Tarantino Triple Feature!
Jun. 30th, 2007 12:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thedeadlyhook[ETA: Now checked for typos!]
So Toys and I are sort of still recuperating from the cold from hell - more him than me on the actual cold; I'm more having stiff-back issues from being laid up so long - so I put on Kill Bill again for us to watch, since we'd been talking about the use of narration as a storytelling tool lately, and Kill Bill has such a good example of the voiceover-exposition narration. (This really IS the kind of thing we geek out about for fun, seriously, the questions of how things work.) The good news is, the rewatch finally motivated me to finish the review of Kill Bill that I'd been meaning to do, along with Grindhouse, and a little insight on Pulp Fiction by way of Sonny Chiba.
So after Toys and I rewatched Kill Bill - whoa, dig me telling this story out of order, all Tarantino-like! - I went looking for a reasonable co-feature in our library and come up with a movie we hadn't seen in a Sonny Chiba combo set I picked up for cheap at some juncture (four movies, one low price!). And lo and behold, if you've ever wondered about that bizarrely worded Bible quotation that Samuel L. Jackson reads to such great effect in Pulp Fiction (the Biblical passage "Ezekiel 25:17" does not, in fact, have more than a third-cousin resemblance to the rant), wonder no more: it's actually an almost word-for-word lift from Karate Kiba, aka Viva Chiba: The Bodyguard. Seriously, it's the text credit crawl that starts the movie, only where Jackson says "and you will know my name is the LORD," Chiba's film asserts that you'll know his name is CHIBA THE BODYGUARD. I don't suppose I gotta guess who the Righteous Man is supposed to be.
A side note here: given that IMDB's trivia section let me down on this occasion, but Wikipedia got it right, and assuming that IMDB contributors tend to fall more into the film school/aficianado side of things, there may be a lesson there about getting out more and seeing more films rather than getting fannish on a specific creator. Among other things, Grindhouse finally proved to me that Quentin Tarantino's body of work really has been consistent: not so much art (in the Masterpiece Theater sense; I'll leave aside a larger definition of "art" for the time being), but schlock, the sort of schlock he grew watching and would like to YOU to see. He honestly wants to share - "Hey, you really gotta see THIS!" - and by not going out and partaking of the '60s and '70s bargain moviehouse features that he obviously enjoys so much, you're missing a huge part of the point.
Which brings me to Grindhouse, which I'll have some really positive things to say about a little further down. I have couple of negative things to say about Grindhouse too: one, that QT has gotten just a tad strident about making sure that you get the titles of the films he'd like you to see, as per the above point (and that they're also available through his own personal video label smacks of irritating, if educational, cross-marketing); two, that he needs to hire an editor who's not afraid to be ruthless in cutting down his dialogue scenes ("Death Proof" dragged badly in its opening acts, partly thanks to the above point, which also goes for QT's musical recs); and three, he really should stop putting himself in his films. Yeah, yeah, "Planet Terror" was really a Roberto Rodriguez movie, but in a double feature with Tarantino's own flick, it took me of the movie to see QT's mug staring back at me. Although this too, I'm fairly sure, is an homage - I remember reading about the director of some women-in-prison flicks who liked to cast himself as a sadistic guard - but strictly in the context of the film, it was annoying. Yo, an out-of-work character actor could've used that part. QT, learn to step back.
That said, these are about the only criticisms I have for Grindhouse, which I flat-out loved, for reasons far beyond the fact that it featured zombie fighting, and a group of women kicking a murdering asshole in the face. More on this later.
Kill Bill (Vols. 1 and 2) and the Legacy of '70s Film
I got the yen to revisit this film after seeing Grindhouse, and enjoying that so much; coincidentally, I also managed to catch Jackie Brown on television right around the same time (I'd seen it before, but it was good to see again), and those two things put together just got me in a mood to see more ass-kicking women, ala QT. And so, Kill Bill.* (Thanks to MechMan for lending us the discs!)
