House of Grind

Saw Grindhouse this weekend. I’ve seen more movies in a movie theater in the past six months than I did in the past three years. Earplugs help tremendously – since most movies are shown with the sound pretty loud, you can hear all the dialogue and ‘splosions yet all the inbreds chatting with their companions and eating popcorn with their mouths wide open seem to vanish. I’m kicking myself that I didn’t think of using them sooner.

Well, anyway, I saw Grindhouse Saturday night and I’ve been processing it ever since. No, it’s not a deep movie by any stretch of the imagination. The only thing deep about it is the dent your ass will leave in your seat thanks to the flick’s 191-minute running time. But the most fascinating thing I found about the whole experience was that I really enjoyed one segment, hated the second, but I can’t stop sulking about the one that sucked.

But actually, the best parts of the whole shebang were the much-ballyhooed trailers inserted before the main features. The trailers worked so well because they all played into the grindhouse aesthetic without having to, you know, construct actual movies around their concepts. My guess is that were, say, Rob Zombie to actually film Werewolf Women of the SS, complete with Nicolas Cage as Fu Manchu, it would be a piece of shit. (Speaking of Rob Zombie: If he ever divorces Sherry Moon Zombie, she’ll never work in movies again – she was in the Werewolf Women trailer for about 17 seconds and she was still outperformed by the props, the costumes and the titles.)

As for the main events…

Planet Terror: A success. The story: Chemical weapons are unleashed on a town in Texas. Most people become mutant zombies; those who are immune band together to battle for humanity’s salvation, or something like that. Lots of shit blows up, and Rose McGowan gets a prosthetic leg.

Robert Rodriguez’s liabilities as a filmmaker became assets in this case. The disjointed narrative was still coherent enough, the violence was suitably over-the-top, the dialogue was the perfect blend of knowing satire and pure Velveeta, the casting was damn near flawless, and of course, the whole machine gun leg thing was pretty cool. The sight of badass El Wray (Freddy Rodriguez) leading the survivors of a mutant attack down the road while riding a child’s toy motorbike was memorable, to say the least, as was Quentin Tarantino’s melting penis. And Fergie gets killed!

Is it stupid? Deliberately so, but it’s fun, too. Every movie can’t be Children of Men, you know.

Rodriguez also made Machete, a fake trailer starring Danny Trejo as a Mexican hired for an assassination who is double-crossed by his employers. Tagline: “They fucked with the wrong Mexican!” Machete was shown at the top of Grindhouse and serves as the perfect introduction. Sadly, Rodriguez doesn’t quite get the joke – apparently he’s making Machete as a straight-to-DVD feature. Why can’t people leave well enough alone?

Which leads us to Planet Tarantino, a.k.a. Death Proof. Quentin Tarantino’s shotgun wedding of road movies and slasher films comes off as My Dinner with Andre clumsily interspersed with bits and pieces of Death Race 2000. If you haven’t already guessed, this is the one that sucked.

Here’s the nutshell narrative: A trio of sexy, sassy women drive to a bar to celebrate a birthday or something, they encounter a mysterious fellow named Stuntman Mike, who ends up driving his death-proof car into theirs, killing them. Then a second gang of sexy, sassy women drive around talking before Stuntman Mike rears his ugly head, ramming their car before the women turn the tables on Mike, eventually tracking him down, running him off the road and beating him up. The End. Oh yeah, spoiler alert!

Seemingly unaware that movies are a visual medium, the mighty QT fills Death Proof with multiple interminable scenes of various hot chicks talking: driving and talking, standing around and talking, sitting around and talking. What are they talking about? Nothing much at all, of course – viewers are supposed to be so dazzled by Tarantino’s flair for scripting naturalistic dialogue and witty banter that the actual content is irrelevant. Tarantino writes dialog like a jazz cat lays down a heavy groove, motherfucker, and if you can’t hang with QT’s scene, then just shut your motherfucking pie hole and go watch The Queen or else I’ll break my motherfucking foot off in your vajay-jay, bitch.

Or so he thinks. The repartee is actually so clunky and artificial that descriptors like “ham-fisted” and “leaden” don’t even begin to scratch the surface. And there is SO FUCKING MUCH of it. These broads never shut up. Again, it’s a movie: show, don’t tell. Everything else is padding, plain and simple.

