I heard that the bandaid on marcelus was the hole from the devil took his soul after marcelus sold it, and the briefcase, with the strange emenint glow was marcelus soul.


Travolta and Jackson were missionaries from god commishined to take back his soul, which is why all the bullets missed them in the surprise attack and the reason Jackson uses the ezequel 25:17 speech

Sorry, the editor in me compelled me to fix this. I really don't mean to be obnoxious about it, I've just recently OD'ed on misspelled, ungrammatical BB posts (adultswim.com makes this board look like it's populated entirely by English majors).

Anyway, I saw Kill Bill Saturday and enjoyed the hell out of it. And everyone who recognized the theme from Ironside whenever the Bride flashed back to the wedding slaughter, raise your hands.

Paul

The Ironside theme rang a bell but I couldn't place it at the time. I did recognize the reference to Jeanne Bell, star of TNT JACKSON, though.

Here's Tarantino-research beyond the call of duty: I got hold of one of the spaghetti westerns whose music Quentin uses: GRAND DUEL. Nice music; bad movie. Lee Van Cleef is decent in it though.

An interesting reason for the non-chronological narrative of KILL BILL, from pussy to cock:



From here

Nope, haven't given up yet ...

Shit. The quote didn't carry over.
Anyway, I really don't buy the writer's notion that the confrontation with Vernita comes after the one with O-Ren Ishii. Admittedly, it's for mundane, real-world reasons, but hear me out: The Bride kills the sleazeball orderly who's been renting her out to horny men during her coma. She makes her way to the parking garage and steals his extremely-distinctive truck. So there's two dead guys in a hospital room that is suddenly missing one coma patient, and a truck belonging to one of the dead guys has gone missing along with his keys.
For the Vernita sequence to come after the O-Ren battle, that means that nobody investigating the two murders and the disappearance puts out a description of the bright-yellow Chevy Silverado SS with "Pussy Wagon" painted on the tailgate in foot-high letters, so it sits, unnoticed, in an airport parking lot for over one month while The Bride flies to Japan, gets her sword made and reduces the Crazy 88 to the Maimed and Bleeding Six or Eight and then returns to the United States. That unlikely combination of circumstances allows her to reclaim the truck at LAX or wherever and then drive it to Vernita's place, where (for some reason) she decides not to use the sword.
It really works a lot better this way: The Bride steals the truck, gets some clothes (Mr. Pussy Wagon had some cash, right?), tracks down Vernita and goes directly to her house. She kills Vernita and then goes to the airport for her trip to Japan. She leaves the truck in a parking lot and simply doesn't bother retrieving it on her return (or, alternatively, she ditches it somewhere or destroys it so her blood and fingerprints aren't found on it).

Paul

Kill Bill Vol. 1 pretty clearly operates within, has created, a world in which the real-life concerns you discuss just don't matter. A co-worker of mine who didn't like the movie complained that various victims of sword attacks spurted too much blood and that one person couldn't win against nearly a hundred assassins. Uh... huh. Yes, right.

I think your argument is a little bit like that. The kind of film that Kill Bill Vol. 1 clearly is doesn't operate with that kind of logic, and it doesn't need to do so. The very fact that Uma leaves the hospital driving that highly conspicuous vehicle (and, yes, several hours after killing two men, including the vehicle's owner) tells you right off the bat that this is a character who is not part of anything like the world of normal people: a real professional killer would never have done that. The point is that The Bride is one of those outlaw, near-mythical cinematic creations that is just above and beyond... well, just about everything remotely normal. Including the law.

It's like she's simply not on the radar of the "normals" in the film. I'd be a bit surprised if there were blood and fingerprint records out there with her true identity on them. Maybe records of some person, Killer X, that could be connected various killings, but an identity or name? That would almost be surprising, given the world that Kill Bill Vol. 1 creates.

Certainly such a protagonist could hide a vehicle in some place completely secret for a month or two, if you need some sort of explanation.

For me, the mixed-up chronology of the plot worked several auspicious effects:

Having the more "personal" one-on-one battle appear early in the film was advantageous for building the character of The Bride and adding depth and complexity to the film, in the way it delineated the differences between The Bride and her former colleagues. The down-and-dirty "girl fight" was a more... intimate way to start things, and, specifically, the *conversations* (or monologues) The Bride had with Vernita and her daughter were absolutely character-defining. A wise move on Tarantino's part.

