hey everyone
well, three teeth have left my jaw. i am still feeling somewhat fragile, but not too sore. no tooth fairy has visited me yet, but i did watch Red Dragon again last week. it's almost the same thing, i guess.
i get very limited time to watch movies these days, so i try and choose what i watch carefully. i made a bad choice, alas, with Grindhouse. as it has Rodriguez and Tarantino attached to it, no doubt the film is immediatley seen as "cool" and a "masterpiece". don't be tricked, these two seem to have been exposed as having run out of ideas, alarmingly so.
people will try to claim "oh, if you didn't like it, you didn't understand what it was trying to parody or pay homage to.". well, i do, as it happens, and it still is not very good.
OK, let's try and take this thing apart bit by bit.....but a warning, as it may contain some spoilers, although there is not exactly a great deal to spoil.
Planet Terror : this is Mr Rodriguez's contribution, and easily the best of the two films. which is scary, as it is by no means good. the film amounts to a timid "tribute" to a variety of Dead films, be they Evil, Night/Dawn/Day or Living in variety, and a few tips of the hat to the beloved Zombi 2. small town is subjected to some sort of chemical exposure, people become zombies, eat people, hard to kill, blah blah blah.
it is dull, slow moving (a very impressive accomplishment for all of 80 minutes) and unimaginative when something happens. the deliberate "missing reel" in this film is a blessing, as it allows you to move on to some sort of action. i could imagine a bunch of teenagers who have never seen any "video nasties" in their time would get excited by the effects, but that's about it.
two notes on the casting, Mr Rodriguez : 1. Bruce Willis in a "surprise" cameo is no longer a surprise, especially when you have him on the poster. Bruce is kind of expected to feature in films like this. 2. Quentin Tarantino is a chum of yours. that should not, however, have forced you to cast him in your film, but now that he is in it, maybe you should have mentioned to him that just shouting a lot is not what one would call "acting", even in an attempted B-Grade send up.
The Mock Trailers : these are the only reason you should look at this film, or just get these trailers off the interweb net somewhere. they are the best aspect of this whole project. Machete is the film you wish you were watching instead of this, the Werewolf Women Of The SS or whatever it is called looks like what Grindhouse should have been about, and Thanksgiving is as close as we are ever going to get to the idea that maybe Eli Roth can actually make a proper film.
Death Proof : this is the biggest crime committed by Grindhouse, and easily exposes the lack of talent and ability Quentin Tarantino is blessed with. it brings me no joy to say that, but i will qualify the comment later.
Death Proof should be one of the coolest films ever. you have Kurt Russell in a potentially iconic role as Stuntman Mike, and you have him driving around in a killer car. what a pity Tarantino opted not to utilise or play to the strengths of this.
the film is an awful lot of very annoying women sitting around talking. and i do mean annoying. once again Tarantino illustrates that he cannot write any sort of character part for a female, instead delivering large chunks of third & fourth rate dialogue that seems to be some self-loathing tribute to the opening of Reservoir Dogs.
you really want these awful female characters off your screen. they do all go eventually, via the Stuntman Mike character, but it takes forever to get to the bit when they go, and even then it is far from worthwhile. this is down to the fact that, and this must have taken more effort that to do it properly, Stuntman Mike is a bland and boring character.
Kurt Russell is barely in the film, and when he does turn up a large amount of his time is wasted in the same banal conversations as the female characters. why go to all that effort to create a cool sounding character, get an ace cult actor to play him and then deliver this rubbish?
apparently, they wish to cut Grindhouse into two films because people have been walking out half way through, not knowing that it is in fact two films. as stupid as the average American is, i find this hard to believe. i would wager that people are walking out knowing exactly why they are - they have had enough of this rubbish dressed up as if it were something impressive.
the saddest part of this is the final demise of the reputation of Quentin Tarantino. how far he has fallen. Reservoir Dogs was a masterpiece, we even forgave that it was no more than a convoluted combined remake of Kubrick's The Killing and The Taking Of Phelam 1-2-3. how on earth he conned the world with Pulp Fiction is still beyond me. every single character was one dimensional, and almost identical. go watch it again, tell me how Uma Thurman is a different character from John Travolta or anyone else! everyone spoke and acted in exactly the same way.
it seems that when a film has to involve a female character or lead, Tarantino has no idea what to do. this was highlighted by the fact that Natural Born Killers and True Romance, once given to other directors to rework somewhat dramatically, were masterpieces of cinema, whereas Jackie Brown and Kill Bll, left in the hands of Tarantino, were a qualified mess.
Tarantino is a good ideas man, and nothing more. he should either just hand over his projects to people that know what to do with them, or he should at the least get some help with his script developments. if Grindhouse is the direction he is taking his writing & film-making in, i would prefer he abandoned cinema all together and just stuck with arguing about names with Spike Lee in a restaurant for the rest of his life.
proceed with caution, then, if you are all excited about seeing Grindhouse. the only possible way it could have been worse is if Jack Black has appeared in it.
other than that,
be excellent to each other...................
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