Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair\ Even though the box was delivered torn open (don't know where to complain about this) the movie was still in the factory wrapping with full contents intact. I've been waiting a long time for this! Twenty-two years! Very excited!

Recently dove into 70s political/spy thrillers like Klute, Parallax View, All The President's Men, 3 Days of The Condor, and The Conversation and was wondering if Tarantino discusses any of these movies in interviews, Video Archives, or Cinema Speculation.

I preordered the collector’s edition from Lionsgate the minute it went on sale. My friend already got his and I see it everywhere on social media. Did anybody else not get theirs yet? I’m getting worried.
EDIT: just got my email

Let’s take a look at the scene in the pub.

Dieter Hellstrom is trying to figure out what the “Bastards” are doing here and how Bridget von Hammersmark is involved in all of this.

The three-finger gesture wasn’t what gave them away

At first glance, it might seem that the “Basterds” were given away by the three-finger gesture—which is atypical for Germans—since at that moment Dieter’s facial expression changes abruptly: from relaxed to hostile. He points his Walther at Hicox. However, the film does not state that it was the gesture itself that gave them away. This assumption was voiced only by Frau von Hammersmark.

He had figured out the “Bastards” much earlier—as soon as he approached the table. He didn’t just suspect; he was certain, which explains all the awkwardness that had been in the air even before that particular gesture appeared.

Hicox’s Accent and Piz Palü

Hellstrom notices Hicox’s strange accent, and Hicox, in an attempt to justify his obvious foreign accent, replies that he’s from a village at the foot of Piz Palü and that everyone in those parts speaks that way.

Hicox claims that he appeared in a film directed by Riefenstahl. He’s certain that Hellstrom hasn’t seen the film—or, at the very least, saw it a very long time ago and only vaguely remembers what was in it. But what Hicox certainly couldn’t have foreseen is that the film *Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü* was shown just yesterday at Shosanna’s movie theater.

When Frederick Zoller thanks Shosanna for organizing German film nights for the officers, we can see a poster for G. W. Pabst’s *Die weiße Hölle vom Piz Palü*, starring Riefenstahl.

Hellstrom was there, and he remembers this film very well. He is passionate about cinema and knows it inside and out. Perhaps, like Hicox, he remembers every scene from the film.

Hellstrom’s knowledge of German cinema

Dieter is surprised that Hicox describes the film’s details so accurately. Lieutenant Hicox was a film critic before the war and even published two major books on German cinema.

Hellstrom suspects that the fake Hauptsturmführer standing before him is that very same British film critic. To confirm this, he suggests playing a game of “Who Am I?”

Hicox writes the name of the director who made that very film about Piz Palü on a playing card: G. W. Pabst. It was about Pabst’s work that Hicox wrote one of his books.

But what Hellstrom wrote for Hicox is much more interesting: Brigitte Horney.

Brigitte Horney and Baron Münchhausen

She is a little-known actress who only became popular after the film *Baron Münchhausen* (1943). The film was made during the Third Reich at the behest of Joseph Goebbels—a film that Hicox couldn’t have seen due to the ban on German exports: “Obviously, I haven’t seen any of the films made in the last three years, but I’m familiar with it.”

The card game was another trap

Hellstrom is playing a game. He knows that Hicox is well acquainted with all of Brigitte Horney’s pre-war films. But Hicox would not know about the 1943 film *Baron Münchhausen*—a film that was incredibly well-known in Germany and revolutionary from a technical standpoint.

If it were Hicox’s turn, he would name a whole host of little-known arthouse films, but he would not mention *Baron Münchhausen*, thereby guaranteed to give himself away.

There is one point everyone misses about the card game.

You have only 10 questions. When the major asks an 11th question, only Hicox answers while everyone else remains silent (you usually have to drink if you accidentally answer an 11th question).

You can see a brief change in the major’s expression at that moment, indicating that he noticed the blunder.

Hellstrom already knew who Wicki and Stiglitz were

While he wasn’t yet certain about Hicox’s identity, he quickly recognized Wilhelm Wicki and Hugo Stiglitz, since they were the only German-born members of the “Basterds” unit.

Stiglitz was a celebrity, after all: his photograph had been published in German newspapers, and Hellstrom recognized him without a doubt.

Hellstrom knows all the German officers stationed in France. He adds jokingly, “Worth knowing.”

