Last week, Friday night was movie night. (Actually, so was Saturday night, but that’s another story.) The venue: The wonderful Vista theatre, one of the great old movie palaces. The movie: Grindhouse. Why? See title (let’s be honest here), and I love well made terrible films (if you see what I mean) but also because I really do enjoy (overall) Quentin Tarantino’s dialogue1.
To get to the Tarantino segment (a movie called “Death Proof”), you have to wade through Robert Rodriguez’ “Planet Terror”, the first part of the double bill. This is a very well done (but maybe half an hour too long?) celebration of the Grindhouse spirit, complete with missing reels, scratchy film stock with burnt out patches, the works. (Clever idea to put in the technical difficulties – including using a missing reel excuse at a pivotal moment – the second film uses that latter joke too). The level of humour was very high indeed, through all the remarkable and cartoonish slime and gore… It was just the perfect venue that I (with two other friends) had chosen to see this in: Friday night at the Vista with an appreciative Silver Lake/Los Feliz crowd (from the neighbourhood).
Combine Planet Terror iwht the long and marvelously terrible spoof trailer for the movie “Machete”, and that would have been a fun night out on its own. But Planet Terror ended, everyone took a deep breath, and the opening credits Tarantinos’ “Death Proof” began to roll.
Night and Day.
While the Rodriguez film and the spoof trailer were made with a huge accompanying wink (several, actually) mindful of the guilty pleasures of the “Grindhouse” genre (and having been to some of the showings at the New Beverly’s Grindhouse festival, I can tell you that they were perfectly done), the Tarantino was something else entirely. What he’s gone and done is made a (mostly) straight film – in the Grindhouse style, but not trying to be bad. Trying (and succeeding) to make a good film. Not a parody but a tribute. Upon reflection, this makes perfect sense: Tarantino has in fact been making this sort of film for his entire career, bringing to the genre excellent film-making skills, a great ear and eye for observation, and a good sense of humour. So of course, he pulled off the delicate balance between – trash and art – perfectly. I don’t know how he does it.
The highlight of the film for me is the dialogue. There are three or four long scenes of groups of women hanging out and just talking trash and as far as I am concerned, the movie could have been entirely filled with those scenes and I would have been fine. His over-stylized and somewhat forced (at times) dialogue (which I like in all of his films) was actually a lot more fluid and natural (relatively speaking) than it has been in the past films, and worked very well indeed.
Oh, and yes, then there’s the stuff with the car. And the other car. Can’t tell you any more, so as not to spoil it, since part of the reason the film works is that you’ve no idea where he’s going with it. Trashy and wonderful at the same time. Delicious.
So in summary…. two completely different films, going for different takes on the Grindhouse theme. I enjoyed both, but I think I preferred the second one.
Did you see the double bill? What did you think?
-cvj
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1Ok, another reason is that I also am in love with Rosario Dawson. I’ll admit it, although I wanted to see the film long before I knew she was in it.
I saw Grindhouse and I thought it was the best movie I’ve seen in the past 6 months or so. Probably the most hilarious, gruesome and disgusting attempted rape scene ever filmed was in Planet Terror.
The movies were mostly filmed in the Austin area of Texas and I loved the hill country oaks. A great part of the Tarantino flick was the woman imitating a cowboy’s approach in a bar.
I was considering blogging this, but there really isn’t much to say.
I’ve heard a lot about Grindhouse because my friend Mike has talked about it for months–yes, literally months. He went to see it, and brought up Vanishing Point, which he says is mentioned in it. Since I am very briefly *in* Vanishing Point, I blogged about that. I’m not sure I’ll see the film. It would be another 140 mile drive, and I have to really want to see something before I drive that far. Maybe I’ll see it on DVD. I’ll be interested in reading other’s reactions.