Grindhouse

Harkening back to an era of exploitation cinema while offering an interesting experiment in auteurism, The Weinstein Co.’s Grindhouse, a double feature consisting of three movie trailers for films that don’t exist, Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, is a nostalgic affirmation of a playfully tasteless, less commodified B-cinema and an implicit critique of our homogenized, over-budgeted contemporary action/horror cinema. Not that Grindhouse arrives at your local cinema with budgetary constraints; the Weinsteins spent 60 million dollars on the dual efforts, and the studio dropped another 30 on P&A. It goes without saying that the synthetic cheapness of these films is intentional and perhaps overstates the case for a more homemade B- cinema. It is ironic then and oddly fitting, given the marginalization of the lost movie culture that is being appropriated here, for the movie to have done so poorly in its opening weekend, setting off a firestorm of media reports about the Weinsteins' troubled start-up studio. But if the sons of Miriam and Max have anything to worry about, it’s not their material. Getting the best movies in quite some time out of their A-list ex-Miramax directors (Kevin Smith’s career-salvaging Clerks 2, Anthony Minghella's overlooked and powerful Breaking and Entering, and now Tarantino’s masterful and Rodriguez’s blissfully incompetent Grindhouse efforts), the most feared producers/distributors in Indiewood have been unable to find the right marketing tenor for any of their prized projects.

To the movies themselves: Planet Terror takes the Grindhouse motif and runs with it in every plausible direction without cleverly reinventing any of the elements. In that way, and when compared to the immensely superior Death Proof, it clearly demarcates Rodriguez as the pure metteur en scene. Consumed with the rules of the genres he’s appropriating, his desire is to synthesize the purest of exploitation extravaganzas, but he is unable to make fresh or reinvent that to which he is paying homage. His Planet Terror is pure pastiche, without anything to really communicate about the medium, its characters, or the world they inhabit, despite all its cheeky, postmodern posturing. Digitally scratched film stock, poor framing, missing reels (with an apology from the management), inconsistent lighting, C-list stars galore, a sci-fi/horror potboiler of a narrative, Planet Terror throws the entire exploitation movie playbook at its audience, but there isn’t really much of a soul there. Its genre hopping, corrupt government, anti-terror, biological weapon on the loose in Texas narrative gives its wonderful performers (especially Josh Brolin as a sadist doctor and C-list perennials Jeff Fahey and Michael Biehn as brothers in barbeque and the law respectively) a chance to chew the scenary to bits, but that’s all that’s there. The narrative literally floats away to paradise, with Rose McGowan’s machine-gun-legged ex-stripper inhabiting a beach idyll with humanity’s other last survivers, the movie’s half-baked attempts at giving its narrative some political subtext (our chemical weapons developer personally killed Osama Bin Laden), already yesterday's forgotten news.

Death Proof does something less ambitious and more powerful. Tarantino is out to pay homage to a very specific body of underappreciated cinema, mainly the work of Monte Hellman, vintage slasher movies, and Richard C. Sarafian’s all but forgotten 1971 Barry Newman-Cleavon Little vehicle Vanishing Point. However, his movie and its action-film mechanics seem a mere vehicle upon which to mount his digressive, irresistibly amusing dialogue and keen observations about human behavior. His lifelike multi-character riffs on topics both personal and marginally pop-cultural never feel forced and are staged with more vigor than ever, especially in a virtuoso six-minute take at a diner of incredible textual and conceptual force that singledhandedly reinvents a tired aesthetic convention: the table circling, multi-character dialogue shot.

If anything, Death Proof proves Tarantino incapable of making a film, however derivative, that doesn’t directly address the realm of his personal obsessions and aesthetic motifs. He is an auteur. His film, despite its modest aims, is by turn an uproarious, disquieting, and completely satisfying revenge cartoon. Featuring perhaps the greatest film car chase since John Frankenheimer staged Ronin, Tarantino serves as his own DP for the first time. The setup is golden; an ominous-looking black car stalks a pair of women (Vanessa Ferlito and Sydney Tamiia Poitier). Later, at a Tex-Mex Austin watering hole, we meet Stuntman Mike (an astonishingly good Kurt Russell). After not winning many fans among the myriad attractive woman at the joint, he slyly persuades Ferlito’s character into a lap dance, which, of course, is lost during the missing reel. Upon our reintroduction, a blonde Rose McGowan tags along for a ride home, killing her before chasing down the girls from the bar and doing away with them in one of the most elegantly staged car crashes in movie history. Of course, when he targets another group of women, including the savvy make-up artist Abernathy (Rosario Dawson, in an unassuming role that is probably her best to date) and stuntwoman Zoe Bell, playing herself to great effect, he meets his match and reveals himself not to be such a tough guy. The second half of the film, in which Mike stalks the girls and waits for their most vulnerable moment (Zoe riding on the hood of a borrowed Dodge Challenger, a la Vanishing Point) before striking unsuccessfully might be the most thrilling in Tarantino’s entire oeuvre. Death Proof is akin to sharing the company of the most ravishing woman you always thought unattainable before playing bumper car with Jeff Gordon for eighty minutes, but it's probably more fun than either.

                                                            Brandon Harris