Darin really wanted me to see Kill Bill, Vols 1 and 2—I hadn’t had a lot of interest in them when they were out in theaters, mostly because I’m not as sanguine (heh) about on-screen violence as I used to be, and because I’d heard that several times during the movie a child watches their parent die in hideous and graphic ways. NO THANK YOU. Stuff that wouldn’t have fazed me for a second pre-Sophia makes me crazy and start crying now.

Darin saw both movies in the theaters and loved them, though. He said I wouldn’t be affected by the parent deaths in the way I thought I would be. “They’re the best kung fu movies ever,” he said.

“This does not mean a whole hell of a lot to me,” I told him.

He brought the movies home and we decided that we would actually spend some time together (instead of me writing (which I’ve been doing of late) and him playing World of Warcraft (major, major friggin’ time sink of his of late). We watched Vol. 1 Sunday night and while I did have a lot of problems with several scenes, I agreed that the movie was so over the top in so many ways that the scenes with children bothered me but not in the make-me-retch (no, really) way I was expecting. Then we sat down to watch Vol. 2 last night. Darin was right: definitely a different movie (several orders of magnitude fewer bodies, for one thing), though it’s clearly an integral part of the whole story. The way Tarantino jumps around in time is extremely clever and almost novelesque: there are lots of scenes you already know the outcome to, but you’re hooked wondering, How’s she gonna get out of this one? Really good filmmaking, I think.

So, we’re watching Vol. 2 last night and after four hours of mayhem, murder, confrontations, kung fu training, standoffs, and a blistering pace toward the inevitable, we’ve finally gotten to the big confrontation where the Bride is going to kill Bill (totally not a spoiler), and they’ve got their weapons out, and here it is, we’re going to find out —

The DVD machine dies.

Totally. Freaking. Dead.

I looked at Darin. He played with the remote control a little. Power-cycled the player a few times. Felt the box to see if it had overheated.

Dead.

“There’s, like, ten minutes left in the movie,” he said. “Do we have any other DVD players? Besides the computer?”

“I’m going to bed now,” I said.

I still don’t know how the movie ends. I guess I will have to break down and watch it on the computer (unless Darin is planning on replacing our DVD jukebox—capacity: 300; currently holds: about 200—soon). But I feel as though I should savor this feeling of suspension, forever trapped in the confrontation.