, and why it does what he does. Same thing with Bea. She’s a Master of the martial arts, Pei Mei’s star pupil. She knows exactly what she’s doing.
And Bill is very, very dead as a result.
True. I was surprised when people told me that it was in black & white in the American version. I was also confused when I saw publicity photos of that scene on the Kill Bill website, and all of the bloodstains on clothes were jet black.
I’m watching Vol. 2 right now. Anything in this one I should look for?
I dunno. Even if you know how to perform a deft physical routine, you still have to practice it to be able to perform it smoothly. After all, you don’t want to look foolish after a failed five-easy-pieces-of-death maneuver.
Well, sure, but if the move were total hokum, she’d have known, is my only point.
Well, I never contended the “Jackson Five touch of death” was hokum within the movie or that Bill wasn’t dead as a post-autopsy doornail at the end. I just thought it was a hokey plot device for Tarantino to use and cheated the audience of a hyperkinetic final battle.
I disliked Kiss of the Dragon for the same reason.
Of course he’s not. He’s just pining for the fjords.
RobuSensei : I can say I was surprised just the same when I’ve learned that there’s a Japanese cut of the movie which doesn’t have B&W scenes. Up to that point I thought that Tarantino did it because of some aesthetic reasons. I mean, we Europeans are accustomed to bloody scenes, why spare us the gory details?
I was surprised by that, too. I haven’t seen the scene in color, but I liked the fact that it was in black and white and was dissapointed that it was the result of censorship.
Which martial art teaches you to punch your way out of a wooden coffin buried under 6 feet of dirt? I want to study that one.