Kill Bill

A collage of references and influences blend together to create something entirely new, and entirely wonderful

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Directed By: Quentin Tarantino
Other Notable Films From Tarantino: Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood
Starring: Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah, David Carradine’s hands
Screenplay By: Quentin Tarantino
Movie Synopsis: A former assassin seeks vengeance after a team of assassins tried to murder her. 
Signature Line: “Those of you lucky enough to have your lives, take them with you! However, leave the limbs you’ve lost. They belong to me now.” 

THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context 

Regarding Quentin Tarantino’s first three movies and the impact they would have on the prevailing opinion of him, the announcement for each, if I may speak in rounded generalities and convenient summaries, was such:

When his first film, the captivating crime drama Reservoir Dogs, was released in 1992, it announced his arrival as an exciting new directorial voice into Hollywood. When his second film, the groundbreaking Pulp Fiction, was released in 1994, it announced him as a potential movie-making genius. And when his third film, the tempered Elmore Leonard adaptation Jackie Brown, was released in 1997, it announced him as someone who did not have to rely on weird narrative structures or gimmicks to put something mesmerizing up on screen. Over a handful of years, he went from—and again, I’m speaking in rounded generalities and convenient summaries here—he went from being a former video rental store employee to the person many believed would become the most influential director of his generation. 

But a notion started to creep into the conversation during the six-year period after Jackie Brown’s release when no new Tarantino films found their way into the theaters; a criticism that felt like it grew more and more accurate as the years ticked by. 

Tarantino was such a defining voice within popular culture during the ‘90s that people began to speculate that, ultimately, he was going to become a totem of it; a curio of the decade unable to keep pace with the industry’s inevitable creative evolution that his work had helped, in part, to inspire. Or, as the website IndieFilmHustle.com wrote of that stretch of time from 1998 to 2002 in their excellent Tarantino anthology: “The world of cinema had already changed so much since the turn of the new millennium; would Tarantino still have a place at the table when he came?” 

And then Kill Bill released in 2003. 

And nobody asked that question anymore. 

Kill Bill, starring Uma Thurman in a role that she and Tarantino brainstormed together while shooting Pulp Fiction nearly a decade earlier, signaled the start of the second phase of Quentin Tarantino’s career, wherein he would make movies that were bigger, and grander, and more ambitious, not only in scope, but also in presentation. He took all of the tricks that he’d learned across the first three movies he’d directed, and then he took all of pieces from other movies that had moved him as a lifelong cinephile, and then he mushed everything together in a way that somehow felt entirely new, and entirely innovative, and entirely invigorating. 

Tarantino had always been a stylish director. 

With Kill Bill, his movies became a style unto themselves. 

THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Kill Bill 

02:48: A movie’s opening scene is responsible for a lot of things (introduce key characters; establish the tone; offer a glimpse of some sort of eventual conflict; etc.), but the main thing it should do is entice the audience. It should get them to ask themselves a question. With Kill Bill, you leave the opening scene asking yourself no less than a half dozen questions. Who’s the woman on the ground?! Why is she covered in blood?! Is she wearing a wedding dress?! Who the fuck is Bill?! Did Bill just shoot her in the head?! Was she pregnant?! It’s an incredible start. 

4:51: Let me take a moment as these opening credits play out to say: I’m really excited about rewatching this movie right now. Uma Thurman is absolutely superb as The Bride. She gives a flawless performance. There's not one single moment when you’re watching it where you go, “Ah. I wish she’d have done that differently there.” I remember reading an interview several years ago where the director of 2004’s Ray (Taylor Hackford) was talking about how Jamie Foxx was born to play the part of Ray Charles. I think it’s the same thing here. Thurman’s portrayal of Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction is the thing that first made everybody say “Hold on a second, there's something really special about this person,” but her portrayal of The Bride is the thing that has come to define Thurman’s unique brilliance as a performer. 

