> I think both volumes of Kill Bill were amazing. When I first saw Kill Bill I, it was uncomfortable to watch, but after I thought about it and got myself used to it, it was a lot of fun. It's a very unique movie. And it is a movie. Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, while certainly unique as well, had more of a realistic tone to them: it was basically as if you had put a camera down in front of these gangsters and filmed them going about their business.

A couple of points:

If you think either RD or PF were realistic, QT (yay acronyms!) fooled you with his dialogue. I could maybe see a case for RD being realistic, but Pulp Fiction is completely insanely unrealistic in so many ways. It's just that the dialogue does a good job of grounding in you reality, that it seems more real than it should.

Tarantino says that those two movies are "more real than real life." I think that's a decent way to describe them. The characters in the films are related in obscure ways (Vincent Vega [John Travolta in PF] and Vic Vega [Michael Madsen aka Mr. Blonde in RD] are apparently brothers) and can cross over between movies -- theoretically at least, since to the best of my knowledge none have. The characters exist in their own universe, the Quentin Universe.

Now, movies like From Dusk 'Til Dawn (which QT wrote) and Kill Bill are, according to QT, the movies the characters in the Quentin Universe go to see when they see movies. So The Bride could wind up meeting the Gecko Brothers or something*.

Characters cannot, however, cross between universes. Marsellus Wallace can't meet up with Elle Driver, then. The one exception to this, according to QT, is Winston Wolf, as he is a movie character who just exists in the Quentin Universe. In other words, I was very disappointed not to see Harvey Keitel in Kill Bill.

Just to be complete, Jackie Brown takes place in the Elmore Leonard universe, as can be witnessed by watching JB back-to-back with Out of Sight.

Ste "Have I spent too much time thinking about this?" phen

* There is an interesting problem I just thought of. There is a character in Pulp Fiction named Esmarelda Villalobos, played by Angela Jones. She's the obsessed-with-death cab driver who drives Bruce Willis back from the fixed-fight he doesn't throw. When QT was showing Reservoir Dogs at Sundance in 1992, he kept hearing about a short film called "Curdled" that starred Angela Jones as a woman obssessed with death (named Gabriella, not Esmarelda). He apparently liked it, and put the character into Pulp Fiction.

In 1996, QT went one further and produced a full-length version of "Curdled" (it kind of sucked). Angela Jones was reprising her character from the short, and there is a part where she's watching TV and sees the Gecko Brothers (from From Dusk Till Dawn).

This raises a big question: Pulp Fiction is in the Quentin Universe, not the Movie Movie Universe. How does Curdled fit in? It has the Gecko Brothers, a clear indication that it's happening in the MMU. So how does Esmarelda/Gabriella fit in? My theory: in the Quentin Universe, somebody met Esmarelda and hired her to star in a movie they wrote about her, called Curdled.

I wonder if Quentin has realized this yet.