Post by obliv326 on Apr 8, 2007 12:02:08 GMT -5
so, if you've been paying attention, you might have noticed that this movie summer has the mpotential to be a great as the summer of 1982. the number of big blockbusters being released, and the certainty of smaller surprises, are getting me excited for a summer like i havent been for a long time. and while it is technically spring, that summer officially kicked off this weekend w/the release of GRINDHOUSE.
i won't rehash the plot. you know the drill. paying homage to 70s exploitation movies, from 2 directors who have roots in those old films, has tons of potential. and there is plenty here for horror fans to love...
planet terror is BRILLIANT!!!! it has the right mox of mocking humour and loving homage that makes you WISH these movies were that good. you want to go out to your video store and grab copies of parasite and prom night and just before dawn and all those 70s horror films (please feel free to toss any others you might have seen to me! i might start chasing that cheap grindhouse thrill now!). everything is spot on. the music has that cheesy 80s synth menace, heavily influenced by john carpenters scores, and they went to the trouble to add grain and scratches t the film. and tell me that josh brolin doesnt make you believe he IS nick nolte!
planet terror was absolutely brilliant.
as good as planet terror is, death proof is that bad...yes...this movie should have been 15 minutes long. that would be stretching tyhe plot...and i realize that these movies arent necessarily all about logical plots, but one thing those films all did was move along briskly...too briskly, a lot of the time. what they DIDNT do was sit in a car w/the three most annoying women you have ever seen while they gfripe and moan about who they are...you know...and how one of them, the most annoying character i had ever seen in a film since maybe starship troopers or maximum overdrive (jungkle julia, played with an arrogance that just screams that she is irresistable to any man alive...i found her half lidded cockiness a complete tgurn off) we spend WAAAAYYYYY too long w/these women, and the reason is obvious...old QT is in love w/his dialogue. the problemis that where in res dogs or pulp fiction he had the prefect ear for those characters and what words to put intheir mouths to make them appealling, he doesnt have that same feel for these women. i became bored with them in tgheir first LOOOOONNNG scene, and i watched the 1st half of the movie bored to tears. it does pick up when kurt russell comes on screen. QT does have a feel for his dialogue and he handles it beautifully. unfortunately, after a VERY sdatisfying end to that 1/2 od the story, we get introduced to an even MORE annoying group of women. i didnt think it was possible, until i heard the character of kim open her mouth...as she brags about men leaving their girlfriends for her, i lost my suspension of disbelief. mind you, i can buy that superman can fly. i can buy that there were people and aliens living together long long ago in a galaxy far far away. i can ever buy that there could exist a chemical that might reanimate dead bodies and that those bodies intestines might act independently of themselves and strangle someone.
but i cant believce any man would leave his girlfriend for 'kim' and her 50+ year old looking grill! esp when she lets out her gutteral "hhhhaaaaaggggggghhhhhh" laugh that i thought people stopped doing 15 years ago because it was s annoying.
kim is the most annoying character i have seen in a long time, incapable of uttering any word that is not a cliche . every hckneyed 'tough' phrase you can imagine , fromm 'boo-yah' to 'i'm a' tap 'at a%$' to 'bust a cap' is tossed out by her numerous times. at one point, swhe seems incapable of saying anything w/o tossing the word ' mutha#$%^er' at the end of it...and its not that im offended by the language, but i am offended by the fact that the character is so completely unlikeable...all of it in a gutteral, nasal whine that makes yhou want to reach into your ears with a red hot screwdriver and sear your sense of hearing together in one big lump...the only fear i would have would be that my brain wwould freeze the last thing i had ever heard into my memory forever!
everything in this film (death poof, i am saying here, not grindhouse as a whole) is longer than it should be. a climactic chase, whish does admittedly feature a nice looking stunt, goes on 5X longer than it should.
not only that, but the reaction from the girls is inconsistent w/any logic. are they afraid of a guy who tried to kill them? NO! they just go chasing after him...and there is a plot hole,.one among many, re:the car they are driving, that is just left lying there like a seeping wound while the guts of this movie spill out through it..and i was rooting for them to die! seriously,i went back to starship troopers, when i cheered for the aliens, and i was hoping that the same fate would meet these obnoxious piles of cliche.
