GRINDHOUSE: PLANET TERROR – robert rodriguez – 3 / 10 DEATH PROOF – quentin tarantino – 7.0 / 10

The first thing I want to talk about, to get that out of the way, is the fake trailers that play before and between the two films that comprise Grindhouse. I guess the idea for the trailers makes sense on a superficial level. And without thinking about it very much, I was excited to see them. But as they unspooled in front of me, I began to realize just how terrible an idea they were. The problem is that they serve no purpose. A trailer is supposed to get the viewer excited to see the film advertised (since they are, after all, advertisements) but since everyone watching this film knows that these trailers advertise nonexistent films, no one is going to want to see the film. Obviously the directors making these trailers were aware of that, so instead of making a trailer that would get people excited about a nonexistent film, they went for humor instead. But if the fake trailers are funny they are not fulfilling the role of trailers and thus become a new thing altogether. In other words, the fake trailers are pretty much a failure as trailers and are thus just short films that comment archly on trailers which, to me, is not very interesting.

A similar problem afflicts Robert Rodriguez’s half of the double feature, Planet Terror. Though he does a much better job of mimicking the experience of seeing a cheap movie in a cheap theater in the 1970s than Tarantino does, there’s a disconnect here between the aesthetic of the film and the substance. Sure it looks like it was shot on 16mm film and had been through the wringer a thousand times (there are hairs and burns and all manner of scratches flickering across the screen) but at the same time there’s so much that is clearly computer generated in the film that the whole thing shakes out as the very definition of disingenuous. To have the film look like it was a legitimate grindhouse picture but then to have clearly spent millions to make it that way makes the film almost impossible to like.

The very first scene, for instance, is of Rose McGowan’s Cherry Darling stripping (or go-go dancing which is, apparently, different). This scene infuriates for a number of reasons. First, McGowan remains clothed throughout. Now I’m not looking to be prurient or to see McGowan naked (really, I’m not that interested) but to make all this hay about the fact that this is a throwback to the boobs and blood splatter pictures of the 70's and then not show any boobs just makes no sense. (Couple this scene with a moment later in the film in which a sex scene “burns up” and the film jumps ahead ten minutes and you get a pretty clear picture of just how Puritanical and un-grindhouse Rodriguez is when it comes to sex). Second, anyone who has seen any commercials or trailers for the film has seen the moment wherein McGowan receives a prosthetic leg machine gun. But in that first go-go dancing scene, she clearly has both her legs intact. So, right from the get go it’s clear that there’s going to be an awful lot of CG work in the film to make it look like she only has one leg. (If this had been a real grindhouse picture, Cherry would have been played by a woman with one leg who would have had a pretty bad prosthesis the whole first half of the movie.) Thus it’s clear from pretty much the first minute of the film that Rodriguez is going to be faithful only to the superficial aspects of a grindhouse picture and not at all to the spirit of the thing. It’s no surprise then that he completely fails to absorb the audience into his nonsensical, meandering zombie picture.

Tarantino on the other hand, clearly set out to be more loyal to the spirit of the grindhouse than to the aesthetics of it (though he does a pretty decent job in that regard as well). Rather than try to make a film that looked like it was being shown in a cheap theater in the 1970s, Tarantino made a film to which the modern audience would respond the same way he did as a kid in that 1970s theater. Basically he chose the much harder path and got a lot closer to success than Rodriguez.

His half of the double feature, Death Proof, concerns a serial killer named Stuntman Mike (played wonderfully by Kurt Russell) who uses his invincible car to kill helpless women. The film is basically two terrific action set pieces separated by two extended conversations between groups of female friends. Though the lack of action for the first forty minutes of the film strikes me as not quite representative of the grindhouse aesthetic, when the action does come, it is fantastic and brutal and damn entertaining. It is also noticeably free of CG work and uses only techniques that would have been available to a filmmaker in the 1970s. Thus, even though from all appearances Tarantino approached his half of the film with a completely different goal than Rodriguez (to be inspired by rather than just imitate the exploitation films of the 1970s), he actually gets a lot closer to making a believable grindhouse flick.

Still, the lengthy dialogue scenes in the film continue the worrying trend Tarantino’s been on since he and Roger Avary parted ways after Pulp Fiction. Whereas he used to be content to have only a scene or two be entirely about his free associative pop culture ramblings (with the other scenes having this mixed in, of course, but not being the exclusive purpose of the scenes), he’s now making films that, anytime anyone opens their mouth, all that’s coming out is ephemera. Take away every last bit of dialogue from Death Proof, for instance, and you don’t lose much of the pleasure of watching the film. Indeed, it's probably increased since you don’t have to wait forty minutes in between action scenes.

I’m not saying that these long rambling conversations are boring because they aren’t. They just aren’t about anything. They exist outside of and apart from the rest of the film and are completely unconnected to the violence that surrounds them. Maybe that’s the point, but the whole enterprise has the same sort of feeling as when, in the end of the second volume of Kill Bill, the whole picture grinds to halt so Bill can talk about Superman for a while. What I’m saying, I guess, is that Tarantino’s banal insights into pop culture and relationships, etc. are just not interesting enough for their own sake. They need to be tied into a larger narrative or it becomes just Tarantino showing off his encyclopedic knowledge of the ephemera of modern life. And while that might have been interesting enough to sustain my interest in his work for a while, I’m starting to grow weary of it. And judging by other reviews of this film, I might not be the only one.

That’s the thing, really. Tarantino makes Tarantino films. He is not capable of doing anything else. Even when he assigns himself the task of mimicking another style of filmmaking, he can’t help but pour his own sensibility into the film and turn it into something uniquely his own. Indeed, he is of that rare breed of filmmakers who present a sui generis aesthetic to the world. The problem is that even though his aesthetic and worldview are completely unique and unlike anything anyone else is doing, there’s no escaping the fact that it is still more of the same in film after film. And I, for one, find the bloom to be off this particular rose. What was lively and intoxicating five films ago is now becoming commonplace and predictable. It’s almost as if Tarantino’s become a genre unto himself. There are worse things, I guess, than being completely unique in the same way film after film. But I had expected more from the video store wunderkind and patron saint of film geeks.