6:13: The Bride is at Vernita Green’s house to kill her. (Vernita is played Vivica A. Fox.) It’s so funny that, rather than kicking the door down and charging in, she rings the doorbell, waits for Vernita to open the door, and then punches Vernita in the face as soon as she does. It’s almost polite, which somehow makes it feel even more disrespectful. 

6:15: Vernita, who knows precisely why The Bride punched her in the face, immediately engages The Bride in a fight, picking her up and throwing her across the room into a mirror hanging on a wall. The Bride responds by kicking Vernita in the vagina and then kicking her in the face, sending Vernita crashing through a glass coffee table. And, just to be clear, I do not intend to recount every punch and kick and hit from every fight in this movie. But I wanted to do so here because it’s just such a compelling, jarring, chaotic sequence. It quickly establishes that Kill Bill is gonna be unlike any Tarantino movie yet. 

7:08: A thing I really enjoy about this fight is that Vernita talks shit to The Bride while they’re going at it. She’s literally fighting for her life against one of the deadliest people on the planet and she’s treating it like how Trae Young treats road playoff games. We never get a Vernita backstory the way we do with Lucy Liu’s character later in the movie, but I really wish we did because Vernita seems like a tremendous amount of fun.

8:04: As good as the actual fight is, the best part is when the school bus pulls up and Vernita’s daughter starts walking toward the front door of the house. Vernita and The Bride, who are in a knife fight standoff, notice that her daughter is approaching and have an entire conversation about how to proceed without ever saying one single word. It’s wonderful, intuitive acting from two wonderful, intuitive actors. 

8:05: By the way: Look at the screenshot above. I greatly enjoy how tall and lanky Uma Thurman is. She’s like if a daddy long legs spider was a human.¹ 

8:30: The fight has been paused. When Vernita’s daughter (Nikki) asks about all the broken glass and destroyed furniture from the fight, Vernita blames it on their dog. I’ve done that so many times. My dog has unknowingly stepped in front of an uncountable number of bullets for me. Weird smell in the living room? The dog did it. There was a bite taken out of a burger that was DoorDash’d to the house? I saw the dog walking around over there earlier. Somebody took $400 from the family checking account and used it to order a Robocop statue? Fuck, man. Who taught the dog how to use a debit card?   

11:43: As Vernita prepares a cup of coffee for The Bride, Vernita tells her that she has every right to want to get even for what’s been done to her. The Bride responds with, “No, no, no, no. To get even—even Steven—I would have to kill you, go up to Nikki’s room, kill her, then wait for your husband, the good Dr. Bell, to come home and kill him. That would be even, Vernita. That’d be about square.” That's such a gnarly fucking thing to say. The first time you watch Kill Bill and she says that line, you’re just sitting there like, “THAT’S even???!!! What the fuck did they do to this woman?????” 

13:53: Vernita tried to hit The Bride with an okey-doke, pretending that she had to make Nikki a bowl of cereal as an after-school snack. What she was really doing, though, was grabbing a gun that she kept hidden inside the cereal box. It caught The Bride completely off guard. It was a brilliant, brilliant plan. The one hitch, though: While Vernita is a world-class talent with a blade in her hand, it turns out she’s a fucking horrible shot. She missed The Bride by three feet. Which is why she’s now dead, lying on the floor with a knife several inches deep in her chest. Rest In Peace, Vernita. We barely knew you. 

15:04: Gah. Nikki just wandered into the kitchen as The Bride was pulling the knife out of Vernita. The words she offers Nikki as consolation: “When you grow up, if you still feel raw about it… I’ll be waiting.” The Bride killed a four year old’s mom in front of her and then told her, “Run up if you wanna get done up, bitch.” Incredible.  

16:13: The Bride has a list of people she needs to kill. (She also has the handwriting of a third grader.) 

16:14: Oh! As I’m looking at the Death List Five, I’m reminded of something: See how Vernita’s nickname when she was in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad was “Copperhead”? I learned a whole bunch about snakes while researching for a thing several years ago, and one of the things I learned is that the copperhead is an ambush predator. It waits until it has a favorable position before committing to a kill. It fits perfectly with how Vernita tried to kill The Bride by ambushing her with the secret cereal box gun. Neat little easter egg. 