i may have said this before, but i dont remember any exploitation films where they just sat and talked and talked and talked and talked, stopping the plot dead in its tracks...or held shots forevere (there is one of 'jungle julia' flipping her hair around that semed to last an eternity).
sadly, i think tarantino pulled a 'kevin smith' in this one...that is where you are so in love w/your dialogue that you refuse to cut it, and it goes on forever and stops the plot cold in its tracks. smith has had this problem since day 1, as he really hadf n othing else in his movies BUT dialogue. QT, on the other hand, has always howsn how it SHOULD be done...layering in that dialogue into the characters, letting scenes develop organically and having the plot scroll from character development. in death proof, only russell and rose mcgowan dont mangle the dialoge.
i am not above blaming the actors here. russell is a great actor, and he manages to make his character feel real and sympathetic and 3 dimensional. mcgowan manages much the same, with the same kind of dialogue the other women had...so fine, lets put it on the ac tresses.
the 2 that stink up the screen the most are kim (tracey thoms, from the descent...which i will now watch JUST so i can see her die!) and jungle julia, played by sydney tamilia poitier (yes...). i wanted to slap julia every second she was on sc reen, dragging her holier than thou presence around and condescending to those in the scenes w/her. 'kim' i just wanted to strangle.
everfyone else is bad, too...rosario dawson is completely unappealling as 'abernathy', but since she is in all her scenes w/thoms, she is always upstaged by someone elses badness...or maybe downstaged?
there is no logic or motivation for this film...and heaven forbid that there were any deleted scenes in this thing! its too long as it is! if you are going to suggest that it was CUT DOWN to this present version, then QT was seriously offf his game...and if those scenes were plot, and were excised for what made it in...
i am seriously tempted to cut my own version of this film. it could, seriously, be 15 minutes long, or less. by cutting out the dead wood (and mind you, i am a tarantino fan! i LOVED everything else he has done, w/the exception of four rooms which i havent seen. i liked jackie brown, yes! i loved kill bill, both parts...i even liked his ER episode! but this is a serious misstep. it fails in every possible way. its a bad film, it has unapealling characters who i hated so much i wanted them to get killed in a gory and viles way! it is even bad exploitation cinema, as it resembles nothing like those car chase films it is supposed to be indebted to, and that it actually references several times (vanishing point, dirty mary crazy larry, gone in 60 seconds, and one must assume, bullitt). those films never stopped ded in their tracks for 15-20 minutes of annoyiong dialogue w/characters you wanted to slap in the face.
i made the mistake of getting a drink in the first few minutes of 'planet terror'. i missed something great! i could have left for long stretches in death proof and missed NOTHING...in fact, i could have missed 90 or so minutes and had a perfectly great experience...there is only one scene in death proof that i would wwatch again. ask me privately if you want to know what it was...although, if you see it, you will prob be able to guess.
then there is the extra stuff! the trailers...
i wont give any details about these, except to say they are all brilliant (w/one excepton, which is only pretty good, if a bit self congratulatory). they are so good you actually want to see the films themselves...and, to a mark, they are all better than 'death proof'
overall, i give it a 6.5...it is hard to go much higher, given how bad 'death proof' is. although, i might revise my review in this way.
getb there early. see everything leading up to planet terror. watch that one. sticck around for the 'intermission'...and after the trailer for eli roth's 'thanksgiving' (everything about it had me in f$%^ing STITCHES, incl the VO), get up and leeave. if you do that, you may have had te best night at the movies that you have had in a long time...and trsust me...just for you, i stuck around until the lights came back up...there is no surprise at the end...so you are safe.
grindhouse w/death proof 6.5/10
grindhouse w/o death proof 9.5/10!
lets hope mr tarantino gets his head on straight. he gets a few more missteps w/me before i write him off...after all, everyone of my favorite directors has made at least one mild stinker (except pt anderson...knock on wood...although i kow some people think magnolia is his, and i can understand that)
rodriguez, though, after sin city, one of the absolute greatest films ever freaking made, and then planet terror, which is a real screamer, is on a tear! i dont know if he has much higher ground he can reach, but i am rooting for him!