The other side of this coin is that the magnificent fight-orgy is saved for the first half of spectacular climax. The bloodbath and then the Spaghetti Western showdown really did make for a whopper of a two-punch climax.

The jumping back and forth in time emphasized how very different the various segments were in one important aspect: the cinematic influences which they honored and pilfered. Most of the chapters pretty clearly (altho not exclusively) concentrate on a different influence or set of influences. Vernita is American blaxploitation/Pam Grier and similar stuff; Ellie Driver's visit to The Bride in the hospital veers more into Eurosploitation territory; the anime sequence is rather obvious; and the two-part climax is grindhouse/chop-socky and then Spaghetti Western.

It's wonderful how Tarantino splices this stuff out in chapters and yet brings it all together in one seemless look and feel. It's not like you're being yanked from one film to another constantly. As many folks here and elsewhere have explained, Tarantino rips off just about every genre filmmaker he's ever worshipped in Kill Bill Vol. 1, but it all feels like a Tarantino film!

And the jumbling of the narrative, the non-linear timeline, helps to demarcate the chapters -- and the influences they rip-off/honor -- more clearly than a straightforward narrative might. It calls to our attention that these chapters ARE indeed quite different, even if they all help to tell the story of The Bride's revenge.

Matthew

PS -- not related, but... I'm glad I saw Shattered Glass yesterday, but I think it's overrated.

Oh, and keep in mind that Uma had to go to Lucy Liu first because LL was the only DIVA who was easy to locate after all those years and the changes they'd brought; indeed, she found out about the others current whereabouts from Sophie, a trophy she picked up in that first victory...

Jumbling the segments as Tarantino did allowed for logic (logic of plot follow-thru, not "realism"), while also serving the film both dramatically (showdown with Vernita and her daughter first) and in terms of movie-thrill whiz-bang (showdown with O-ren and her gang at the end).

Matthew

True, but at the end, unless I'm mis-remembering, they show her flying back from Tokyo scratching O-Ren's name off the list and contemplating Fox's character's name (which I've forgotten.) And the chapter titling seemed to also indicate Fox was killed after Liu.

Fortunately, Kill Bill is concerned with nothing other than looking "cool" while making a bunch of references (and "borrowing" techniques put to better use in the borrowed-from films.)

The thing about the vagina/penis transition is priceless, though. Gee, the fuckee becomes the fucker ... NOW I get it! ... what a great film!

: ) Not that I don't appreciate the link.


K

"What she's got is more powerful than a penis"-- Gary Busey, ruminating on the attributes of a female boxer doing a stunt on THE MAN SHOW.

I liked Conard's take on PULP FICTION better than KILL BILL, but that may be in part because KILL BILL is still an unfinished text, so it's hard for a critic to discern whether or not KB has the same sort of symmetry as PF.

The idea about "masculinizing" a woman character by giving her a weapon is nothing new, of course. Carol Clover's MEN, WOMEN & CHAINSAWS, though flawed on several points of logic, is IMO one of the most engaging meditations on the theme, and I guess it goes back to Freud & Lacan choosing to view women as creatures who burn with suppressed penis envy. None of which exactly tells us diddly-squat about why, in storytelling terms, the Bride getting a sword is functionally any different than the Once-and-Future-King of England (who presumably already had a penis) getting hold of Excalibur.

I mean, I don't know how seriously Conard is putting this stuff out there, but come on: the appeal of a weapon-- pretty much any weapon, from a gun to Wolverine's claws to Wonder Woman's lasso-- is that it extends one's sphere of efficient force. The weapon can seem "phallic" or "yonijic" (probably a made-up word, but I saw it applied to WW's lasso somewhere), but I think gender symbolism,if present, comes in as a secondary manifestation-- and I'm not at all sure it's there in KILL BILL.

Hey, if a sword is phallic and a lasso "yonijic," what is a whip? Neither, or both? Are famous whip-users like Lash Larue and Indiana Jones androgynous? How about a cowboy who uses guns AND a lasso?

Etc., etc...

I didn't care much for the rest of the analysis, but trapped within the penis envy stuff is a sound reason for shifting the events around, it privileges the sword usage.

K, I'm getting around to it.