18:38: Okay. We just jumped back in time. It’s four years earlier, shortly after the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (thought they) killed The Bride and the rest of her wedding party. The police theorize that it was a “Mexican Mafia hit squad” who murdered everyone.

Mexicans actually make a surprising number of appearances as ancillary characters in Tarantino movies. My favorite time happens in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt are standing outside of a restaurant waiting for one of the valets (all of whom are Mexican) to bring DiCaprio’s car around. DiCaprio is crying because he’s just gotten some bad news about his career. Pitt looks at him, hands him his sunglasses, then says, “Don’t cry in front of the Mexicans.” It’s great advice. Nobody will ever remind you more times that they saw you crying once than a Mexican.

20:44: Elle Driver (second-in-command for the Deadly Vipers, played by Daryl Hannah) is at the hospital. She’s there to poison The Bride, who somehow survived being shot in the head. She’s whistling to herself as she walks through the hallways. The only two people who have ever looked cool while whistling were Elle Driver right here and Omar Little in The Wire. Everybody else looks like an idiot when they whistle. 

20:45: In the movie, The Bride killing Vernita is the first thing we see. In reality, though, it’s actually the last thing she does. The linear timeline of events in Kill Bill is: 

• Bill shoots The Bride in the head

• The Bride spends four years in a coma in an El Paso hospital

• The Bride wakes up from the coma, kills the man who was about to rape her and also the nurse who arranged for it to happen

• The Bride leaves the hospital and goes to Tokyo

• The Bride acquires a Hattori Hanzo sword 

• The Bride fights and kills O-Ren Ishii, then gets information about Bill and the remaining Deadly Vipers from O-Ren Ishii’s consigliere.

• The Bride goes back to America and kills Vernita

21:53: Elle put a nurse disguise on so she could move through the hospital unnoticed. Part of her disguise is a new eye patch that has a red cross on it, which is fucking hilarious.

24:03: Bill just called Elle. He tells her that he changed his mind about her poisoning The Bride in her sleep. Elle’s mad about it. And honestly, I don’t blame her. When’s the last time you went to the hospital? It’s a real hassle getting in and out of there. If you’re gonna change your mind, fine. That's fine. You’re the boss, you’re allowed to do that. But at least change your mind before I cruise around in the hospital parking garage for fifteen minutes looking for a parking spot that’s gonna cost me $24.  

26:46: It’s four years later. The Bride just woke up from her coma. There are so many moments over the course of Kill Bill and Kill Bill Vol. 2 where you just sit there watching something Uma Thurman is doing on screen and say to yourself, “Fuck, man. She’s so fucking good.” This part (where she realizes that she’s not pregnant anymore and that the baby she was carrying must have died) is one of them. Just absolutely heartbreaking.

31:37: Gah. A nurse (Buck) has apparently been charging people $75 to have sex with The Bride’s comatose body. Those horrible memories are top of mind now as she crushes Buck’s head in by slamming the door to her room shut on it over and over again. 

31:41: In one of the memories, we see Buck standing over The Bride’s bed. While she lies comatose, he says, “Well, I’m from Huntsville, Texas. My name is Buck. And I’m here to fuck.” I actually watched this movie at the theater in Huntsville, Texas. (The college I attended is located in Huntsville). When Buck said he was from Huntsville, a bunch of people in the theater clapped and cheered. Then they saw that he was a rapist and you could feel them all being like, “Dammit. I should’ve waited, like, five more seconds before I cheered for that guy.” 

32:32: The Bride does a lot of impressive things in Kill Bill, but probably the A-1 pick is when she’s able to convince her legs not to be atrophied anymore just by thinking about it. I looked up how long the atrophied leg recovery process would take for a normal person who’s been in a coma for four years. All the websites said it’d take, at minimum, several years of intense physical therapy, and even then that person may never get back normal functionality. The Bride was 100 percent operational after just 13 hours of sitting there thinking about how much she hated her former co-workers. 

