I haven't seen Kill Bill, but from the sound of it, couldn't the whole "assassin not killing the woman because she was pregnant" thing simply be construed as privileging the life of a fetus over the life of a woman-- basically saying that her life is only valuable because she is breeding?

Having said that, I often find myself in turmoil in terms of female characters that I admire, because often, when I look at things more closely, I see that they are promoting sexist paradigms. For instance, one movie that made me feel great was "G.I. Jane"-- now, I am totally not a military minded person, I protest wars instead of supporting them, and a lot of stuff that happened in that movie was stuff that I hated. But it still made me feel really powerful as a woman. I loved seeing Demi Moore kicking some ass. An even worse example comes from the second Bridget Jones movie-- not only does it say that the ultimate fulfillment for a woman is a relationship with a man, it was badly written and very badly acted. Yet, when I went to see it with two feminist friends, we all came out of the theatre feeling bizarrely empowered-- I have NO IDEA why this is. None of us found the actual relationship that she formed with Mark Darcy empowering, it wasn't a great movie-- but for some reason we all felt good about ourselves, and I walked home thinking "ha! No man is ever going to stop me doing anything cool!" And I really have no idea why, because that is not the message that the film gives at all.

As for my real feminist sheroes-- SHIRLEY VALENTINE!!! If you have not seen this movie, it is a total must. It's about a 40-something Manchester housewife who goes on a trip to Greece, and doesn't come home.