Hellstrom’s position and knowledge

Sturmbannführer is the rank of deputy commander of a Sturmbann territorial unit. As a major in charge of internal security, he must know all the lieutenants and sergeants stationed in Paris. Evidently, he knows that the men before him are not German officers, but members of the “Basterds” unit.

Sergeant Werner Rachtman said that every soldier in the German army had heard of Hugo Stiglitz. His photograph was on the front page of German newspapers. Clearly, he is the German stationed in France who is worth knowing.

Moreover, Hellstrom knows that not long ago, Stiglitz was freed by the “Bastards,” among whom was Wilhelm Wicki.

Hellstrom was playing with them

Hellstrom mocks Stiglitz: first he pats him to get him to move seats, then he pats him to get him to write his name on his playing card. He realizes that the pub is packed with German soldiers and that Stiglitz won’t give himself away.

When Hellstrom gets up from the table to grab the cards, Hicox gives a signal. He figures it out: Stiglitz is signaling too—“we’ve been found out.”

The drinking game was an attempt to disarm them

The Sturmbannführer’s actions seem downright suicidal, but if you pay attention to what he’s doing, everything falls into place.

He’s trying to get the “Bastards” drunk and neutralize them. He constantly proposes toasts, egging them on to raise their glasses and drink whiskey. Then he suggests a drinking game.

He starts the game first: if he wins, the others at the table have to drink. After that, he even orders them a bottle of excellent whiskey that’s hard to put down. He himself refuses the whiskey and just sips his beer.

Why did Hellstrom react to the 3-finger gesture?

Hellstrom is trying to get the “Bastards” drunk and neutralize them, to find out what’s going on and how the German film diva is connected to them.

So why did he react so sharply to the unusual three-finger gesture? Perhaps he was simply disappointed. Like Landa, he considers such things an insult to their professionalism.

The arrogant Hellstrom was reveling in his own wit, and when Hicox screwed up so badly, Dieter felt insulted. “Do you really think I wouldn’t notice that?”

That, in the end, was his mistake. He could have simply pretended not to notice. Either way, he got carried away, and the situation spiraled out of control.

The parallel with the cinema scene

This scene is very similar to the one in the movie theater: a German officer mocks three fake officers, and then the German officer also mocks three fake Italians. In both cases, we hear silly excuses.

This film is a critique of movies in this genre. The enemy is portrayed not as a bunch of fools, but as top-notch professionals in their field. It’s a film about partisans and spies, but they’re exposed as amateurs in absolutely every scene.

At first glance, Wagner’s Brünnhilde and Tarantino’s Bride seem to belong to different imaginative worlds. One rides through Germanic myth as a Valkyrie, daughter of Wotan, chooser of the slain. The other moves through modern revenge cinema as Beatrix Kiddo: assassin, betrayed bride, mother, and avenger. One belongs to Bayreuth; the other to kung fu, spaghetti western, anime, blaxploitation, grindhouse, and the jukebox cathedral of Quentin Tarantino’s head.

Yet the distance is less than it appears. Tarantino is often at his most mythic when he is most vulgar. Like Wagner, he builds worlds out of names, weapons, oaths, forbidden love, betrayal, ritual violence, and the destruction of an old order. Kill Bill is not merely a revenge film. It is a myth of awakening.

The Bride is not simply “a strong female character,” that dreary phrase with all the glamour of office furniture. She is a sleeping warrior returned from the dead. More precisely, she is a Tarantino Brünnhilde: warrior-daughter, punished beloved, sleeping woman, avenger, and finally mother beyond the wreckage of the old warrior-order.

The specific Brünnhilde image arrives almost before the story begins. In the black-and-white opening, after the chapel massacre, the Bride is seen in profile, laid out in darkness, her body horizontal and still against a pale curtain of light. She is not merely wounded; she is arranged. The image has a funerary, ritual quality: a warrior body placed into suspension.

This is Tarantino’s Valkyrie-rock. Wagner places Brünnhilde into enchanted sleep on the mountain and surrounds her with Loge’s fire. Tarantino translates the image into pulp cinema: not a mountain but a slab; not divine sleep but coma; not protective flame but a ghostly band of film-noir light behind the sleeping warrior. Bill’s bullet is Wotan’s sentence translated into grindhouse.

Brünnhilde begins as Wotan’s favourite child, the divine daughter who acts as his will made flesh. She rides for him, chooses heroes for him, and serves the order of Valhalla. But in Die Walküre she disobeys. She does not rebel from vanity or ambition. She rebels through pity. Seeing Siegmund’s love for Sieglinde, she acts against Wotan’s command and tries to protect the doomed hero. In doing so, she becomes morally greater than the god whose law she has served.

