Quentin Tarantino Messes Up

No one doubts that American filmmaker Quentin Tarantino is a cinematic prodigy. You'd be hard pressed to find an auteur who has as much love and respect for the silver screen as he does. Usually his movies are overflowing with obscure cinematic references and tributes. This man does his homework and generally doesn't make mistakes. But, while watching Kill Bill 2 this weekend with my dearest Dai Li, I found that the golden man of pulp cinema isn't as infallible as he seems.

At the beginning of the awesome scene "The Cruel Tutelage of Pai Mei", the scene in which Beatrix Kiddo goes to the Sichuan province in China to study with a kung fu master, Dai Li yells, "Hey! They don't speak Guangdong hua in Sichuan!" She was right, Pai Mai wasn't speaking Mandarin, he was speaking Cantonese (called Guangdong hua in Mandarin), which also explains why I couldn't understand much of what was being said. In fact, the actor playing Pai Mai, Chia Hui Liu, is from Hong Kong where most people speak Cantonese rather than Mandarin. I assume that while Chia probably speaks a bit of Mandarin, Tarantino had him speak his native tongue so he wouldn't butcher the pronunciation. Still, the Chinese person I was watching the movie with didn't buy this, and neither do I.Mandarin Speaking Skills: 1, Tarantino's Film Veracity: 0