Blood, filth, and noise: GRINDHOUSE

 

GRINDHOUSE is a bit of a culturally fascinating creation.  It's two fanboys' unchecked filmmaking fantasies played out on screen.  I can see Rodriguez and Tarantino having drinks (or some mixture of illegal substances) and talking about the project enthusiastically:

R: Hey Q, you know how we always talk about how much we love those old exploitation movies?

Q: Yes I do Robert. (Insert five minute monologue with lots of obscure references)

R: We should  make our own movie that is just like those old movies because that would be really COOL.

Q: Yes that would be cool!  And it fits right in with everything in my postmodern body of work in which I constantly make art by recasting traditionally unappreciated movies that most people think are crap but that I think are really AWESOME! (Repeat the previous sentence twenty times, but each time more enthusiastic and in the form of an analogy based on a pop song).

R: Whatever you say man, but zombies and blood and explosions are all BAD ASS.  Plus the Weinstein brothers worship the ground you walk on and they'll let us do anything we want!

Q: Rock on.

Now that I've ruined most of my chances at with the aforementioned very talented filmmakers and the courageous producers who sponsored them, I'll talk about the films themselves.  But really, Hollywood is now overrun with fanboy filmmakers from Peter Jackson to Sam Rami, from del Toro to Eli Roth.  It's only a matter of time before Harry Knowles, the king of all fanboys, has his own production company.

Anyway, the approach that each filmmaker ultimately resulted in something rather unlikely: GRINDHOUSE is Rodriguez's best film to date and Tarantino's worst.  But Quintin's is still the better film.

PLANET TERROR is the much better homage to those blood-and-lust fueled flicks of yesteryear, where logic took a back seat to an opportunity to blow someone or something up, where often the cover art for the movie was much sweeter looking than anything in the movie itself, and where poor editing, missing reels, and dirty film stock was part of a film's charm.  Rodriguez makes a much more honest effort to recreate and modernize the films he used to adore: there's a certain tongue-in-cheek campiness to the film that actually elevates its excitement factor rather than diminish it, and one can enjoy the film for the guilty pleasure that it is.  And thus why this film is Rodriguez's most accomplished effort: while all his prior films, from the breakout success DESPERADO to the star-filled but inexcusable ONCE UPON A TIME IN MEXICO to the stylistic but shameless SIN CITY, were in truth bad movies with a certain "cool fun factor," this one KNOWS it is bad.  And it has a great time being it.

 

Quintin Tarantino cheated.  He tried to make a good film.  But what we get is Tarantino without precision, without restraints, and without enough editing on the script's end.  If it wasn't for the now stereotypical Tarantino-esque strands of witty (or would-be witty) dialog, DEATH PROOF would have been a great diversion that actually had some weight to it.  The car chase will become legendary: a woman hanging onto the hood of a car at ninety miles an hour is just exciting and amazing to watch.  The not-so-subtle sexual innuendo and the feminism smacking masculinity back on itself is not just funny, it's smart (Kurt Russell's over-the-top crying is hysterical).  But to get to the point of the movie, Quintin sets it up ad nauseum with rambling and tangent-laden conversations that do little to establish a mood or drive the story.  Whereas certain ramblings in films like RESERVOIR DOGS and PULP FICTION added to their respective film's unique flavor and fleshed out its characters, they truly just get in the way here.  It's like the director is trying to turn a thirty minute short film into a feature, and he does so with nearly masturbatory levels of yawn-inspiring dialog.  For a guy so enthusiastic about a film's energy, this one is pretty uneven.  One also gets the feeling that all of the stylistic homages to exploitation films (the sound blips, the missing reel) were an afterthought, whereas they felt like an honest part of PLANET TERROR.  Still, the presence of actual thought-provoking themes, accompanied by the extended and truly revolutionary stunts* makes Quintin's entry the more worthy film, even if it comes at the price of being the poorer recreation of films that most people are glad no longer exist.

Computers have ruined our expectations for realistic stunts: watching a real chick hold on for her life on top of a real car is more exciting than watching a digitally animated Keanu Reeves dodge computer created bullets.

Comments

[Brett Swanson]

After our first post-mortem conversation about these flicks, I was under the impression that you thought Planet Terror was the better of the two films.

I pretty much totally agree with your sentiments in this post...

The narrative drive of the film is in almost no way served by the chick-ramblings. He could've had the same set up with the same characterizations in half the time.

Quentin should go about making a film that has the same kinds of awesome action sequences but actually has a plot and steadier action.

That could be quite compelling...