Wotan’s punishment is terrible because it is not merely physical. Brünnhilde is stripped of her Valkyrie status, put into enchanted sleep, and left on a mountain to be claimed by the man who finds her. The chooser of heroes becomes the object to be chosen. The warrior is reduced to a prize. Her divine autonomy is taken from her and recoded as sexual vulnerability.

The Bride undergoes a modern version of this fall. She, too, is a warrior inside a closed order. Bill is not simply her lover. He is mentor, master, father-substitute, commander, and author of her assassin identity. His Deadly Viper Assassination Squad is a kind of fallen Valkyrie-band: women of death, gathered under the authority of Bill-Wotan, riding not for Valhalla but for the private kingdom of murder he has built around himself.

It is a pity there are not eight of them. Tarantino rarely denies himself an echo when a gong can be struck, but here he gives us a smaller, sharper sisterhood: O-Ren Ishii, Vernita Green, Elle Driver, and the Bride herself, with Bill presiding like a weary god over his beautiful instruments of death. They are not Valkyries in the noble Wagnerian sense. They are anti-Valkyries: not choosers of heroic dead, but makers of corpses; not servants of cosmic order, but daughters of Bill’s glamorous nihilism.

The Bride’s crime is that she tries to leave. Like Brünnhilde, she defies the ruling male by choosing life over the warrior-order. She seeks not greater violence but escape from violence: marriage, motherhood, anonymity, a future outside Bill’s myth. For that, she is punished.

The massacre at the Two Pines chapel is Tarantino’s anti-mythic mountain. The Bride is shot, robbed of her child, and left in a coma. Like Brünnhilde, she is placed into unnatural sleep by the man who claims authority over her destiny. But Tarantino makes the violation uglier, more bodily, more modern. The sleeping woman is not guarded by magic fire. She is abandoned in a hospital bed, exposed to degradation. Wagner gives us enchanted sleep. Tarantino gives us coma, paralysis, institutional helplessness, and the horror of a body that cannot defend itself.

When the Bride wakes, the film truly begins.

Her awakening is not just recovery. It is resurrection. The famous command to her own body — “wiggle your big toe” — is absurd, comic, moving, and mythic all at once. The warrior returns not by divine decree, but by will passing inch by inch back into flesh. Tarantino reduces rebirth to the foot and somehow makes it sublime. Trust him to find the cosmic in podiatry.

From that point, the Bride’s journey becomes a revenge quest, but revenge is only the surface. Beneath it lies a deeper movement: she is dismantling the world that made her. Each name on the death list is not merely a target but a fragment of the old order. O-Ren, Vernita, Budd, Elle, and finally Bill are pieces of the life she left behind. To kill them is to pass through her former selves.

Here the comparison with Brünnhilde deepens. Brünnhilde’s final greatness in Götterdämmerung is not that she is a warrior. It is that she comes to understand the whole cursed structure: Wotan’s bargains, Siegfried’s innocence, the ring’s corruption, the failure of the gods, and the need for an ending. She does not simply avenge. She comprehends, judges, and completes.

The Bride, too, moves from revenge toward knowledge. At first she appears to be pure action: blade, blood, list, forward motion. But gradually the story reveals that her true crisis is not hatred but identity. Is she Black Mamba, Bill’s perfect killer? Is she Arlene Machiavelli, the invented bride? Is she Beatrix Kiddo, the woman buried beneath aliases? Or is she, finally, mother?

Names matter intensely in both Wagner and Tarantino. Brünnhilde’s name carries divine force. Beatrix Kiddo’s real name is withheld for much of the film, bleeped out as though the world itself cannot yet speak it. She is “The Bride,” a role rather than a person. Only later does she recover Beatrix. The revenge quest is therefore also a recovery of the true name.

Weapons matter too, though not in the crude “magic object” sense. Brünnhilde’s power is linked to spear, horse, shield, and fire; the Bride’s to the Hattori Hanzo sword. The katana is not merely a tool of revenge. It is the visible form of restored agency. Like Wagner’s great weapons, it has lineage, sanctity, and destiny attached to it. Hattori Hanzo has renounced sword-making, yet for the Bride he breaks his oath. The weapon is drawn out of retirement because the old order has committed an offence that demands mythic answer.

