| |
|
I managed to see this as the creators originally intended in a tiny, dirty theater in New York last week and I'm glad I did. Because the format works, because Planet Terror was fantastic, and because sitting through an extended European version of Death Proof would make me yearn for the sweet release of death. I hated that fucking film. And I come on here and everyone loved it? I can't understand that. Let's get into some
SPOILERS
FOR BOTH GRINDHOUSE MOVIES
Rodriguez: there's a dude who understands the grindhouse aesthetic. Or what I understand that aesthetic to be, which is something closely related to what we called video nasties here in the UK for a while. Cheap, exploitative, lurid, sex and violence very much to the fore and shot through with gross-out moments. The genre's bad taste was recreated with Cherry losing her leg and the many subsequent jokes about it before it turned her into the heroine, there was lesbian love and a hot blonde with a broke car, there was an evil doctor and medical horror and the one thing that reliably makes audiences cover their eyes, injections going in. It was knowingly kitsch in its recreation of everything that made those movies so bad and so compulsively watchable (though I would have preferred Rutger Hauer to Bruce Willis) and it did it all with such love. It worked as a joke and a grindhouse flick in one. I laughed at the conventions as I feared for the cardboard characters. And I'm totally down for seeing Machete.
Perhaps after Planet Terror Death Proof was always going to be a disappointment. It had to be different, Tarantino couldn't just have pushed the same buttons again, but as the trailers showed the genre contained lots of wildly different movies. Indeed was made up of random films which appealed to particular audiences, assembled after the fact. And I guess that, rather than going for a movie that was deliberately exploitative, QT wanted to make one that ended up there by chance because it contained elements that somehow made it grindhouse.
If that was his intention some of it worked. The dizzying shifts in tone between the end of part one and the end of part two, the wild, joyous sunlit ride of the final car chase. But these are small sections of a boring-ass film.
The very idea of girl gangs versus a crazed stuntman is grindhouse, but there was nothing grindhouse about the execution. Rodriguez's luminous colours were gone, the crackles were gone, and for what seemed like an hour but was probably half that we watched girls hang out in a car and a bar. They didn't have anything particularly interesting to say. Tarantino used to be able to get you with a conversation. The opening minutes of Pulp Fiction were electric even though it was just two people talking. You get to know Jules and Vincent through their conversations. But in this movie it was nothing but filler. Who's seeing who, who's buying the weed, all that crap about the lapdance which was dragged out excruciatingly... we didn't learn much about the characters. We weren't hearing anything interesting. It wasn't in any way grindhouse; it was late-period Tarantino, in love with his own dialogue, and it was boring.
That was Stuntman Mike's problem, too. Walking away from that bar, you'd say to your buddy "That guy was kinda creepy, don't you think?" They'd say "What, Mike? He tries to be scary. But nah, he's just a boring old fucker." The undercurrent of menace was drowned out by the methodical tedium of the character. At this point, Mike should be charming or at least intriguing, and only the audience should know he's scary. Instead he's an old man who wants everyone to be a little bit afraid of him and goes about it in a heavy-handed way. The scene where he demands a lap-dance; would anyone give him one? The scarfaced old dude's calling me chickenshit, and I need to rise to that bait?
The MISSING REEL bit that follows is a good illustration of the differences between the two films. In Planet Terror, it's a joke that gets funnier the more you think about it. We've missed a reel and all the dull characterisation is skipped out, the heavily-armed go go dancers have arrived, everyone knows who El Wray is and the survivors' hideout is in flames. Again, it shows a knife-keen understanding of the conventions of the genre and the audience's desire to just skip to the fuckin' end. In Death Proof, it's a weak joke (hah! you missed the lap-dance!) that only confuses the plot; what, everyone's cool with Mike now? What did I miss? Then there's horror, which is good though brief, but it's not surprising. Whether it's because we know grindhouse or we know Tarantino, it's not unexpected when the ladies die. It's not the seismic shock that the director seems to be expecting. Films of this genre or by this director contain sudden death, and we're not invested in the characters particularly so we don't particularly care.
Then, after almost an hour of indifferently-written girl gang chat culminating in about two minutes of action, we're introduced to another girl gang having a chat and my heart sunk. Fuck not again. Yes again. Again it's indifferently written, though this time it's more contrived. We need to know one of the girls carries a gun and another one's managed, through a chain of highly unlikely circumstance, to get herself a go on a car from a famous weird grindhouse movie. It takes an age to get to the action, to QT's mate playing Ship's Mast and Stuntman Mike back again and from there it's good if slightly odd in terms of tone. After the first half and the establishment of a realistic tone it's odd to see three girls laughing it up as they chase a homicidal driver, but I admit I kinda liked that difference in tone. I even liked the abrupt ending. But there's no excuse for making us sit through an hour or more of tedious conversation for that amount of action, especially not in a movie which purports to be grindhouse.
There's no excuse for Stuntman Mike, either. Kurt Russell is a terrible thing to waste. He should have been a malevolent presence which owned the film until his comeuppance. Instead he was a plot device and a bore with unreadable motivations.
You have to feel sorry for Rodriguez. He makes a movie with his much more famous mate and he puts his whole soul into it. He creates a trailer which encapsulates the thrills of the genre they've chosen perfectly, and a movie which elaborates on them at joyous length. Then his mate turns up with a piece of crap starring this girl he clearly fancies as herself and which hardly belongs to the genre at all. Instead it's full of his usual stuff except produced even more lazily than usual. And his mate is the one who gets to go to Cannes. |
|
|
