Grindhouse wasn’t in theaters long enough last Spring for me to get around to it. Its 3+ hour running time probably didn’t help at the box office. Now, Grindhouse is being released on DVD, severed into its 2 parts: Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror (released next month) and Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof (released this week).
Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) stalks young women in his stunt-car which has been rigged so the driver’s seat is “death-proof”. He can cause car accidents and live while causing fatalities and dismemberments. The women he stalks in Tarantino’s latest 70s-inspired B-movie extravaganza are voluptuous, tough, and tough-talking. They talk – a lot – about music, movies, boys, sex, and everything in between. Vanessa Ferlito shines the brightest in the first set of chicks. It’s great to see fully-formed women play actual characters. You feel like you know these ladies and don’t mind the pages of dialogue.
The second set of women trade in the hips for biceps. Three girls (Tracie Thoms, Rosario Dawson, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead) are working on a movie in Tennessee and have a long weekend ahead of them. They pick up another friend (Zoe Bell) at the airport. Bell is from New Zealand and is a real-life stuntwoman (she performed the stunts for Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movies). The resemblance is obvious, but her stunt-work is magnificent. Dawson is great but Tarantino’s dialogue is best served up by Thoms. These gals talk a lot, too, but it’s all a big set-up for the best car chase scene in ages. The last 20 minutes are, well, like a shot of adrenaline injected directly into the heart.
Tarantino’s immediately recognizable dialogue is great. No one writes for women like he does. He references car-chase movies from the 70s, as well as his own movies. In one extended take, women talk as the camera moves around them at head-level – a direct rip-off of Reservoir Dogs's opening scene. For fans of horror and slasher films, this may be a masterpiece. For others, you might wish he’d stop slumming and realize his potential as the next Scorsese. But he doesn’t want that – he’d rather be the first Tarantino. He’s definitely tilling new ground whether you want to walk on it or not. B+
Friday, September 21, 2007
Death Proof – B+
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2 comments:
an A- for me. i was about to write this review when i saw yours. when i was a kid growing up in a house that didn't go to the movies, this is the type of stuff i thought i was missing out on.
it would have been interesting to see the grindhouse version (90 minutes vs the 115 or so here). the layers of fetish in this film just goes deeper and deeper, with the final touch being the feet fetish exploration. it's the foot that stuntman mike dreams of violating that kick him between the eyes in the end. the final twenty minutes are the most fun i've had watching a movie in several years. is it just me or do tarantino films increasingly inhabit their own self-referential world, some mix of the seventies and today. kurt russell is great.
i'm not sure if this is gritty truth disguised as flashy trash, or flashy trash disguised as gritty truth disguised as flashy trash. whatever, it's a blast.
I bet the shorter version would play better for me. I'm not sure I'll sit through all that dialogue more than 1 or 2 more times. I will, however, be watching the last 20 minutes a lot.
Great observation about the foot at the end. I'm embarassed I didn't make the connection. The foot fetish is, however, hard to miss and plays into Tarantino referencing himself.
By the way, it's flashy trash disguised as gritty truth.
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