39:53: I wonder what the response was among the hospital staff the next day when word spread that Buck had been murdered. I feel like probably not that many people were very sad about it. 

42:53: The first half of O-Ren Ishii’s backstory (which is told via a very cool extended anime sequence): Her parents were killed in front of her by a Yakuza boss when she was nine years old. Two years later, she killed that Yakuza boss, then spent the next several years becoming one of the best assassins on the planet. Bill eventually recruited her to be a part of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. 

45:24: The Bride is off to Okinawa.² 

46:00: Sonny Chiba! True, blue martial-arts movie royalty.³ He plays Hattori Hanzo, a legendary swordmaker who is currently disguised as a mild-mannered sushi chef. He doesn’t know that The Bride knows who he really is. 

50:09: You know what’s always cool in a movie? When people are talking and someone says a name then everybody and everything stops because that person’s name has been said. That's what just happened here when The Bride said “Hattori Hanzo” out loud. 

50:38: Hattori asks The Bride why she needs a Hattori Hanzo sword. Her response:

Great line.

51:28: In hindsight, it’s at least a little bit crazy going all the way from El Paso to Okinawa to get a sword. That’s a 20-plus hour flight we’re talking about. They were selling guns at Walmart in 2003. She could’ve just popped on in there. Grabbed a pistol, maybe some snacks. It would’ve taken ten minutes.

55:23: The Bride not only wants one of Hattori Hanzo’s swords from his personal collection (which, at least within the context of this movie, is like asking for Michael Jordan’s shoes off his feet), but she also wants it for free. Hattori laughs her off until she tells him who she’s going to kill with it. (Bill is a former student of Hattori’s.) Hattori tells her that he’s gonna make her a new sword. He says it’s gonna take him one month to make it. I’ll say it again: Walmart. Ten minutes.⁴ 

58:21: This whole sequence where Hattori presents The Bride with her sword (which stretches out OVER TWO FULL MINUTES) is so fucking dope. People are always drawn toward the flashier parts of Quentin Tarantino’s movies, but to my brain, he’s never better than when he’s being totally and completely patient with a moment. He just has such a great sense of how and when to lean into something. 

58:28: “If on your journey, you should encounter God… God will be cut.” Great line. 

58:45: Hattori called The Bride a “yellow-haired warrior.” The podium for times in movies when an Asian person gave a white person a nickname: 

• The gold medal spot goes to Hattori Hanzo calling The Bride a “yellow-haired warrior” in Kill Bill

• The silver medal spot goes to the crowd calling Jean-Claude Van Damme “nok su kow” in Kickboxer (“nok su kow,” we’re told, means “white warrior”)

• And the bronze medal spot goes to Thao in Gran Torino when he walks into the barbershop and says to the barber “What’s up, you old Italian prick?” when Walt is trying to teach him how guys talk to guys

59:32: The second half of O-Ren Ishii’s backstory: With Bill’s blessing, she left the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad and eventually sliced and fought and maimed and murdered her way to the head role of Tokyo’s Yakuza. That's where she is now as The Bride hunts her. 

1:01:37: When I was a kid—maybe 11 or 12 years old—one of my uncles gave me a piece of advice that I still go back to today. I was talking to him about how a kid at school was picking on me. His response, which I found to be utterly fascinating, was not that I should tell an adult at school what was happening, and it was not that I should just ignore the kid and eventually he’ll get bored of picking on me, and it wasn’t even for me to just punch the kid in the nose, which is what I assumed he was gonna tell me to do. He said: “You gotta overreact. Really overreact. The next time he does something to you, fucking throw a chair at him or try and hit him with a brick or something. Nobody’ll mess with you after that. They’ll be too worried about what you’re gonna do.”

Anyway, O-Ren Ishii just cut a Yakuza boss’s head off in front of everyone because he got a smidge too disrespectful for her liking. Everyone has fallen the fuck in line now. One big overreaction. That's all you need. Try it. Change your life. 

