Not gonna grind my teeth over Grindhouse

Makes no nevermind to me that Quentin Tarantino thinks the schlock movies he watched until his eyes bled when he was in the early stages of his ongoing arrested adolescence are among the greatest achievements in the art of cinema.

And I don't care if he wants to spend the rest of his life reliving his still unspent youth by remaking those movies.  Filmbrain is a little harsher on him about this:

Tarantino needs to find a new source of inspiration that informs his screenwriting. Like a hyperactive child, his desire to share his encyclopedic knowledge of cult and fringe cinema has gone from supplementing and enhancing his cleverly written screenplays to becoming the sole purpose for their existence. Yes, Quentin, we know you've seen every Chia-liang Lu and William Rotsler film. Time to move on.

But then Filmbrain has seen Grindhouse and I haven't and, not that I had any real plans to go, I'm not going to, now that Filmbrain has saved me the trouble.   

At any rate, I don't care what obsesses Tarantino.  Pulp Fiction is what it is, a touchstone of the pop culture of the end of the last millenium.  And I liked Jackie Brown.  What bugged me about the Kill Bills was that Tarantino used them to utterly waste the time, talent, and beauty of Uma Thurman.

Now, in his half of Grindhouse, Death Proof, he's apparently gone and done Rosario Dawson and the other smart, beautiful young actresses in the cast the same favor.  Sez Filmbrain:

It’s one thing for Quentin to present us with a bunch of middle-aged guys sitting around a table, hanging out in a hotel room, or driving around in a car engaging in lengthy dialog liberally seasoned with pop-culture references – everything from Like a Virgin, fast food menus, Kung Fu, The Man From Rio, or AM radio hits. These are Tarantino’s geeky obsessions writ large. Yet in Death Proof, black suited guys are replaced by hotties in baby tees and tight pants, and the results come off as little more than male geek fantasy – gorgeous young women sitting around dropping references to Zatoichi, obscure British rock bands, and 70s cult cinema. It’s unbelievably juvenile, and more than a little pathetic.

Oh, well.  Their business.  And like I said, wasn't on my list and, anyway, Filmbrain's seen it so I don't have to. Filmbrain didn't have much to say about Robert Rodrguez's parts, but clearly there's too much Tarantino in Tarantino's:

Death Proof is too self-congratulatory and self-aware to work as either pure exploitation or even homage – in fact, it's Tarantino paying tribute to Tarantino more than anything else. He seems unable to distance himself from his auteurist self in order to create something worthy of the grindhouse moniker. It's more adolescent than sleazy, and lacks the salaciousness of, say, a Russ Meyer film, whose unique flavor of girl power Tarantino co-opted. Too self-satisfied with the characters he created, he lacks the conviction to gaze upon them the way Meyer did. What we're left with is neither fish nor fowl; too conscious of itself to adhere to the genre, but not clever enough to subvert it.

At least, though, says FB, Death Proof isn't as misogynistic as some critics have said.

Read the whole of Filmbrain's review, Aging SWM director seeks kickass F, great feet a must.

Meanwhile, across the cineplex, at The House Next Door, Keith Ulrich, a major Tarantino fan, and Matt Zoller Seitz discuss their Tarantino problem.

Comments

[Rob]

Huh. I didn't think Death Proof was mysoginist at all.

About Tarantino and the genre thing, I don't know. All of his films have been genre films; the first three were in the "crime" genre, which for various reasons is recognized as respectable by major critics. I am a fan neither of martial arts films nor of B movies, but I quite enjoyed both the Kill Bill movies and Grindhouse.

I had the same thought, for a while, about these movies; when will Tarantino quit this nonsense and get back to making REAL films, something that he obviously has the talent to do. But the more I thought about it, the less defensible that argument seemed. Film is about pleasure, and if he wants to make movies of the sort that he enjoys watching, then who I am to say that he shouldn't? More importantly, there's something absurd about saying that a gangster film is "serious" and a martial arts film not; we are to believe this because Coppola and Scorcese prefer the former over the latter?

[tdraicer]

>Yet in Death Proof, black suited guys are replaced by hotties in baby tees and tight pants, and the results come off as little more than male geek fantasy – gorgeous young women sitting around dropping references to Zatoichi, obscure British rock bands, and 70s cult cinema. It’s unbelievably juvenile, and more than a little pathetic

Well the problem with that argument is that from what I've read Rosario Dawson (at least) is as much a full-blown cult film/comic book geek as QT, and would quite likely have that sort of conversation.

[Uma]

Lance, I was lost; adrift on a sea of confusion and was trying to find myself in Quentin's eyes. I should have known I was going to the wrong place. But... didn't you like the jumpsuit?

[Jessica]

(Found you via Tomato Nation.)

It's funny, because while I didn't love Pulp Fiction and haven't seen (or tried to see) any other QT film, I was blown away by the Kill Bill films. One thing I haven't been able to figure out since watching them and writing about them -- since I haven't run into a lot of women writing about the KB movies -- is how much reactions to KB run along gendered lines. I saw it and felt that Uma Thurman wasn't wasted at all, and that the movie(s) were, if maybe not feminist, very female-centered -- the interactions about honor, power, and responsibility were all (with the exception of the dialogues between Beatrix and Bill) between women. But I don't know how much of my reaction is due to the fact that I was a woman thinking about my own fertility and sexuality when I saw the films, and whether my reaction would have been different had I not known, going on, that Uma Thurman was a mom going through a nasty divorce.

[tom]

Planet Terror has rewarding hilarities; Death Proof is more engaged with what movies are. I was disappointed with the "action" - it seemed, despite its claims to authentic stuntwork, to depend on a suspension of disbelief I was not persuaded to be willing to provide.

And one can get lost in the jungle of misogynist/misanthropist reactions. Initially I thought, he's turned off his mind and is dissolving into sheer technique. What came back to me after the initial rush of adrenalized juissance had to do with the use of stunt people in Death Proof, and digital scratch lines. Kurt Russell playing a stunt man who uses his stunt car to inflict actual (simulated) nonstunt violence upon actors playing real people, one of said actors is a stunt woman who actually performs an extraordiary elongated "stunt" that is usually reserved for stunt doubles.

The film is at least thinking about reality, cinema, and stunt.

[Campaspe]

"But Wes Anderson and the Coens – and for that matter, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Marc Caro, who are also highly, highly, highly stylized, contraptionist filmmakers have all moved me more than Tarantino. Even when their movies are overscaled, overcontrolled or boring, they touch my feelings in a way that Tarantino doesn’t. If Tarantino’s a preacher, I’d say he’s Elmer Gantry. I don’t believe in anything he says."

What Seitz said. And how.

[burritoboy]

Compare Linklater with Tarantino. They both emerged at the opening moment for indie film after Sex, Lies and Videotape. Linklater has far more range: he's made several comedies, two animated movies, a science fiction movie, a Western/gangster, two high school comedies, a sports movie, a theater piece (Tape), several undefinable pieces and two romance movies. Tarantino's made only action movies at half of Linklater's speed.

Compare Before Sunrise / Before Sunset to any Tarantino and see the difference.

[Rob]

burritoboy,

Before Sunset is perhaps the worst monstrosity ever committed to celluloid. Linklater has demonstrated little other than the capacity to make bad, pretentious, and annoying films in just about every genre.

[burritoboy]

"Before Sunset is perhaps the worst monstrosity ever committed to celluloid"

Er...............yeah, sure, whatever you say boss.