i won't rehash the plot. you know the drill. paying homage to 70s exploitation movies, from 2 directors who have roots in those old films, has tons of potential. and there is plenty here for horror fans to love...
planet terror is BRILLIANT!!!! it has the right mox of mocking humour and loving homage that makes you WISH these movies were that good. you want to go out to your video store and grab copies of parasite and prom night and just before dawn and all those 70s horror films (please feel free to toss any others you might have seen to me! i might start chasing that cheap grindhouse thrill now!). everything is spot on. the music has that cheesy 80s synth menace, heavily influenced by john carpenters scores, and they went to the trouble to add grain and scratches t the film. and tell me that josh brolin doesnt make you believe he IS nick nolte!
planet terror was absolutely brilliant.
as good as planet terror is, death proof is that bad...yes...this movie should have been 15 minutes long. that would be stretching tyhe plot...and i realize that these movies arent necessarily all about logical plots, but one thing those films all did was move along briskly...too briskly, a lot of the time. what they DIDNT do was sit in a car w/the three most annoying women you have ever seen while they gfripe and moan about who they are...you know...and how one of them, the most annoying character i had ever seen in a film since maybe starship troopers or maximum overdrive (jungkle julia, played with an arrogance that just screams that she is irresistable to any man alive...i found her half lidded cockiness a complete tgurn off) we spend WAAAAYYYYY too long w/these women, and the reason is obvious...old QT is in love w/his dialogue. the problemis that where in res dogs or pulp fiction he had the prefect ear for those characters and what words to put intheir mouths to make them appealling, he doesnt have that same feel for these women. i became bored with them in tgheir first LOOOOONNNG scene, and i watched the 1st half of the movie bored to tears. it does pick up when kurt russell comes on screen. QT does have a feel for his dialogue and he handles it beautifully. unfortunately, after a VERY sdatisfying end to that 1/2 od the story, we get introduced to an even MORE annoying group of women. i didnt think it was possible, until i heard the character of kim open her mouth...as she brags about men leaving their girlfriends for her, i lost my suspension of disbelief. mind you, i can buy that superman can fly. i can buy that there were people and aliens living together long long ago in a galaxy far far away. i can ever buy that there could exist a chemical that might reanimate dead bodies and that those bodies intestines might act independently of themselves and strangle someone.
but i cant believce any man would leave his girlfriend for 'kim' and her 50+ year old looking grill! esp when she lets out her gutteral "hhhhaaaaaggggggghhhhhh" laugh that i thought people stopped doing 15 years ago because it was s annoying.
kim is the most annoying character i have seen in a long time, incapable of uttering any word that is not a cliche . every hckneyed 'tough' phrase you can imagine , fromm 'boo-yah' to 'i'm a' tap 'at a%$' to 'bust a cap' is tossed out by her numerous times. at one point, swhe seems incapable of saying anything w/o tossing the word ' mutha#$%^er' at the end of it...and its not that im offended by the language, but i am offended by the fact that the character is so completely unlikeable...all of it in a gutteral, nasal whine that makes yhou want to reach into your ears with a red hot screwdriver and sear your sense of hearing together in one big lump...the only fear i would have would be that my brain wwould freeze the last thing i had ever heard into my memory forever!
everything in this film (death poof, i am saying here, not grindhouse as a whole) is longer than it should be. a climactic chase, whish does admittedly feature a nice looking stunt, goes on 5X longer than it should.
not only that, but the reaction from the girls is inconsistent w/any logic. are they afraid of a guy who tried to kill them? NO! they just go chasing after him...and there is a plot hole,.one among many, re:the car they are driving, that is just left lying there like a seeping wound while the guts of this movie spill out through it..and i was rooting for them to die! seriously,i went back to starship troopers, when i cheered for the aliens, and i was hoping that the same fate would meet these obnoxious piles of cliche.
