Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s love poem to the low budget blood and hyperbole of the genre films most people don’t know or don’t get anymore. I confess, I know little about the exploitation films that Rodriguez and especially Tarantino continue to go on and on about. I was more excited about Grindhouse because of the prospect of resurrecting the been dead for way too long double feature, and I was not disappointed.
Grindhouse is a glorious, addictive film of excess, and it really conjures the notion of watching movies as a community again, of films being an extension of collective adolescent dreams more so than cooperate opportunism. Which is, in reality, bullshit of course. Tarantino and Rodriguez are as interested in making money as much as anyone else I would imagine, but, while being multi-millionaire, A-list players themselves, they seem to have at least not forgotten the primal thrill of seeing a corpse get beheaded by a shot gun when you’re a thirteen (hell, even twenty) year old virgin.
At the risk of being scorned by any film scholars who happen across this page, I think Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” is the gem of the two, and that Tarantino’s contribution, “Death Proof” is interesting but problematic. With “Sin City”, “Planet Terrror” and the faux trailer for “Machete” that preceds PT, Robert Rodriguez, finally, seems to be growing into the kind of wild, genre party animal that he’s always fashioned himself to be. Gone is the long, boring digressions of “Once Upon a Time in Mexico”. Gone is the slack, irregular tone of “From Dusk Til Dawn”. “Planet Terror” is pure, bloody, pusy id, and very funny, bloody, pusy id at that.
Planet Terror’s plot is not worth recounting, it makes even less sense than the typical Rodriguez movie, but the joy has returned to Rodriguez’s work. The film has a demented, Looney Toon energy, a vibe that recalls early Sam Raimi, or even, on his goriest days, a little Joe Dante. The cast, especially Rose McGowan, Marley Shelton, Jeff Fahey, Michael Biehn, and Josh Brolin are completely in tune with the material, and manage the tricky feat of both satirizing and contributing to the genre. The happiest surprise is that things are completely fucking nuts BEFORE the zombies show up.
Quentin Tarantino is, obviously the more talented and ambitious of the two filmmakers, and I imagine its his contribution most are more excited/curious about walking into “Grindhouse.” I love Tarantino’s work but can we point out the big white elephant standing in the corner of the room? Tarantino has wanted to have his genre cake and eat it too for quite some time, maybe ever since his first, “Reservoir Dogs”. The unlikely divide in artistic temperament (half Roger Corman, half Jean Luc Godard) has worked up until about the last thirty minutes of “Kill Bill Vol. 2″. That film’s ending was flat and ponderous, and lacked the hellfire confidence of everything Tarantino had produced previously. Tarantino clearly relishes being the bad boy of modern American cinema, but are bad boys this self-conscious? Are they this eager to impress us?
“Death Proof”, Tarantino’s half of “Grindhouse”, resembles KB2 in its lack of footing, its desire to be all things to all people. The film’s opening, though, is a solid, pure Tarantino riff on the horror film, with a masterful low throb dread. At the halfway mark “Death Proof” hits a signature to Tarantino genre zig zag, and starts all over again, and morphs into something all together different from what we have been watching up until this point. The problem is that, for Tarantino films, being unpredictable has become predictable, and Tarantino, in his determination to subvert genre, hasn’t bothered to come up with something better than the formula he’s subverting.
There’s disappointingly little at stake in “Death Proof”, its all post-modern, self-congratulatory wink-wink, and, to be honest, I’m tired of Tarantino continuing to lean on this particular crutch. As much as he may stress to the contrary, Tarantino makes films for the critics, and this couldn’t be more evident than in Death Proof. Mr. Tarantino, if you want to be Roger Corman, then BE Roger Corman, if you want to be Jean-Luc Godard, then BE Jean-Luc Godard, but Roger Godard is beginning to lose his luster. Death Proof’s exception is Kurt Russell’s Stuntman Mike, a canny, vulnerable variation of Russell’s past genre tough guys, and one of his very best performances.
I think the key to Tarantino’s current M.O. is still the intial rejection of his third, and quite possibly best, film “Jackie Brown”. Tarantino showed a startling empathy in that film, and the violence was largely, daringly, offscreen. Of course, Tarantino was greeted with a nation wide apathy as a result. The fact that “Jackie Brown” has become an in retrospect classic has had seemingly little effect on Tarantino, he’s still stranded between expectation and personal compulsion.
All of that said, I wouldn’t want Grindhouse any other way, the fascinating artistic schizophrenia of Tarantino’s contribution only enhances the wild, lovely unwieldiness of the entire enterprise.
