(He picked it up on a visit to the Roy Rogers-Dale Evans Museum.) His car is a beat-up purple Volvo of uncertain vintage. He is large, almost bearlike, with his prominent chin and high forehead, and is today clad in black sweatpants with a silver stripe running down each leg, sneakers that display the words “Kill” on one and “Bill” on the other, and a Roy Rogers and Dale Evans T-shirt with “Happy Trails” scrawled across the front. Blinking rapidly, I try to snap back out of the movie-movie universe while Tarantino hustles me through the door and into the parking lot. As the two women go at it, they tromp on cold cereal, spilled from an overturned box-another nod to domesticity-which snaps, crackles, and pops in surreal syncopation with the thudding chops and kicks. The scene takes place in the Fox character’s kitchen, and at one point her young daughter wanders into the room and witnesses part of the mayhem, thus introducing a hint of moral ambiguity into what could have been shot as a straight-ahead action sequence. But despite all the talk about “movie movies,” Tarantino hasn’t been able to resist inserting a few of the jarring, signature grace notes more characteristic of his non-movie movies, complicating the issue at hand. As she crisply moves in on her adversary, she looks as if she’s been doing this sort of thing her whole life. *Kill Bill’*s conventions dictate that we accept Thurman as a killing machine, and after a moment or two that seems right. In other words, Kill Bill is a flat-out martial-arts movie, the kind of picture the characters in his earlier films might watch when they’re not slicing off a cop’s ear ( Reservoir Dogs) or plunging a hypodermic needle the size of a pencil into the heart of a would-be girlfriend ( Pulp Fiction). Thurman, tall and lithe, looks like she’d be more at home on a runway modeling for Victoria’s Secret, but, as Tarantino points out, “this is the movie-movie universe, where movie conventions are embraced, almost fetish-ized, as opposed to the other universe where Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs take place, in which reality and movie conventions collide.” In my case, I’m wincing and dodging as Uma Thurman exchanges bone-crushing blows with actress Vivica Fox. Porter’s The Great Train Robbery, back in 1903, who ducked as a gunslinger pointed his pistol at the camera. “Watching” is not quite the word for it I’m gripping the arms of my chair, feeling very much like a member of those first audiences for Edwin S. Quentin Tarantino is hovering over my shoulder as I sit with his longtime editor, Sally Menke, watching a scene from his new movie, Kill Bill, in a Hollywood bungalow tucked away among antiques shops on a fashionable drag just south of the Paramount lot.
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