Talent proof
I am a fan of Messrs Tarantino and Rodriguez (especially Mr Rodriguez, who I will worship as a God if I ever enter the mysterious world of the filmmaker more than as a random runner and clapper board guy who can’t clap the board properly) and waited eagerly for Grindhouse to appear in the UK. My hopes were dashed by the need to make money and the pair of films were split and lengthened to make “proper” movies. I’ve still not managed to see Planet Terror, the one that I have suspected I’ll like the most, but this evening I got round to seeing Death Proof.
It was an interesting film, I’ll give it that much, and very much a film of two halves. The first half had the perfect seedy feel to it – filmed at night, in a bar, with people drinking and living on the set. It had sexy dancing, Kurt Russell having some lines, Tarantino demonstrating he couldn’t act and the infamous “distressed film” effects that were added to try and make Grindhouse look like half of a drive-in double bill. I rather liked it. Then came the second half – filmed during the day, with a random chunk of black and white, with no momentum at all until the end and an ending that sucked, despite the excellence of the last shot. It feels as if there are two entirely seperate films here, bolted together to fill out a 1hr45 runtime…
This isn’t the first time in recent memory that I’ve felt like this about a Tarantino film – take Kill Bill. I don’t care that Tarantino was “forced to split it in two” – it’s not a film. It’s a short film festival program stuck together and sold as one (well…two). Yes there is a story, but it was so irrelevant to the disjointed scenes that I could only barely think of each of the two halves as a film in it’s own right. The second especially felt like a stuck together bunch of short films – some excellent, some merely good, but in the end it didn’t hang together as a film and fell short of the mark, despite my loving large numbers of the ‘vignettes’, or whatever one would call such things.
So, overall I’d say that the Death Proof that I assume made it into the Grindhouse double bill was a pretty excellent piece of short, violent, exploitation cinema, put together by someone who can make good films (although I suspect the second half would still not have worked as well as the first). I’d also say that the Death Proof that made it onto DVD is an overly flabby film, stuck together from two very different feeling movies, the latter half of which fails almost entirely, to the point of souring me against the first half.
I just hope they make the film of Machete now:
(Other Grindhouse fake trailers:
Eli Roth – Thanksgiving, Rob Zombie – Werewolf Women of the SS, Edgar Wright – Don’t!
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Posted: February 3rd, 2008 under Uncategorized.