Uma Thurman wears a Rolex Cosmograph Daytona

I've watched the long flashback at the heart of Kill Bill Vol. 2 more times than I can count, and not once did I look at the Bride's wrist. Why would you? Beatrix Kiddo, played by Uma Thurman, is alone in a motel bathroom waiting out a pregnancy test, an assassin about to learn she's carrying Bill's child, and Tarantino is using the moment to turn a killer into a mother. The watch is the last thing on your mind. But freeze the frame and there it is, for a second looking like a steel Rolex Cosmograph Daytona.

It is not one. Two watch publications, Wrist Enthusiast and Time and Tide, went through the close-up frame by frame, and the prop gives itself away twice over. A real Daytona's three subdials are chronograph registers - running seconds, a thirty-minute counter, a twelve-hour counter. The fake's instead show the date at three o'clock, a twenty-four-hour scale at six, and the day of the week at nine, a calendar layout no Daytona has ever worn. And the tachymeter around the rim is printed upside-down. The watch it is pretending to be is the steel reference 116520, the Daytona Rolex made from 2000 to 2016.

Here is the part that gets me. This is Tarantino, the man who sweats every needle-drop and every cut, and in the single scene that turns his assassin into a mother, somebody in the prop department grabbed a counterfeit Daytona and clipped it on. Time and Tide looked at that upside-down tachymeter and said it plainly: there's no excuse for it.