* Unless otherwise noted, I'll be talking about both volumes as one "film."
I should start out by admitting that I wasn't entirely wowed by Kill Bill when it was first in the theaters. At that time, I'd just happened to have watched a lot of the Shaw Brothers martial arts classics that the movie set out to homage, so I'd sort of had my fill of white-haired masters, aertial-spraying swordplay, and gang-on-gang fights between warring disciplines of kung fu. Kill Bill hadn't seemed very remarkable in that crowd, more a finely wrought replica of a samurai sword than a hand-forged Hattori Hanzo blade. In other words, not so unique.
On later viewing, though, I found Kill Bill to be more pointed and powerful than I'd originally given it credit for - and no, still not all that unique, but somehow, over time, that's come to feel less like the point. Part of that no doubt has to do with the sharp decline in tough chicks on TV and film over the last ten years (where the hell did they all go?), but with my eyes opened fully to Tarantino's schlock-house influences thanks to Grindhouse, I could finally see that shoutouts to Asian cinema aside - the fight in the snowy garden, the Crazy 88s, Gordon Liu in a white beard - Kill Bill actually owed much more to the "exploitation" flicks of the '60s and '70s, women's-revenge stories like Coffy and Foxy Brown, and Sergio Leone's "spaghetti" Westerns. A huge "duh" in hindsight, since the clues are all right there in the film's found music - everything in the soundtrack is borrowed from other films. (The lion's share of the music is by Ennio Morricone, composer for the Leone Westerns; a vocal number that plays at the end of both volumes is from the Japanese film Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, which is stunningly appropriate, if you've seen that movie.)
Thematically speaking, these aren't even disparate items to begin with - samurai cinema and Westerns. More than one of Sergio Leone's movies was based on Japanese samurai films, and what more obvious cultural mashup was there than the TV series Kung Fu, of which David Carradine, Kill Bill's Bill, was the star? Lucy Liu's character O-Ren, who'd originally annoyed me for needing an extensive backstory just to explain away the actress's ethnicity, now strikes me as a fair symbol of the multicultural quality of the whole film. (And I have to give Tarantino credit for not dodging the issue by pretending that Liu is Japanese, a claim that Memoirs of a Geisha can't make.)
I don't want to get hugely into the told-out-of-order narrative structure - it doesn't particularly add to the story, but it doesn't harm it either (unlike, say, The Prestige, which kills its own suspense with the same device). There were clearly some compromises made in the edit stage while breaking the movie into two parts - the length of time devoted to the story of O-Ren, particularly the animated sequence, strikes me as fillerish, and possibly a last-minute addition to beef up the running time (the animation studio, Production I.G, is capable of far more polished work when they're really going all-out - check out Blood: The Last Vampire if you're curious). Additionally, the final confrontation between The Bride and Bill in Vol. 2 seems to consist of two entirely separate ideas that I suspect were later combined, with the flashback to The Bride's discovery of her pregnancy wedged in the middle: a calm faceoff on the villa's patio that ends in her administering the Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart technique (note how composed her clothing is in this scene, and that her orange wrap suddenly reappears), and an earlier confrontation in which Bill reduces our heroine Beatrix Kiddo to a captive audience via sooper-seekrit home-brewed paralyzing truth serum (!). In the context of the first movie, or if the films had still been together, this segment might've worked - it's hard to argue with the logic of including comic book mad science and speechifying about superheroes in a story about a blonde woman fighting masked ninjas and a mace-wielding schoolgirl while wearing Bruce Lee's outfit from Game of Death - but as the climax of Vol. 2, which I'd otherwise argue is the superior film, it's a misfit. The majority of Vol. 2 is given over to Leone-style gritty closeups and '70s "realism" - I'll even count the sequence with Pai Mei as "realistic" here, regardless of the martial arts master's own wire-fu magic, since the training montage chiefly consists of Beatrix's sweat and effort, lugging water and punching wood planks - but the sudden introduction of Bill's pontification about Superman (bwazah?) brings the film skidding dangerously close to parody, right at the moment of The Bride's coup de grace, not ideal. The ending would be tighter, IMHO, without the Superman speech - it's not original anyway, but a somewhat faulty paraphrase of a fairly famous Jules Ffeifer rant - and the truth-serum Q&A.
