Grindhouse. huh.
Apr. 6th, 2007 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
molly_oit's awfully hard to say anything coherent about Grindhouse, because it's really six films. Halfway through, I would've asked for my $8.50 back, but by the end I felt it was money well spent.
The trailers are *great*, especially Machete (starring Danny Trejo!) and Werewolf Women of the SS (directed by Rob Zombie and featuring Nic Cage as Fu Manchu!)
Project Terror (Robert Rodriguez' contribution) was unbeLIEVably gory. It made Romero's Land of the Dead seem like a Disney film. The acting was pretty terrible, and even though that was mostly deliberate, it was still bad acting, which is just not that fun to watch. Rose McGowan's prosthetic machine gun was cool, but too little too late. Don't get me wrong -- there were lots of moments when we hooted with laughter or squealed with disgust along with the rest of the audience. But in between those moments it was kinda ... boring. Also, Michael Biehn is starting to look kinda old. ::is sad::
Deathproof (the half directed by Quentin Tarantino), on the other hand, felt less like a parody and more like a real movie. It took a long time to get where it was going, but the destination was FABULOUS. Kurt Russell really did a wonderful job, he was seriously good. Sydney Poitier probably did a good job, but her character was so irritating it was hard to tell. Rosario Dawson*, Tracie Thoms, and Zoe Bell were all very good, PLUS they played delightful characters. Bell most often works as a stunt double (she was Uma Thurman's double in Kill Bill), and she puts her skills to very good use.
And the ending! Oh, the ending. It was equal parts Russ Meyer and Powerpuff Girls, and just so *excellent*!! I'm still giggling over the memory of Kurt Russell cowering in his scary black car as he tries to drive away from a pink-shirted, pipe-wielding Zoe Bell!
*My Rosario Dawson footnote: I was at grad school in Kansas, working on a thesis on romance fiction (the Nora Roberts kind, not the Nathaniel Hawthorne kind), and over some holiday -- spring break or Christmas or I don't know what -- I went to visit a high school friend who was like an assistant to the assistant to the assistant director on very, very indie movies. We had to get up at 5 am because they were shooting an exterior scene near his apartment and using his apartment to deal with makeup and costumes.
All these people who are interested in film but are WAY too cool to move to LA and work in mainstream film show up. None of them know what to say to me -- Kansas might as well be a foreign country, and paperback romances are miles beneath them. (They weren't real subtle about it -- it was like they thought I was too naive to notice they were exchanging looks with each other and patronizing me.)
So then Rosario Dawson shows up, and she has TOTAL cred with them -- a) she's just coming off Larry Clark's KIDS, which had gained enough money/notoriety to be HUGE, but was still low-budget/shocking enough to be Very Cool, and b) she's the talent. And while the various crew people are working on Rosario's hair/makeup/costume and trying not to look like they care if she notices how cool they are, I am introduced ("This is Molly. She's visiting from Kansas. She reads romance novels.").
And Rosario says, "Oh, my grandma loves those. I've read a couple of hers, there's one that was really funny, ..." and she goes on to describe a scene from "The Sherbrooke Bride." And of course I interrupt to say, "I've read that one!" So then we start talking about the pros and cons of Catherine Coulter novels, and from then on we're buddies. The film crew is TOTALLY confused by this; they're way too cool to talk freely with me, and not quite cool enough to talk freely with Rosario, and by the transitive property of social inequality, no way in hell should Rosario and I be chatting away.
In retrospect, I don't know if Rosario was really that enthused to talk about Catherine Coulter, or if she was simply being nice to the odd one out, but either way I'll always remember her as a friendly, unpretentious person, and I've noted her subsequent success with delight.
The trailers are *great*, especially Machete (starring Danny Trejo!) and Werewolf Women of the SS (directed by Rob Zombie and featuring Nic Cage as Fu Manchu!)
Project Terror (Robert Rodriguez' contribution) was unbeLIEVably gory. It made Romero's Land of the Dead seem like a Disney film. The acting was pretty terrible, and even though that was mostly deliberate, it was still bad acting, which is just not that fun to watch. Rose McGowan's prosthetic machine gun was cool, but too little too late. Don't get me wrong -- there were lots of moments when we hooted with laughter or squealed with disgust along with the rest of the audience. But in between those moments it was kinda ... boring. Also, Michael Biehn is starting to look kinda old. ::is sad::
Deathproof (the half directed by Quentin Tarantino), on the other hand, felt less like a parody and more like a real movie. It took a long time to get where it was going, but the destination was FABULOUS. Kurt Russell really did a wonderful job, he was seriously good. Sydney Poitier probably did a good job, but her character was so irritating it was hard to tell. Rosario Dawson*, Tracie Thoms, and Zoe Bell were all very good, PLUS they played delightful characters. Bell most often works as a stunt double (she was Uma Thurman's double in Kill Bill), and she puts her skills to very good use.
And the ending! Oh, the ending. It was equal parts Russ Meyer and Powerpuff Girls, and just so *excellent*!! I'm still giggling over the memory of Kurt Russell cowering in his scary black car as he tries to drive away from a pink-shirted, pipe-wielding Zoe Bell!
*My Rosario Dawson footnote: I was at grad school in Kansas, working on a thesis on romance fiction (the Nora Roberts kind, not the Nathaniel Hawthorne kind), and over some holiday -- spring break or Christmas or I don't know what -- I went to visit a high school friend who was like an assistant to the assistant to the assistant director on very, very indie movies. We had to get up at 5 am because they were shooting an exterior scene near his apartment and using his apartment to deal with makeup and costumes.
All these people who are interested in film but are WAY too cool to move to LA and work in mainstream film show up. None of them know what to say to me -- Kansas might as well be a foreign country, and paperback romances are miles beneath them. (They weren't real subtle about it -- it was like they thought I was too naive to notice they were exchanging looks with each other and patronizing me.)
So then Rosario Dawson shows up, and she has TOTAL cred with them -- a) she's just coming off Larry Clark's KIDS, which had gained enough money/notoriety to be HUGE, but was still low-budget/shocking enough to be Very Cool, and b) she's the talent. And while the various crew people are working on Rosario's hair/makeup/costume and trying not to look like they care if she notices how cool they are, I am introduced ("This is Molly. She's visiting from Kansas. She reads romance novels.").
And Rosario says, "Oh, my grandma loves those. I've read a couple of hers, there's one that was really funny, ..." and she goes on to describe a scene from "The Sherbrooke Bride." And of course I interrupt to say, "I've read that one!" So then we start talking about the pros and cons of Catherine Coulter novels, and from then on we're buddies. The film crew is TOTALLY confused by this; they're way too cool to talk freely with me, and not quite cool enough to talk freely with Rosario, and by the transitive property of social inequality, no way in hell should Rosario and I be chatting away.
In retrospect, I don't know if Rosario was really that enthused to talk about Catherine Coulter, or if she was simply being nice to the odd one out, but either way I'll always remember her as a friendly, unpretentious person, and I've noted her subsequent success with delight.