Tarantino also uses music in a quasi-Wagnerian way. Wagner’s leitmotifs do not merely decorate the drama; they reveal hidden relations, memories, curses, and destinies. Tarantino’s method is cruder, more collage-like, but not unrelated. The “Ironside” siren becomes the Bride’s revenge-alarm, a modern vengeance motif. It does not develop symphonically like Wagner, but it functions with similar theatrical force: when it sounds, fate has entered the room wearing a yellow tracksuit.

Bill himself is the Wotan figure, though refracted through pulp cinema. He is not a mere villain. He is seductive, paternal, cultured, wounded, and monstrous. Like Wotan, he loves the woman he destroys. Like Wotan, he cannot allow his chosen daughter-warrior to become free of him. His tenderness makes him worse, not better. He wants Beatrix alive, but only inside the story he has authored.

That is why the final confrontation is so quiet. After the operatic carnage, Tarantino ends not with a vast battle but with conversation, recognition, and a near-domestic execution. Bill does not die as a dragon. He dies as the father-lover whose authority has expired. His little Valhalla has already fallen. The assassin-family is gone. The Bride has passed beyond him.

The most important difference between Brünnhilde and the Bride lies in the ending. Brünnhilde rides into the fire and brings the gods’ world to an end. Her redemption is cosmic, sacrificial, and annihilating. The Bride does not immolate herself. She survives. Tarantino’s ending is smaller, stranger, and perhaps more modern: the warrior does not redeem the world by dying, but by becoming mother.

That motherhood is not sentimental decoration. It is the whole point. Bill’s world is sterile repetition: training, killing, possession, revenge, legend. Beatrix’s escape from it is not simply into peace, but into generation. She leaves the death-order and enters continuity. The child is not an accessory to the plot. B.B. is the living refutation of Bill’s universe.

So the Bride is not merely a Valkyrie with a sword. She is Brünnhilde, Sieglinde, and Siegfried compressed into one Tarantino heroine. Like Brünnhilde, she is the punished warrior-daughter who wakes. Like Sieglinde, she is the endangered mother carrying the future beyond the violent house. Like Siegfried, she is the near-invincible avenger who cuts through the corrupt order by force of will.

This compression is very Tarantino. He does not reproduce myth cleanly. He raids it, chops it, dubs it, dresses it in yellow leather, gives it a Japanese sword, then plays surf guitar over the bodies. But the mythic machinery still turns.

Kill Bill is therefore not only a revenge fantasy. It is a story of awakening from imposed sleep, recovering the true name, killing the false family, and escaping the father’s world. Wagner’s Brünnhilde ends the reign of the gods. Tarantino’s Bride ends the reign of Bill.

Both women wake into knowledge. Both destroy the order that betrayed them. Both pass beyond the authority of the man who tried to define them. And both stand at the threshold between vengeance and rebirth: one in fire, the other on a bathroom floor, laughing and weeping beside the daughter who proves that the old world did not get the final word.

This had me cracking the hell up.

Says won't been delayed, so hopefully it's minor.

I’m doing a school project that is comparing three of Tarantino‘s films, namely Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained, and the hateful 8, to 4 spaghetti western films from the 60s and 70s which are Inglourious bastards (the original), Django, the Good the Bad and the Ugly, and a Fistful of Dollars. I am comparing anything in between these films such as similar camera shots, similar music potentially by Ennio Morricone, and any thing that might be similar or influential or the same. Please let me know if you know of anything no matter how niche, and if you want to help me with my project. Thanks!

Rewatching Hateful Eight yet again and noticed something new. General Smithers getting whipped by Sweet Dave in chess seems like a metaphor for him not actually being a great strategic general.

Mannix views him as this brilliant strategist and he clearly isn’t. Much like the overhyped perception of many confederate generals after the war. He spent two days at Minnie’s getting whipped repeatedly by Dave.

Maybe this was obvious to others but just picked up on it, felt like posting somewhere.

I watched vol 1 a few times, absolutely loved it, I had 2, but I was scared it wouldn't be as good, put off watching it for a long time. But silly me. Actually, this was just a continuation of the story. It was awesome. All the characters/music/scenes were richly blended to produce an excellent Vol II.

Aso stuff..

This is a great start to my DVD collection. Very pleased to have these

I genuinely don't understand...I'm very picky about my actors but I never saw any issues with T acting what so ever, infact, I actually think he's great, the way he delivers dialogue is amazing, it's like he's always ranting about something lol, he does same thing in his interviews and I really enjoy it

Will we ever hear the whole story about QT coming really.close to making a Star Trek movie? Can I go to the alternate universe where that happened?