i may have said this before, but i dont remember any exploitation films where they just sat and talked and talked and talked and talked, stopping the plot dead in its tracks...or held shots forevere (there is one of 'jungle julia' flipping her hair around that semed to last an eternity).
sadly, i think tarantino pulled a 'kevin smith' in this one...that is where you are so in love w/your dialogue that you refuse to cut it, and it goes on forever and stops the plot cold in its tracks. smith has had this problem since day 1, as he really hadf n othing else in his movies BUT dialogue. QT, on the other hand, has always howsn how it SHOULD be done...layering in that dialogue into the characters, letting scenes develop organically and having the plot scroll from character development. in death proof, only russell and rose mcgowan dont mangle the dialoge.
i am not above blaming the actors here. russell is a great actor, and he manages to make his character feel real and sympathetic and 3 dimensional. mcgowan manages much the same, with the same kind of dialogue the other women had...so fine, lets put it on the ac tresses.
the 2 that stink up the screen the most are kim (tracey thoms, from the descent...which i will now watch JUST so i can see her die!) and jungle julia, played by sydney tamilia poitier (yes...). i wanted to slap julia every second she was on sc reen, dragging her holier than thou presence around and condescending to those in the scenes w/her. 'kim' i just wanted to strangle.
everfyone else is bad, too...rosario dawson is completely unappealling as 'abernathy', but since she is in all her scenes w/thoms, she is always upstaged by someone elses badness...or maybe downstaged?
there is no logic or motivation for this film...and heaven forbid that there were any deleted scenes in this thing! its too long as it is! if you are going to suggest that it was CUT DOWN to this present version, then QT was seriously offf his game...and if those scenes were plot, and were excised for what made it in...
i am seriously tempted to cut my own version of this film. it could, seriously, be 15 minutes long, or less. by cutting out the dead wood (and mind you, i am a tarantino fan! i LOVED everything else he has done, w/the exception of four rooms which i havent seen. i liked jackie brown, yes! i loved kill bill, both parts...i even liked his ER episode! but this is a serious misstep. it fails in every possible way. its a bad film, it has unapealling characters who i hated so much i wanted them to get killed in a gory and viles way! it is even bad exploitation cinema, as it resembles nothing like those car chase films it is supposed to be indebted to, and that it actually references several times (vanishing point, dirty mary crazy larry, gone in 60 seconds, and one must assume, bullitt). those films never stopped ded in their tracks for 15-20 minutes of annoyiong dialogue w/characters you wanted to slap in the face.
i made the mistake of getting a drink in the first few minutes of 'planet terror'. i missed something great! i could have left for long stretches in death proof and missed NOTHING...in fact, i could have missed 90 or so minutes and had a perfectly great experience...there is only one scene in death proof that i would wwatch again. ask me privately if you want to know what it was...although, if you see it, you will prob be able to guess.
then there is the extra stuff! the trailers...
i wont give any details about these, except to say they are all brilliant (w/one excepton, which is only pretty good, if a bit self congratulatory). they are so good you actually want to see the films themselves...and, to a mark, they are all better than 'death proof'
overall, i give it a 6.5...it is hard to go much higher, given how bad 'death proof' is. although, i might revise my review in this way.
getb there early. see everything leading up to planet terror. watch that one. sticck around for the 'intermission'...and after the trailer for eli roth's 'thanksgiving' (everything about it had me in f$%^ing STITCHES, incl the VO), get up and leeave. if you do that, you may have had te best night at the movies that you have had in a long time...and trsust me...just for you, i stuck around until the lights came back up...there is no surprise at the end...so you are safe.
grindhouse w/death proof 6.5/10
grindhouse w/o death proof 9.5/10!
lets hope mr tarantino gets his head on straight. he gets a few more missteps w/me before i write him off...after all, everyone of my favorite directors has made at least one mild stinker (except pt anderson...knock on wood...although i kow some people think magnolia is his, and i can understand that)
rodriguez, though, after sin city, one of the absolute greatest films ever freaking made, and then planet terror, which is a real screamer, is on a tear! i dont know if he has much higher ground he can reach, but i am rooting for him!