Furthermore, numerous plot threads are introduced, built up with extensive dialogue, and then dropped, e.g., Jungle Julia text messaging the dude, the two fratboys trying to get the girls drunk enough to date rape, etc. That's just sloppy writing.

What’s worse is the casting. Sydney Poitier’s Jungle Julia is an unlikable bitch. Jordan Ladd plays… some blonde chick wearing a Tura Satana t-shirt that was put there simply to impress the movie geeks (yeah, I caught it, but I’m omnipotent like that). Stuntwoman Zoë Bell plays… stuntwoman Zoë Bell, and let’s just say that as an actress, she’s a fine stuntwoman.

Worst of all, Tracey Thom as Kim gives a performance that would make Wanda Sykes blush, as it’s full of all the worst stereotypical “sassy black chick” mannerisms and inflections you can think of. It’s like Thom thought she was in an episode of The Parkers, not a Hollywood film, and in fact, it’s actually offensive; it’s such a broad, cartoonish characterization that Tarantino might as well have cast a white woman and put her in blackface.

(Speaking of crap acting, Tarantino himself couldn’t act wet if he fell out of a boat, but naturally, he has “cameos” in both Death Proof and Planet Terror, just like he does in every other damn movie he’s ever made -- remember the meme that was running around that went “He’s an actor, but he really wants to direct?” Tarnatino’s a director, but he really wants to act.)

Elsewhere, Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Lee, a vapid actress who is too girly to keep up with the main trio of cool chicks, who drop references to old movies and muscle cars and the difference between Aussies and Kiwis while Lee talks about an ex-boyfriend who liked to watch her urinate (that’s Tarantino being edgy). Lee was obviously written as comic relief, as someone for the audience to zero in on and scorn: “What a stupid bitch! She’s never seen Vanishing Point!” (All the little Tarantino acolytes in the audience have most likely never seen Vanishing Point either, but they wouldn’t dare admit that QT dropped a reference that they weren’t intimately familiar with.) But Lee comes off as perhaps the most sympathetic and certainly the most realistic character in the whole segemnt. Go figure.

Meanwhile, of course, this flick is allegedly about crazy Stuntman Mike and his ultra mega badass death proof car (it’s called Death Proof, after all), so you would think there might be lots of footage of the car speeding down wide open highways, peeling tires and the titular vehicle demonstrating is very death-proofness, but apparently Tarantino thought the gals yammering away about their boyfriends and, of course, Vanishing Point, was way more interesting.

The ultimate punchline is that Grindhouse debuted at a modest #4, well below the expected box office totals it was assumed it would garner. Hopefully this will inspire studios to reign in Tarantino's worst tendencies, which are on ample display in Death Proof.

Put On Your "Fugee" Face

Saw Children of Men the other day (in a theater!). I liked it.

It’s set in the nearish future. For unknown reasons, there have been no births in 18 years and the human race appears to be headed into extinction. Furthermore, wars and terrorist attacks have ravaged much of the planet, and England has become a police state where immigrants (called "fugees," just like Lauren Hill's old group) are rounded up and put into camps for deportation, or made to live in ghettos. A former radical named Theo (Clive Owen) is drawn into a shady revolutionary organization that may have the key to humanity’s future.

Again, I really enjoyed the movie, especially the soundtrack and for the kittens (aww), but I’m also always appreciative of movies that are willingly downbeat – it’s a nice respite from the standard cookie-cutter Hollywood flicks with their grafted-on happy endings.

But since I am not a person who likes children all that much – I pretty much hate them, actually – I didn’t find the movie’s bleak, oppressive milieu nearly as bleak and oppressive as I was supposed to.

Borat 1 Douchebags 0

From The Associated Press:

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- A judge rejected a request by two fraternity brothers to block the DVD release of the hit spoof movie Borat.

...The South Carolina fraternity brothers sued Nov. 9, claiming they were tricked into making racist and sexist remarks to British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen in Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.

...The fraternity brothers claim the filmmakers got them drunk before getting them to sign release forms agreeing to appear in the film. Their names do not appear in the lawsuit. The film “made plaintiffs the objects of ridicule, humiliation, mental anguish, and emotional and physical distress,” the lawsuit claims.

Jagshemesh

Once again I violated my "no movies in the theater" maxim. The victim: Borat: Cultural Learnings Whatever I Don't Care.