1:03:28: “The price you pay for bringing up either my Chinese or American heritage as a negative is… I collect your fucking head. Just like this fucker here… Now if ANY OF YOU SONS OF BITCHES… got ANYTHING ELSE TO SAY… NOW’S THE FUCKING TIME!” A perfect line reading from Lucy Liu. 

1:04:49: The Bride is off to Tokyo. 

1:06:03: Motorcycles and swords. Fuck yes. The podium for times in movies where there were both motorcycles and swords: 

• The gold medal spot goes to the motorcycle sword fight in John Wick 3 

• The silver medal spot goes to the decapitation scene in Black Rain

• And the bronze medal spot goes to O-Ren Ishii’s henchmen right now as they ride around Tokyo with swords on the back of their motorcycles. 

1:09:56: O-Ren Ishii and some of her gang are in a private room inside a very nice two-level bar. The Bride is sneaking around outside of the room. It’s kind of crazy to me that nobody on O-Ren’s team did any sort of recon work ahead of time before walking O-Ren into the bar. It would’ve taken fifteen seconds to call the owners of the bar and be like, “Hey, we’re gonna head over. We got O-Ren with us. Anything weird going on? Any new faces?” The owners would’ve been like, “Actually, now that you mention it, yeah. There's a 6-foot tall white woman in a Bruce Lee outfit with a sword just sort of panthering around. Just a heads-up on that.” So many lives would’ve been saved.  

1:14:47: The Bride took O-Ren’s lawyer hostage and then cut the lawyer’s arm off in front of O-Ren. Here’s how one of the Yakuza bosses reacted earlier when O-Ren cut that one guy’s head off:

He looks like a buffoon; certainly it’s a reaction unbecoming of a person who is supposed to be in a position of power within a criminal organization. 

Conversely, here’s how O-Ren reacted to The Bride cutting her lawyer’s arm off:

Blank face. That's why O-Ren is in charge. 

1:15:43: The first henchman O-Ren sent to fight The Bride was absolutely obliterated. He didn’t get one single shot in. He swung his sword at her once, she cut his sword in half with her super Hanzo sword, then she impaled him, lifted him nine feet up off the ground, then flung him into a nearby fountain. As soon as The Bride was done, O-Ren shouted “Tear the bitch apart!” at which point five more members of her gang ran over to try and kill The Bride. You’re fucking out of your mind if you think I’m gonna sprint over to try my luck with someone I just watched lift a guy NINE FEET UP OFF THE GROUND WITH A SWORD.

1:17:28: …And all five of those people are dead now.  

1:17:37: Great moment. 

The Bride: So, O-Ren. Any more subordinates for me to kill? 

[An offscreen figure steps into the shot.]

Offscreen Figure: Hiiiiiiiiii. 

1:18:36: The Bride versus Gogo Yubari, O-Ren’s personal bodyguard. Gogo uses a meteor hammer as her primary weapon. What’s the fight strategy with someone who’s using a long range weapon? You just charge at them, right? You wanna be as close as possible that way they can’t swing their thing at you, right? I know that's what you’re supposed to do when someone is threatening to throw something at you. Is it the same thing here? Somebody who’s good at fighting assassins please answer this question for me. 

1:20:45: Gogo loses this fight, but let’s please always remember that she gets the closest of anyone to defeating The Bride in a one-on-one showdown. She has her under constant pressure, and under constant threat of death, a feat made all the more impressive when you remember that Gogo was ONLY 17 YEARS OLD at the time. It’s like those stories you hear about Len Bias holding his own against pros when he was, like, 14 or whatever. That's who Gogo Yubari is. She’s the Len Bias of assassins. It’s very sad that her career was cut down so early. 

1:22:45: The rest of the Crazy 88 gang has shown up. There are a bunch of cool shots in Kill Bill, but I’m not sure I can name two that are cooler than this one: 

I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. 

1:23:29: Everybody remembers The Bride snatching Elle Driver’s eyeball out of her head in Kill Bill Vol. 2. What a lot of people forget, though, is that she does it here first to a nameless henchman during this fight. (It’s the thing that causes the transition out of color and into the black and white sequence.)