Overall, though, I really loved Kill Bill on revisit. It's a stunningly violent film, so by no means recommended for the squeamish. Vol. 1 has more onscreen deaths, but the carnage is also more cartoonish (chopped-off limbs, spraying arteries), while Vol. 2 goes for a more viscerally gory brand of savagery, including a buried-alive sequence that could easily induce phobias. Its saving grace, though, is that it never once wavers or makes apologies for what it is, a tale of bloody vengeance: as the character Budd says in the film itself, "that woman deserves her revenge." You've gotta admire that kind of clarity of purpose.
And Daryl Hannah steals every scene she is in. : )
Which brings us, at last, back to Grindhouse.
Grindhouse, and Positive Feminist Images
Now, I have no idea what Quentin Tarantino's actual politics are, or whether he considers himself a feminist, but here's what I have noticed from viewing his films, particularly Grindhouse, Kill Bill, and Jackie Brown: he likes tough broads. Particularly ones who won't hesitate to pop a cap in your ass. He's very consistent about this - even the teenage Juliette Lewis steps up to this plate to fight vampires in From Dusk Till Dawn - and what's more, he consistently portrays these tough broads as the captains of their own destinies, as in the recurring image from all of the movies I've just mentioned, the heroine behind the wheel of a car.
That's a pretty unambiguous image, don't you think?
So, although I loved "Planet Terror" to pieces - big applause for Rose McGowan, as the amputee go-go dancer with the machine-gun-prosthetic ("it's 'go-go,' not 'cry-cry'") and Marley Shelton as the doctor with a hypodermic holster - it's "Death Proof" that speaks to me even more. While hardly a perfect film (see above for my bitching about how much QT could really stand to have someone red-pen and/or tighten some of his more indulgent dialogue), the initial setup is hard not to read as a sort of feminist document, a counterargument to the mindset that women have to be extra-cautious while navigating their way through a hostile man's world. This is the point of the long prologue with the two sets of women - to show that it's not caution that either damns them or saves them. The prologue is about how different they aren't.
The two groups are, for all intents and purposes, identical. Neither set of women is paying attention to their surroundings or in any way being "on guard," the way women are encouraged to do, just in case of encounters with creepazoids like Stuntman Mike (Rose McGowan's trusting bar patron is an example of exactly this argument, and establishes Stuntman Mike as a killer of what he perceives as "helpless" women). Both sets are equally interested in gossip, sex, and goofing off. Both are caught equally unaware by Stuntman Mike's attack. But the real difference between the two groups - aside from simple luck in not being hit head-on by the Death Car, as the first group was - is revealed in Tracie Thom's speech about carrying a gun. She carries it for protection, she says, because if she wants to do her laundry at midnight, she will - she's not going to tolerate her actions being limited by what someone else might do.
This is key. Tracie Thom's character carries her gun as an equalizer. If anyone fucks with her, she can fuck with them right back. And that's exactly what the women of the second group do when they're attacked - they go after Stuntman Mike and stomp a mudhole in his butt. Roll credits.
In the real world, of course, this philosophy is not without problems. Having the means to retaliate doesn't always guarantee success, for one, and for two, responding to someone's attempted crime with another crime doesn't mean you'll necessarily get away unscathed. What it does mean, though, in the symbolic world of film, is that the girls of "Death Proof" are not victims, but equal combatants. And that's incredibly cathartic to see, in a very knee-jerk, justice-is-served sense. It's violent and it's harsh, what those women eventually do to their attempted serial killer, but you can't say it's not fair. Stuntman Mike meets his fate because he makes the mistake of viewing the second group of women as easy pickings, and he's wrong. Dead wrong.
I enjoyed the hell out of that. Because I'd like to do my laundry at midnight too.
