I saw it three times already....

Rating: 10/10 (12 October 2003)

*** POSSIBLE SPOILERS***
I put the spoilers heading on the top of this review, just in case there are people who are really hard core about that sort of thing. But, I also must say that it is impossible to really spoil this movie for anyone by telling them plot elements, because you know what's going to ultimately happen by just reading the plot description. Eventually, The Bride is going to Kill Bill and everyone associated with reuning her wedding day. This is not a movie that you watch for the plot, and not a movie that you can enjoy being told about. This is a movie that needs to be watched, it demands it. Roger Ebert described it best when he refered to it as "story telling without a story", this is exactly right because we have all seen this story before, hero gets wronged, and wrongs the evil doers. But, because Tarantino is so good at what he does, he uses every element he can to make this the most interesting thing imaginable. I have already heard people complain about the amount of blood in this movie; these people obviously didn't get the point: this is a MOVIE about MOVIES that has NO grounding in reality. It is a throw back to very low budget Kung-Fu films and also to film noir and spagatti westerns. The movie is almost a thesis on the simularities between the genres; by combining the elements together, you get to thinking that there were already many elements there in the first place; in all three genres, somebody has been wronged, usually someone important to them has died or they have had an attempt on their life and they are out for quick justice by killing everyone of them. In fact, many spaggeti westerns took plots from samari movies and vice versa.
Quentin makes it very clear that the audience are his puppets and he is the puppet master controlling every aspect of the film. He of course has always done this to an extent, as in Pulp Fiction in Res Dogs where he jumps the story around simply for effect. He of coursse does that here too; but, in this movie he even goes as far as to bleep The Bride's real name out simply because he doesn't want you to know it yet; and he wants you to know that he doesn't want you to know.
This is a tribute to the asian art of film making; he even goes as far as to make one of the chapters (if you didn't know yet, the movie is divided into chapters, five in this movie, five in the next) an anime sequence. This helps him bring home the idea that this is not an emotionaly serious movie, that the violence is cartoonish and that should be accepted, what better way to do this then to have a cartoon in the middle of the movie? This also helps him tell elements of the story, that if he tried to tell in live action, he would have gotten an NC-17 or X rating as opposed to the R rating he did recieve.
There are slow motion shots in this movie, there are black and white shots in this movie, there's a shadow fight sequence in this movie, and a snow fight sequence. And those are just a hand-full of the elements that he uses. I've seen it three times already and plan on seeing it several more times before it gets out of theaters, this truly is the most entertaining movie to come out in a very long time. A+