Happy Birthday Uma Thurman

As I said last week, I've been inspired by one of my favorite bloggers to maintain a regular feature using my favorite actresses' (or female actors')birthdays as an opportunity to celebrate my obsession with them, and I usually have pretty good reasons to be obsessed with a particular actress, considering that I find 75% of them to be either undistinguished or actively bad. Well, despite not having liked a single movie she's been in without "Directed by Quentin Tarantino" attached to it, I am deeply in love with Uma Thurman.

Disclaimer: I have not seen Hysterical Blindness (2002), Tape (2001), Sweet and Lowdown (1999), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993) or The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988).

Her filmography is not great, but generally, if she is in a shitty movie, she is somehow able to transcend the shittiness of the whole enterprise. It could be her otherworldly loveliness, her charming sheepishness (witnessed more from interviews with her than from the characters she plays), her very unusual facial features (you'd never confuse her with anyone else), or maybe it's the way the sun shines down on me and I hear birds chirping and a choir of angels when she smiles and laughs. Ethan Hawke is a fucking idiot.

Anyway, the #1 reason she knocks my socks off is her tour de force performance in Kill Bill: Volume 1 and Kill Bill: Volume 2. Even if you don't like Quentin Tarantino or kung-fu movies or spaghetti westerns or kung-fu movie homages or spaghetti western homages or crazy violent swordfights or pure adrenaline-surging badassery, you have to admit that Uma Thurman is SPEC-TACULAR, like a performance that'll make her a Legend, if she's not one already, at the young age of 38! 38. And she's a fucking Legend. Quentin Tarantino can do that for your career.

Despite Quentin Tarantino's waning credibility among film elitist snobs, I still consider his oeuvre a guilty pleasure of mine, and have yet to see a film by him that I didn't like (Yes, I liked Death Proof). He's as smitten with Ms. Thurman as myself, moreso, and it must either be an immense treat or an endless parade of stifled overtures of affection to work with her, talk to her, stand next to her, breathe the same rose-scented air as her...but somehow he manages to not let the magnetic force of her allure distract him.

Yeah, so, um, wow, she's just exceptionally attractive and sexy and wonderful, but I did not find her to be any of these things when she played Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction. Mia Wallace is the relatively smug, badly-coiffed, sneering, jaded moll of prodigious gangster Marcellus (Ving Rhames) and is not really likeable. Okay, she is sexy, I suppose, despite the hair, and does warm up to Vincent Vega considerably after getting back home from Jack Rabbit Slim's. She seems untouchable and smells of danger. She is also rather insightful when it comes to the mechanics of social exchanges:



The color of her hair seems to play a large part in the chameleon transformation from icy, wicked bad-girl Mia to lovable, sunny good girl (with bad-girl fighting skills) Beatrix Kiddo. I could totally buy that glaring girl with the dark hair getting mixed up in a lurid fiasco involving a hypodermic needle hanging out of her chest. Beatrix, not so much. Despite being a world-traveled assassin who has sliced off people's arms, legs, heads, and scalps, she is a pretty wholesome gal. I could go on and on about how she holds TWO ENTIRE FILMS on her shoulders, strains every fiber of herself, physically and mentally, to play "The Bride," or how she becomes a walking embodiment of pure awesomeness, an Icon of Cool, or I could just show a wild montage of the phantasmagoric fight sequences and color palettes shimmering from the movie, but instead I'll show you a quiet clip from Volume 1, the moment she first meets Hattori Hanzo (Sonny Chiba) after arriving in Okinawa:



The rolled up sleeves, the pony-tail, the smile, the warmth, the playfulness, the lack of pretension, the eyes, the way Tarantino lights her, this was the moment where I fell in love with Uma Thurman, and drooled like a pervert all over my lap. Now that the DVD is available, I can drool in the privacy of my own home.