So Toys and I are sort of still recuperating from the cold from hell - more him than me on the actual cold; I'm more having stiff-back issues from being laid up so long - so I put on Kill Bill again for us to watch, since we'd been talking about the use of narration as a storytelling tool lately, and Kill Bill has such a good example of the voiceover-exposition narration. (This really IS the kind of thing we geek out about for fun, seriously, the questions of how things work.) The good news is, the rewatch finally motivated me to finish the review of Kill Bill that I'd been meaning to do, along with Grindhouse, and a little insight on Pulp Fiction by way of Sonny Chiba.
So after Toys and I rewatched Kill Bill - whoa, dig me telling this story out of order, all Tarantino-like! - I went looking for a reasonable co-feature in our library and come up with a movie we hadn't seen in a Sonny Chiba combo set I picked up for cheap at some juncture (four movies, one low price!). And lo and behold, if you've ever wondered about that bizarrely worded Bible quotation that Samuel L. Jackson reads to such great effect in Pulp Fiction (the Biblical passage "Ezekiel 25:17" does not, in fact, have more than a third-cousin resemblance to the rant), wonder no more: it's actually an almost word-for-word lift from Karate Kiba, aka Viva Chiba: The Bodyguard. Seriously, it's the text credit crawl that starts the movie, only where Jackson says "and you will know my name is the LORD," Chiba's film asserts that you'll know his name is CHIBA THE BODYGUARD. I don't suppose I gotta guess who the Righteous Man is supposed to be.
A side note here: given that IMDB's trivia section let me down on this occasion, but Wikipedia got it right, and assuming that IMDB contributors tend to fall more into the film school/aficianado side of things, there may be a lesson there about getting out more and seeing more films rather than getting fannish on a specific creator. Among other things, Grindhouse finally proved to me that Quentin Tarantino's body of work really has been consistent: not so much art (in the Masterpiece Theater sense; I'll leave aside a larger definition of "art" for the time being), but schlock, the sort of schlock he grew watching and would like to YOU to see. He honestly wants to share - "Hey, you really gotta see THIS!" - and by not going out and partaking of the '60s and '70s bargain moviehouse features that he obviously enjoys so much, you're missing a huge part of the point.
Which brings me to Grindhouse, which I'll have some really positive things to say about a little further down. I have couple of negative things to say about Grindhouse too: one, that QT has gotten just a tad strident about making sure that you get the titles of the films he'd like you to see, as per the above point (and that they're also available through his own personal video label smacks of irritating, if educational, cross-marketing); two, that he needs to hire an editor who's not afraid to be ruthless in cutting down his dialogue scenes ("Death Proof" dragged badly in its opening acts, partly thanks to the above point, which also goes for QT's musical recs); and three, he really should stop putting himself in his films. Yeah, yeah, "Planet Terror" was really a Roberto Rodriguez movie, but in a double feature with Tarantino's own flick, it took me of the movie to see QT's mug staring back at me. Although this too, I'm fairly sure, is an homage - I remember reading about the director of some women-in-prison flicks who liked to cast himself as a sadistic guard - but strictly in the context of the film, it was annoying. Yo, an out-of-work character actor could've used that part. QT, learn to step back.
That said, these are about the only criticisms I have for Grindhouse, which I flat-out loved, for reasons far beyond the fact that it featured zombie fighting, and a group of women kicking a murdering asshole in the face. More on this later.
Kill Bill (Vols. 1 and 2) and the Legacy of '70s Film
I got the yen to revisit this film after seeing Grindhouse, and enjoying that so much; coincidentally, I also managed to catch Jackie Brown on television right around the same time (I'd seen it before, but it was good to see again), and those two things put together just got me in a mood to see more ass-kicking women, ala QT. And so, Kill Bill.* (Thanks to MechMan for lending us the discs!)
* Unless otherwise noted, I'll be talking about both volumes as one "film."
