Credits at the end of "Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair" attribute the creation of the Bride assassin to "Q & U" — stark-white capital letters that stand in for Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman. The coy initials look a little like something a romantic kid might carve into a tree. Fittingly, the four-and-a-half hours leading up to them feel like a sheaf of love letters. It's an ode from a director to his star, to the chop-socky classics that inspired it and to every film nut willingly spending their day in a theater.

Big words. But the saga of the Bride, aka Beatrix Kiddo, aka Black Mamba, and her vengeance upon her lover Bill (David Carradine), the boss of her former Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, for mowing her down in a wedding chapel, makes for an awful big movie. Especially as i

See Full Page