Verdict: I loved it. On paper, it sounded like, well, a seven-minute segment on a cable TV comedy show stretched to 90 minutes. Usually, this is a recipe for disaster (see: any movie built around any SNL recuriing character from the past 20 years). (Yes, this includes Wayne's World.) But, I'm a fan of Da Ali G Show and since every entertainment information outlet seemed hellbent on spoiling every last bit in the movie, and also with the rash of lawsuits and complaining in the press that some of the movie's unwitting participants are involved with, I figured I'd better check it out before media saturation totally ruined it for me.

Borat was that rarity: a comedy that made me laugh. I recommend. If the DVD has enough extras and deleted scenes, I'll probably buy it.

Ominous anecdote: We were originally going to catch an early Sunday matinee at the Baxter. When we arrived, we saw three fire trucks in front of the theater. There was a fire and the Baxter was closed for the day. An omen? I bravely, heroically decided to catch an evening matinee at Stonybrook, which did not have any fires that day. Success.

Octopus's Garden

A fisherman caught a six-foot octopus near the Falls of the Ohio this week. Wildlife officials were all over the local media speculating as to how saltwater marine life ended up in the Ohio River, but the answer to the mystery was a bit more prosaic. Not to mention pathetic and stupid. The auteur seems like quite the little douchebag, no?

Here's a photo of the well-traveled cephalopod:

I Suppose It's Possible Other Kids Are Masturbating and Spreading Their Semen Around the School As Well

Watched The Squid and the Whale on PPV. It's one of those movies I see at Wild & Woolly all the time and think about renting but something flashier catches my eye.

All I can say is I'm sorry I waited this long. The Squid is one of the most deadpan, hilarious movies I've seen in ages. I liked it so much I bought a used copy on DVD at W&W the day after.

First, it features kids, and yet I wasn't consumed with the urge to climb inside the TV and strangle the horrible little fuckers as I usually am when children are required to emote.

Second, Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney are both really good, and William "Don't Call Me Billy" Baldwin is perfectly cast as an amiable doofus (or philistine, if you prefer).

Turns out it was written and directed by Noah Baumbach, who cowrote the screenplay for The Life Aquatic with Wes Anderson -- who executive produced The Squid and the Whale. Birds of a feather.

Soy un Perdedor

Memorial Day weekend. Jen is up in the Region. I am here at HQ.

So far, I have watched three of the "Classic Album" DVDs: A Night at the Opera (Queen); Ace of Spades (Motorhead); Bat Out of Hell (Meat Loaf).

I also watched New York Doll, which is about Arthur "Killer" Kane, who seemed to be such a sweet, sad guy. How's this for an ending: After playing a triumphant reunion show with the survivng New York Dolls, Kane returned to Los Angeles feeling a little run down and sick. After three weeks, he went to see a doctor. He was diagnosed with leukemia and died two hours later. If that exact same scenario were presented in a novel or a fictional film, it would be seen as maudlin and unrealistic.

I also picked up a documentary on the Runaways. When the boss is out of town, I always try to hit Wild & Woolly and rent all the obscure and/or foreign movies that she doesn't want to sit through, but I can never remember which ones I want to watch, so I usually just end up looking through the music section (see above).

A couple of weeks ago, Jen and I were playing pool at the Barret Bar. The music they were playing was really good and it was obviously all from the same album. After seven or eight fantastic songs in a row, I went over and asked the bartender who was playing. It was Beck's Guero. Better late than never. I hit a few of my usual used CD haunts but I finally gave up this weekend and bought it new at Best Buy. Now I might have to check out Sea Change.

The album graphics are highly reminescent of Henry Darger's art. As I haven't bothered reading the liner notes yet, this may be intentional.

That's Not a Knife

Saw Wolf Creek last weekend -- in an honest-to-God movie theater. Happily, the crowd was well behaved. As for the movie, it was a decent, gritty horror flick, no more, no less. It had a resolutely downbeat ending, which I liked because it fit the tone of the movie. The two female leads were cute as buttons, which made the events of the film all the more disturbing. John Jarrat as Mick was really good. But back to the audience: I saw a mom and dad bringing two small kids into this rated R movie full of bloody violence and implied sexual assault. Way to go there, Ward and June.