I should start out by admitting that I wasn't entirely wowed by Kill Bill when it was first in the theaters. At that time, I'd just happened to have watched a lot of the Shaw Brothers martial arts classics that the movie set out to homage, so I'd sort of had my fill of white-haired masters, aertial-spraying swordplay, and gang-on-gang fights between warring disciplines of kung fu. Kill Bill hadn't seemed very remarkable in that crowd, more a finely wrought replica of a samurai sword than a hand-forged Hattori Hanzo blade. In other words, not so unique.
On later viewing, though, I found Kill Bill to be more pointed and powerful than I'd originally given it credit for - and no, still not all that unique, but somehow, over time, that's come to feel less like the point. Part of that no doubt has to do with the sharp decline in tough chicks on TV and film over the last ten years (where the hell did they all go?), but with my eyes opened fully to Tarantino's schlock-house influences thanks to Grindhouse, I could finally see that shoutouts to Asian cinema aside - the fight in the snowy garden, the Crazy 88s, Gordon Liu in a white beard - Kill Bill actually owed much more to the "exploitation" flicks of the '60s and '70s, women's-revenge stories like Coffy and Foxy Brown, and Sergio Leone's "spaghetti" Westerns. A huge "duh" in hindsight, since the clues are all right there in the film's found music - everything in the soundtrack is borrowed from other films. (The lion's share of the music is by Ennio Morricone, composer for the Leone Westerns; a vocal number that plays at the end of both volumes is from the Japanese film Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41, which is stunningly appropriate, if you've seen that movie.)
Thematically speaking, these aren't even disparate items to begin with - samurai cinema and Westerns. More than one of Sergio Leone's movies was based on Japanese samurai films, and what more obvious cultural mashup was there than the TV series Kung Fu, of which David Carradine, Kill Bill's Bill, was the star? Lucy Liu's character O-Ren, who'd originally annoyed me for needing an extensive backstory just to explain away the actress's ethnicity, now strikes me as a fair symbol of the multicultural quality of the whole film. (And I have to give Tarantino credit for not dodging the issue by pretending that Liu is Japanese, a claim that Memoirs of a Geisha can't make.)
I don't want to get hugely into the told-out-of-order narrative structure - it doesn't particularly add to the story, but it doesn't harm it either (unlike, say, The Prestige, which kills its own suspense with the same device). There were clearly some compromises made in the edit stage while breaking the movie into two parts - the length of time devoted to the story of O-Ren, particularly the animated sequence, strikes me as fillerish, and possibly a last-minute addition to beef up the running time (the animation studio, Production I.G, is capable of far more polished work when they're really going all-out - check out Blood: The Last Vampire if you're curious). Additionally, the final confrontation between The Bride and Bill in Vol. 2 seems to consist of two entirely separate ideas that I suspect were later combined, with the flashback to The Bride's discovery of her pregnancy wedged in the middle: a calm faceoff on the villa's patio that ends in her administering the Five-Point Palm Exploding Heart technique (note how composed her clothing is in this scene, and that her orange wrap suddenly reappears), and an earlier confrontation in which Bill reduces our heroine Beatrix Kiddo to a captive audience via sooper-seekrit home-brewed paralyzing truth serum (!). In the context of the first movie, or if the films had still been together, this segment might've worked - it's hard to argue with the logic of including comic book mad science and speechifying about superheroes in a story about a blonde woman fighting masked ninjas and a mace-wielding schoolgirl while wearing Bruce Lee's outfit from Game of Death - but as the climax of Vol. 2, which I'd otherwise argue is the superior film, it's a misfit. The majority of Vol. 2 is given over to Leone-style gritty closeups and '70s "realism" - I'll even count the sequence with Pai Mei as "realistic" here, regardless of the martial arts master's own wire-fu magic, since the training montage chiefly consists of Beatrix's sweat and effort, lugging water and punching wood planks - but the sudden introduction of Bill's pontification about Superman (bwazah?) brings the film skidding dangerously close to parody, right at the moment of The Bride's coup de grace, not ideal. The ending would be tighter, IMHO, without the Superman speech - it's not original anyway, but a somewhat faulty paraphrase of a fairly famous Jules Ffeifer rant - and the truth-serum Q&A.
