When Kill Bill first came out, I read about it in a copy of Total Film magazine I bought from Tesco sometime near the end of 2003. I would’ve been twelve then, and obviously far too young to be able to watch it in the cinema, but it was one of the first movies I remember being actively hyped for. I had no idea who Quentin Tarantino was, or what made this movie significant enough to grace the cover of a magazine. But the simple fact that it was on a magazine cover at the exact time I started to read them was more than enough to lure me in. I had to wait until the following August to see it, when my parents got me Volume 2 on DVD for my birthday, and soon after I tried to buy Volume 1 in Woolworths, boldly and incorrectly assuming I could trick the shop assistant into believing that I was actually eighteen, and not thirteen. I didn’t have to wait long to rectify the mistake, when my mum picked up the DVD for me from a different Woolworths a week later. But it did mean that I watched the second part before the first, forever complicating the already non-linear chronology for me. In any case, once I had them both I must’ve watched the entire thing at least twenty times, sometimes together, sometimes separately, sometimes in the wrong order. Despite not knowing anything about Tarantino, or martial arts cinema, or yakuza movies, I was, for a while, utterly obsessed with it.
But then I left it behind. I didn’t pull on the threads of Kill Bill when I went to university. I didn’t watch anything by Lau Kar-leung or Kinji Fukasaku, nor did I watch Lady Snowblood or Five Deadly Venoms or The Bride Wore Black. As much as it easily could’ve done, Tarantino’s taste never set the foundation of my cinephilia. I had Fellini and Tarkovsky and Murnau instead, and a fresh copy of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die to work through. Kill Bill just fell by the wayside, a film that I’d already seen in a world of films that I hadn’t, and that was that.
As I write this, I’m a few days removed from seeing Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair, my first encounter with the film in any form in more than fifteen years. Both volumes cut into a single, intermission-split, four-and-a-half hour movie, as originally intended, with very few differences aside from a slight shift in the order of information and a few extra minutes of the anime section. But, otherwise, largely the same as it ever was. Seeing it again after all this time, and for the first time in a cinema, was nothing short of extraordinary. So much of it remains seared in my memory. The brutality of the knife fight in the suburbs. The Crazy 88 and everything that happens in Tokyo. The sad inevitability of the wedding flashback. The three-inch punch. The opening of the money-and-snake-filled briefcase in the trailer. And the final showdown with Bill that disappointed me so much as a teenager but feels so vital to the film now. Having seen an astounding number of movies since I last watched this one, it’s so thrilling and so rare to watch a filmmaker as wildly talented, well-funded, and totally brazen as Tarantino just cutting loose and luxuriating in his own cinephilia, throwing everything he’s got at a relatively straightforward revenge story and making it feel enormous. I don’t think Tarantino has ever bettered Kill Bill, and I’d be surprised if he ever did again.
A part of me wishes that I never left it behind, that I spent my university years unpicking its homages and influences and watching those movies instead of diving headfirst into the canon. But then I wouldn’t have had this experience of rediscovery now, of seeing such a formative film as this one with new eyes and reveling in its thrills once again. I think you need these kinds of revitalising experiences every once in a while, if only to remind yourself of the electrifying power that cinema can have when it means something to you.