1:24:55: The Bride is lighting these boys the fuck up. It’s a full-on massacre. You gotta figure at some point O-Ren was standing there watching everything unfold like, “Fuck, man. I should’ve hired at least one person to carry around a gun. That would’ve been super helpful right now.”

1:25:34: O-Ren just left. She walked clean out of the building. She knows her gang has no chance against The Bride. They’re done for. This is like the Pistons walking off the court early after Jordan’s Bulls finally beat them in the playoffs. Really poor sportsmanship on O-Ren’s part. 

1:26:32: The Bride is breakdancing with a sword, cutting off feet and arms as she windmills around on the floor. These bitches are getting Electric Boogaloo’d to death. How embarrassing. 

1:27:31: The Bride just killed her 34th gang member. How many people would you have to watch someone kill in a giant sword fight before you were just like, “You know what? I didn’t even really like this job anyway. I’m gonna go ahead and get out of here.” Like, how are you the 34th person killed here? The first or second person, sure, I get it. But the 34th?!

1:28:41: The second leader of the gang (Johnny Mo, who was a co-boss with Gogo Yubari) has finally decided to jump in. Where the fuck has this guy been? The Crazy 88 gang has horrible leadership. 

1:29:14: …Aaaaaaaaaaand Johnny Mo’s legs have both been cut off. He barely lasted half a minute against The Bride. He never even landed one single shot against her. And, again, he was the co-boss of the gang, which presumably means he was one of their more skilled fighters. More proof yet that Gogo Yubari was a phenom.  

1:29:32: As The Bride looks out over the room full of murder and mayhem that she’s just caused, she says, “Those of you lucky enough to still have your lives… take them with you! However, leave the limbs you’ve lost. They belong to me now.” The coldest line of the movie. 

1:29:33: Also: what if she actually did keep the arms and legs? Like, she’s got a storage unit in Pasadena full of body parts she’s cut off during her fights. That’d be a crazy episode of Storage Wars. You’re hoping for some comic books or maybe a Louis Vuitton purse but nope, it’s human arms and legs. 

1:31:02: Everyone else has been defeated. It’s motherfucking go time. The Bride versus O-Ren Ishii. A one-on-one sword fight to the death. Outside. Under the moonlight. In the snow-covered garden behind the House of Blue Leaves. Just a perfect set up. Regarding assassins and assassins-related mythology, this fight has gotta be their version of Muhammad Ali versus Joe Frazier.   

1:33:15: Lucy Liu fucking crushes this role, by the way. She’s able to do that thing where she turns stillness into deepness. It’s really special. O-Ren is my favorite non-Bride character in the entire Kill Bill universe. 

1:34:33: O-Ren sliced The Bride’s back open, watched her collapse to the floor, then laughed and sniped, “Silly caucasian girl likes to play with Samurai swords.” You can tell she’s been holding onto that insult for a while. She’s wanted to say that to The Bride for years. I know it felt so good when she finally got to do it. 

1:34:48: O-REN IS READY TO KILL THE BRIDE… SHE’S MOVING IN FOR THE KILL… GET UP, BRIDE! GET UP!

1:35:17: THE BRIDE IS BACK ON HER FEET! IT’S NOT OVER YET! THE FIGHT CONTINUES!

1:36:36: Ahahahahahahahahahahahaha. The Bride caught O-Ren with a sword swipe down the leg and O-Ren immediately apologized for talking shit a minute ago. A Hattori Hanzo blade slicing across your thigh changes your attitude real quick. 

1:37:17: THE BRIDE JUST CUT THE TOP OF O-REN’S HEAD OFF! SHE SLICED THAT SHIT CLEAN OFF! SHE TURNED O-REN’S HEAD INTO A CONVERTIBLE! HER BRAIN IS OUT FOR EVERYONE TO SEE! 

1:37:34: O-Ren’s response to the top of her head now resting on the ground next to her… 

A perfect movie death.   

