“So, Satya”, she said. “Which M was your Christmas this time?”

I was confused. Which M? Like James Bond M? Was my friend making some arcane pop culture reference that I did not get? Was I doomed to begin the year on a note of failure, unable to respond to a simple query? I must have blinked more than a few times, because she laughed. “I meant, was it Merry, Melancholy or Meh?”

“Oh”, I said. “Sorry, you lost me for a second there.” And then when I was about to answer her, I realized that my life is such a blur sometimes that it took me a couple of minutes to retrace my steps and answer her question. Merry, I said. But not the way you would think. And very very special. In fact, I told her, if I did not write this shit down, I would forget all about how special Christmas 2015 was.
“Goddammit are you going to not answer me right now and write one of those roundabout, self-aware blog posts of yours?”, she said, and seeing the twinkle and the grin, added, “You know nobody reads blogs nowadays, right? I mean, this is 2016. If you were writing this down, I would have lost interest right about now.”

Too late, for my eyes had already glazed over, as my mind flashed back to a few weeks ago. A time when events of major import were unfolding in another part of Los Angeles as I sat at my work-desk whispering arcane spells over cauldrons overflowing with bubbling ichor. Or debugging code, if you want a narrative that fits in more with your frame of reference.

You see, the New Beverly – which is a heritage theater that Quentin Tarantino used to frequent as a struggling screenplay-writer, and later on bought when the owner died and building was due to be broken down in 2007  – announced that they were going to play Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair on Christmas Eve. KB:TWBA, in case you didn’t know, is the NC-17 cut of the movie, both volumes played in one single screening with an intermission, with a combined runtime of 257 minutes. It has additional material, the whole House of Blue Leaves sequence is in color, as opposed to the b/w version that was aired for audiences because the excessive bloodletting did not make for happy Film Certification boards. Only one print of this cut exists, and QT owns it. It has French subtitles because it was cut for the Cannes screening.

Now here’s the important thing – the only public screening was in Cannes, for the premiere of Kill Bill. The only other time it had been screened until this happy announcement was also at the New Beverly in April 2011, for Tarantino’s birthday. I know the month because I bought tickets off Craigslist for the event; I had to sell them because of an unexpected trip back to India. The tickets yielded a profit, but the cruelest blow was the Tyler Stout Mondo poster that was released during the screening. I did buy the poster a few years later, but had to pay a huge premium; I complained to the moirai, out of frustration and resentment. But a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do, for the sake of his living room wall.

Anyway, the point of all this nerdtastic regurgitation of facts is: The Whole Bloody Affair is kinda special. Especially more so because out of Tarantino’s oeuvre, Kill Bill was the movie that mapped the movie-viewing landscape for me in the second half of my twenties. You know how when you are young and you like certain things, but you don’t really know how to classify them, or find more things like them? Before Kill Bill happened, I never really knew how to go around and figure out what I should watch next, but suddenly there was this explosion of taste; this whole spectrum of genres that QT’s homages and references opened up for me – Italian giallo, Shaw Brothers films, Spaghetti Westerns, *good* anime, the Yakuza movies of Kinji Fukasaku, the soundtracks of Morricone and Bacalov, Japanese noise rock; and surprisingly, a renewed interest in the likes of Hitchcock, Truffaut, and Godard. Films and film-makers that I had considered too pretentious or stuffy for my tastes suddenly felt warmer, cast in a new light; swathes of genre film that I had dismissed as not worth my time revealed deeper veins of style and substance. So it made the wait to see Tarantino’s original cut for the film even more special, a 12-year tunnel at the end of which a light flickered, finally.

But of course, all 200 tickets for the December 25 show sold out in 2 minutes. I was ready at the appointed hour, refreshing the tickets page. By the time I added tickets to my cart, the number came down to 92,  and by the time I got to the payments page, they were all gone. Somewhere, the moirai laughed. But I pulled myself up, brushed off the dirt of disappointment while muttering “So that we may pick ourself up” to imaginary Alfred in my head, and went on with my life, because there is not much else one can do.

That Christmas morning, I went to watch Hateful Eight in the morning; it was one of the few movies of 2015 that I was looking forward to, and to say I loved it would be an understatement. By the time I was done with lunch and came back home, it was nearly 4 PM. I am not sure why I checked Twitter, but I did, and in my feed there were tweets from the New Beverly Theater talking about the show due in a few hours. But huzzah, they mentioned a standby line. A moment or two of indecisive laziness, and then I found myself saying – fuck this, I can either stay at home and cry, or go stand in line and at least try. Moments like these – when one’s brain speaks in rhyme – defines one’s very existence. I walked out, paused, and ran back in, because it was really really cold outside – shut up, non-Los Angeles people – and put on another jacket, picked up a scarf, and drove like crazy to the theater. Hoping that there weren’t already 30 people in the standby line.

There were 7. I was the 8th. And after 3 hours of waiting, and talking to the guys standing ahead of and behind me, and hearing stories of how one of them sat next to Quentin T himself at one random movie screening and how the other fist-bumped Edgar Wright just a few days ago, it turns out there were 11 returns. I swear Tomoyasu Hotei played when I walked inside the theater. There was a line at the refreshments stand, which has one of the most wondrous cinema food prices in the world – $1 for a small drink, $4 for a popcorn – and even though I had only just been in line, I stood there again for a few minutes to grab me some nourishment. The pre-movie ad reels are always fun at the Beverly; this time around, we had an animated Max Fleischer Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer ‘toon in its entirety; followed by trailers for Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs, Truffaut’s The Bride Wore Black, the Western Navajo Joe, Bronson’s Death Wish, and the Clint Eastwood starrer Hang ‘Em High, which I realized I have never seen.

Thoughts on TWBA:

• The music that begins Kill Bill, with the somewhat old-timey ‘Our Feature Presentation’ animation is actually QT’s homage to the New Beverly, which plays before every movie. This music therefore played before the movie actually began, and then again within the movie’s credits. We applauded, of course.
• French subtitles throughout. ‘Buck’, for some reason, is subtitled  ‘Buckaroo’ in French.
• Boss Matsumoto’s killing is defs more gruesome in this cut. Pun completely intended.
• The Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves sequence is all-color, and has a bunch of unedited blood-and-gore snippets, obviously. It also features the kid that gets his ass whupped with the non-business end of the Bride’s Hanzo sword in yet another sequence, where his mask gets knocked away. That also misses the close-up of the Bride’s eye in the upstairs room – in the normal cut, she blinks, and the color flips back in.  Gordon Liu as Johnny Mo also gets a little more fight-time in this version.
• Because both movies are linked together, Bill and Sophie’s scene from the end of Vol 1 does not have the line “Does she know that her daughter is still alive?” line. None of the preview snapshots (‘How did you find me?’, ‘That woman deserves her revenge, and we deserve to die’, ‘She must suffer until her last breath’) at the end of Vol 1 appear in the uncut version, for obvious reasons.
• It also does not have the opening ‘Bill, it’s your baby’ sequence from Vol 2 – which is the same scene from Vol 1 but with the theme music from ‘Navajo Joe’ playing in the background. Also, the Bride looking into the camera saying ‘Thought you were dead, didn’t I?’ is not in this cut.
• Love the way Gheorge Zamfir’s ‘The Lonely Shepherd’ leads into the intermission. Very very stylish.
• There is a 7-second blooper at the end of the credits. For those of us who stayed until that point – and there were a lot of us – the staff at the New Beverly handed out custom beanies. Woo hoo!

My Christmas, therefore, was M for Merry. It was B for Bloody and T for Tarantino-esque and F for Fuck yeah, a gargantuan goal overcome.