Three years ago, I had almost stopped watching the new movies. They were so bad, I spent my time with the movies of the fairly distant past, most over 20 years old.

Even though I am a science movie freak, I found the Star War and Star Trek movies to be a bore. The Matrix group started well but then lost it. The Alien sequels were unwatchable.

I must interject the fact that while I loved watching movies, I knew nothing about directors. So, I had entirely missed the arrival of director Quentin Tarantino on the scene. This changed when a fellow engineer brought a copy of Kill Bill 1 to work one day and told me I should watch it. He had been listening to my movie complaints and knew I was missing the boat on Tarantino.

That night, I watched Kill Bill 1 and my movie watching entered a new phase. No more Star Wars....no more Matrix...and, certainly, no more Lord of the Rings (probably the most overrated movie of all time).

I soon added Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill 2 to my collection of DVDs.

But it was Kill Bill 1 that made me a Tarantino fan.

From the opening scene where Uma Thurman is shot until the next scene where the sheriff discovers that she is still alive and on to the next scenes where she is horribly mistreated in the hospital and evenually begins to exact revenge from those who wronged her. I was totally sympathetic to her plight. How could anyone treat a human like that and expect to get away with it?

Even the Okinawa scene resonated with me. I had spent a year on Okinawa after being drafted decades ago. I loved the island and missed it. The Okinawa scene made me regret that I had not got more into the island culture while there. Drinking, chasing girls, and barroom brawling is not getting into the culture. I could have learned Karate; I could have learned to speak Japanese better. I could have read the local literature. I could have maintained my Okinawan contacts after I left Okinawa. Yes, I loved the Okinawa movie sequence but it left me with a touch of regret.

So, as Kill Bill 1 proceeded, I remained mostly sympthetic to the heroine even as I begin to realize that she was going a step too far in her revenge. Still, for the rest of the movie, I was on the bride's side almost 100 %.

As Kill Biil 2 opened, I was most impressed by Bud, Bill's uncouth brother. Seldom has a movie character been better developed as the character of Bud. Other movie directors would never have "wasted" so much time on building a character who is dispatched fairly quickly. But Tarantino did not mind the waste. It was vintage Tarantino.

As Kill Bill 2 proceeded, a subtle change came over me.....I begin to feel sympathetic toward Bill whom I had hated in Kill Bill 1. After all, Bill had done a good job of raising he and Uma's daughter. Maybe, I am too softhearted or too liberal but I wanted to see Uma and Bill forgive and forget and ride off together with the daughter into the sunset.

But such was not to be. Tarantino is an unforgiving man and he has to extract his bucket of blood. Plus, forgiving and forgetting is old school movie stuff!

But, what a pair of movies - Kill Bill 1 and Kill Bill 2! Both are on my list of the top ten movies of all time. In another lens, I will review Pulp Fiction which is generally rated higher than the Kill Bill movies (not by me). And there will be a few comments about Tarantino's lesser known films, some of which are disappointing to me.

The Kill Bill movies established Tarantino as the world's top film director.