1:38:05: A fun thing: Prior to the start of the fight, O-Ren tells The Bride that she hopes she saved some of her energy while fighting The Crazy 88 because if she didn’t then The Bride probably isn’t gonna last five minutes against O-Ren. If you start a five minute countdown right when The Bride and O-Ren take their first swings at each other, O-Ren drops dead four minutes and fifty-seven seconds later. 

1:38:49: Remember that meme of the Popeye’s Chicken worker sitting outside on her break looking absolutely spent because of how hard she’d been working?

Same thing.

1:39:34: The Bride kept O-Ren’s now-one-armed lawyer alive because (a) she wanted to get information about the remaining members of The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, and (b) so she can tell Bill that The Bride’s on her way to kill him and everyone else. I wonder what it feels like to have somebody say they’re gonna come kill you? I have to imagine it’s pretty terrible. I get nervous when someone says they have to email me about something. 

1:42:15: The Bride is on her way back to America. Two things: (1) The airline she’s on allows its passengers to bring their swords with them on the plane. They got little sword holders at each of the seats and everything. 

(2) The Bride is writing out her Death List Five (which we saw at the start of the movie after she killed Vernita). It’s different handwriting, though:

I’m not sure if that's supposed to mean something or if it was just an accident. 

1:43:38: During the final moments of Kill Bill we get a clip of Hattori Hanzo talking about revenge, a clip of Budd (a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad) talking about how he and the other Deadly Vipers deserve to die, a clip of Elle Driver saying that The Bride needs to suffer to her last breath, and a clip of Bill revealing that The Bride’s daughter is still alive. It’s a perfect set-up to get us into Kill Bill Vol. 2. 

1:43:40: The movie’s over. Good movie. 

ACCIDENTAL SIMILARITIES
Things that last week’s movie (Seven) has in common with this week’s movie 

• Both movies have someone who lies in a bed for at least one year.

• Both movies have scenes where police think a person is dead and then it turns out they’re not.

• Both movies have scenes that feature red crosses that belong to killers (in Seven, John Doe has one above his bed; in Kill Bill, Elle Driver has one on her eye patch).

• Both movies have scenes where someone cuts someone’s head off to prove a point. 

• Both movies have scenes where someone dies during sex. (In Seven, it’s the LUST victim. In Kill Bill, it’s the guy who killed O-Ren’s parents.) 

• Both movies have tall white women in them. (Uma Thurman is 5-foot-11. Gwyneth Paltrow is 5-foot-9.) 

THE LAST BITS
Things that I Googled while watching Kill Bill 

• How tall is Uma Thurman? She’s 5-foot-11.

• How tall is Daryl Hannah? She’s 5-foot-10. 

• Was Uma Thurman driving the motorcycle in Kill Bill? It doesn’t say. All that came up were a bunch of articles about how Quentin Tarantino pressured Uma Thurman into driving a car for a scene in Kill Bill Vol. 2 that ended with Thurman losing control of the car and crashing it in real life. 

• How much does a Hattori Hanzo sword cost? I could only find pricing information for fake Hattori Hanzo swords (around $200). Nobody had a real one for sale. In Kill Bill Vol. 2, Bud tries to sell The Bride’s to Elle Driver for a million dollars, so I figure the price for a real one is somewhere around there. Bud set the market. 

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Next week’s movie: Love & Basketball (2000)

You can stream it on Peacock or rent it from all the places you rent movies from.

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This essay was edited by Hannah Giorgis. The FOOTNOTES video was produced by Richie Bozek.

1. While Hannah was editing this, she mentioned to me that she met Uma Thurman at a party several years ago. She described her as “flitting around the place barefoot, the very picture of grace,” which is exactly how I would expect Uma Thurman to exist at a party.

2. If you pause the movie at just the right time during this part, you can see The Bride’s name (Beatrix Kiddo) on the plane ticket that gets handed to her.

3. The Street Fighter (1974), Karate Bullfighter (1975), Hunter in the Dark (1979), etc.

4. A question I think about every time I watch this movie: The Bride goes to Okinawa to get the Hattori Hanzo sword. Then she uses the sword to kill O-Ren Ishii. Why didn’t she use it to kill Vernita?