Overall, though, I really loved Kill Bill on revisit. It's a stunningly violent film, so by no means recommended for the squeamish. Vol. 1 has more onscreen deaths, but the carnage is also more cartoonish (chopped-off limbs, spraying arteries), while Vol. 2 goes for a more viscerally gory brand of savagery, including a buried-alive sequence that could easily induce phobias. Its saving grace, though, is that it never once wavers or makes apologies for what it is, a tale of bloody vengeance: as the character Budd says in the film itself, "that woman deserves her revenge." You've gotta admire that kind of clarity of purpose.
And Daryl Hannah steals every scene she is in. : )
Which brings us, at last, back to Grindhouse.
Grindhouse, and Positive Feminist Images
Now, I have no idea what Quentin Tarantino's actual politics are, or whether he considers himself a feminist, but here's what I have noticed from viewing his films, particularly Grindhouse, Kill Bill, and Jackie Brown: he likes tough broads. Particularly ones who won't hesitate to pop a cap in your ass. He's very consistent about this - even the teenage Juliette Lewis steps up to this plate to fight vampires in From Dusk Till Dawn - and what's more, he consistently portrays these tough broads as the captains of their own destinies, as in the recurring image from all of the movies I've just mentioned, the heroine behind the wheel of a car.
That's a pretty unambiguous image, don't you think?
So, although I loved "Planet Terror" to pieces - big applause for Rose McGowan, as the amputee go-go dancer with the machine-gun-prosthetic ("it's 'go-go,' not 'cry-cry'") and Marley Shelton as the doctor with a hypodermic holster - it's "Death Proof" that speaks to me even more. While hardly a perfect film (see above for my bitching about how much QT could really stand to have someone red-pen and/or tighten some of his more indulgent dialogue), the initial setup is hard not to read as a sort of feminist document, a counterargument to the mindset that women have to be extra-cautious while navigating their way through a hostile man's world. This is the point of the long prologue with the two sets of women - to show that it's not caution that either damns them or saves them. The prologue is about how different they aren't.
The two groups are, for all intents and purposes, identical. Neither set of women is paying attention to their surroundings or in any way being "on guard," the way women are encouraged to do, just in case of encounters with creepazoids like Stuntman Mike (Rose McGowan's trusting bar patron is an example of exactly this argument, and establishes Stuntman Mike as a killer of what he perceives as "helpless" women). Both sets are equally interested in gossip, sex, and goofing off. Both are caught equally unaware by Stuntman Mike's attack. But the real difference between the two groups - aside from simple luck in not being hit head-on by the Death Car, as the first group was - is revealed in Tracie Thom's speech about carrying a gun. She carries it for protection, she says, because if she wants to do her laundry at midnight, she will - she's not going to tolerate her actions being limited by what someone else might do.
This is key. Tracie Thom's character carries her gun as an equalizer. If anyone fucks with her, she can fuck with them right back. And that's exactly what the women of the second group do when they're attacked - they go after Stuntman Mike and stomp a mudhole in his butt. Roll credits.
In the real world, of course, this philosophy is not without problems. Having the means to retaliate doesn't always guarantee success, for one, and for two, responding to someone's attempted crime with another crime doesn't mean you'll necessarily get away unscathed. What it does mean, though, in the symbolic world of film, is that the girls of "Death Proof" are not victims, but equal combatants. And that's incredibly cathartic to see, in a very knee-jerk, justice-is-served sense. It's violent and it's harsh, what those women eventually do to their attempted serial killer, but you can't say it's not fair. Stuntman Mike meets his fate because he makes the mistake of viewing the second group of women as easy pickings, and he's wrong. Dead wrong.
I enjoyed the hell out of that. Because I'd like to do my laundry at midnight too.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-30 09:17 pm (UTC)Really looking forward to Grindhouse coming out on DVD. And Kill Bill is one of my favorite movie experiences in spite of minor flaws.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-30 11:56 pm (UTC)I'm really looking forward to the Grindhouse DVD, even though in some ways I find it far more flawed than Kill Bill. The faux trailers are hysterical, and I can only hope for some juicy extras. (The KB discs seem a little bare-bones in that respect, oddly enough.)
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 12:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 02:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 02:38 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 02:49 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-06-30 10:18 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 12:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 12:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 12:32 am (UTC)I'm betting it was House of Flying Daggers - I do remember a very gorgeous bamboo-forest scene in that one. And Hero is one of my great favorites, for the amazing use of color.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 03:42 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 01:24 am (UTC)She does! Which surprised me, because I never think of her as someone with a great deal of screen presence. But she was terrific in KB. Violence, music, and dialogue aside, I think one of QT's greatest strengths as a director is his ability to get great performances out of the people you least expect it from.
"You know what happens to people who have knives? They get shot!"
I'm so glad you wrote up your thoughts about Grindhouse, because it was hands-down the most fun I've had in a movie in ages, and I had a very similar reaction to the two films: Planet Terror was tons of fun, and Rose McGowan was *perfect*, but Death Proof is the one that stayed with me after I left the theater.
"Death Proof" dragged badly in its opening acts, partly thanks to the above point,
The point in Death Proof where I thought the dialogue dragged a bit was in the long scene between Tracie Thomms and Zoe Bell about doing the ship's mast. Most of the opening scenes, while slow, struck me as being languid, a sort of dreamy build-up to the nightmare of Stuntman Mike. And all of the scenes between both sets of women seemed to deliberately play with some of the cliches of chick flicks, the blah blah blah between girlfriends about men and sex and whatever.
It's violent and it's harsh, what those women eventually do to their attempted serial killer, but you can't say it's not fair. Stuntman Mike meets his fate because he makes the mistake of viewing the second group of women as easy pickings, and he's wrong.
I think what I found most fascinating about the second half of Death Proof wasn't even that the women killed him -- it was that they made him cry. Stuntman Mike is set up as this big bad misogynist serial killer, iconic in his Death Proof car, but as soon as the women exhibit resistance, as soon as they start fighting back, he turns into a whiny crybaby. I don't know if Tarantino considers himself a feminist either, but the way he tore down the woman-hating monster to reveal the wuss underneath strikes me as a compelling feminist statement, whether he meant it to be one or not.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-07-01 02:47 am (UTC)Most definitely! That's a really special skill for a director to have, the ability to consistently coax great performances out of their actors. John Waters has it too - one of my favorite guilty pleasure movies is Cry-Baby, and he gets fabulous stuff from Traci Lords and Patti Hearst. And I saw a movie at the San Francisco International Film Festival this year by an Indian director who cast his film completely with amateurs, day laborers and a 14-year-old girl as the start. It's probably a hallmark of great patience, taking the time to coach people like that - not something I would've expected from Tarantino, given the content of his work, but who knows?
The point in Death Proof where I thought the dialogue dragged a bit was in the long scene between Tracie Thomms and Zoe Bell about doing the ship's mast.
Yeah, I agree. Although QT probably could've gotten away with that one had he not already strained our patience with all the talk before that about the car, and the film they saw it in, blah blah blah blah... yeah, we get it already. Those segments could've really used some trimming. The girl talk, though, I really liked. You got a good feel for who the characters were.
Stuntman Mike is set up as this big bad misogynist serial killer, iconic in his Death Proof car, but as soon as the women exhibit resistance, as soon as they start fighting back, he turns into a whiny crybaby.
Yes! More than anything else, that struck me as most damning indictment of his "women are victims" mindset - the first time he runs up against targets who refuse to be cowed, he completely falls apart. It really made it clear that he preyed what he thought were easy targets, and his breakdown showed him up for the big coward he really was. It was very satisfying.