Ray Pride

The notion of secreting some Cheetos Puffs and an oil can of Foster's in my shoulder bag into last week's post-deadline all-media "Grindhouse" screening at River East held momentary allure, or perhaps packing a flask, in honor of the mid-adolescent shake-`n'-bake tradition of drive-ins and dollar houses in decades past, but I resisted, yet still experienced the exchange of deliciously bitchy talk-out-louds from fellow audience members and the apposite spectacle of a late-coming, morbidly obese woman clumsily tramping on my feet and blocking the screen in the oversold auditorium and loudly dubbing me a "motherfucking little white cocksucker." (Free shit makes me stupid, too.) I could almost smell the scorched, foul carpets and seats of the Loop's late and lamentable UA, McVickers, Woods and pre-civic-ized Chicago Theater venues.

Other rancid things comprise the 191-minute spectacle, thrilling and dismaying in equal, vivid measure. Also of interest is writing about the film after its cataclysmic opening weekend, with mooted plans by distributor The Weinstein Company to perhaps pull the $90 million-plus investment from theaters and to release Robert Rodriguez's twangy, frenetic Tex-Mex-neck zombie "Planet Terror" separately from Quentin Tarantino's "Death Proof," a sadistic, even nihilist, limb-scattering car-crash demolition derby opus, girl-gawking trash-talk epic, aka "Gone in 60 Footrubs." It was also interesting to hear moviegoers over the weekend who didn't want to see the film explain why: the title was meaningless to them; their friends said it was two overlong shitty movies aping shitty movies they had no interest in; and women almost universally said they weren't in for an evening of unrelenting misogyny. (Not everyone has nostalgia for the company of snoring, stinking drunks, either, can you feature that?)

You could read "Grindhouse" politically, as voices on both sides of the aisle have, considering the portions as two responses to totalitarian fervor, shambolic, anarchic, in the face of dread and drear and language loosed from moorings to rove the underbrush of political, careerist, go-along-to-get-along, cliquey, insidery, acquiescence. There's incendiary contempt throughout--Bruce Willis' speech about how he wasn't supposed to be the one to kill Osama Bin Laden is pretty spectacular--spending the Weinstein Co. investors' cash to crayon upon and beyond the lines of taste, form, decorum.

Rodriguez goes full-bore in digitally simulating the wrecked quality of bad 1970s exploitation pictures, relentlessly jiggling frame and soundtrack that almost qualifies "Terror Planet" as an experimental film. Roger Ebert's described a fondness for sentences that have never before been spoken, and there are moments, such as the trashy spectacle of McGowan's character's prosthetic leg, a promiscuously hair-trigger machinegun. This eyeball kick has never been seen before, and Rodriguez deploys it inventively. If you think about it, though, you'll feel awfully guilty: there are nasty undertones and overtones everywhere here. (More successful is Rodriguez's trailer that opens the film, for the apocryphal "Machete," in which Danny Trejo wreaks havoc--"You fucked with the wrong Mexican" is practically the first line of dialogue you hear after the lights go down.)

Tarantino's slasher/stoner film, "Death Proof," has its own peculiar pace, functioning as four discrete shorts, not flagged with title cards--"The Quentin Problem"--but not unlike the chapterization of "Pulp Fiction." The writer-director-piss-poor-actor also goes hog-wild with his foot fetishism, packing his picture with innumerable shots of feet, toe-splay and arched sole, from tic to trope and back again, fetish, fixation, totem, swoon and bore. The racial politics of his dialogue for women are best described by Tarantino himself, from an interview in the April GQ: "[B]lack-male things and me tend to go hand in hand... I just walk in step with... There's a lot of things that me and black males walk in step with. In our masculinity." Better to comment on the look of his film, in which he takes his first credit as cinematographer, which draws upon the plein-air parch of director of photography John Alonzo's work on "Vanishing Point" and John Deerson's work on Monte Hellman's "Two-Lane Blacktop." (Fortuitously, both of these pictures about the horizon we always approach but never overtake were written by litterateurs just as eccentric as Tarantino; the first by Cuban-born novelist G. Cabrera Infante and the second by Rudolph Wurlitzer. Rudy Wurlitzer's dramaturgy "Blacktop" is a tetch terser than Tarantino's.) He also pulls a neat trick like something Elmore Leonard does on the page with patois: after twenty minutes or so, the put-on "damaged print" idea goes away and we're simply in a Tarantino movie.

He's not a consistent cameraman. Where Robert Rodriquez makes Rose McGowan a voluptuous screen siren to blast away Ava Gardner and Rita Hayworth, director and cinematographer Tarantino puts her pale face in a thumb-oval blotch of white, less angel than affectless specter. Tarantino admires darker and stronger features in his actresses, and I mean that admiringly, approvingly. These are beautiful women most casting directors wouldn't let in the room, and bless Tarantino for that.

"Grindhouse" grinds on in theaters now.

(2007-04-10)

Also by Ray Pride

The Other Side of the Mountain
Why do we keep watching? The answer is, many people don't. Or patterns change. And the film/DVD/cable industry is always a few steps behind figuring out a fresh master plan, and everyone's concerned the film industry will go the way of the record industry: free to everyone but its creators
(2007-04-03)

Tip of the Week
"Wind" follows a pair of brothers (Cillian Murphy, Padraic Delaney) who join the Republicans to fight for Irish independence. Words are spoken, violence is enacted, passions are displayed with fine fire
(2007-04-03)

Blair Witch Hunt
There are a couple of techniques put to impeccable use in the largely first-person "The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair" which fall outside of traditional boundaries of "documentary," which, of course, is why documentaries fascinate today: the willingness to be frisky, the imperative to be personal and to personalize
(2007-03-27)

Tip of the Week
Producer-director-editor Philip Gröning's "Into Great Silence," a humble 162-minute documentary about a silent order of monks in the French Alps' Grand Chartreuse monastery--shot without crew or lighting--is long, but, as you would expect, meditative
(2007-03-27)

The Mourning After
(2007-03-20)

Tip of the Week
(2007-03-20)

Moving Pictures
(2007-03-13)

Tip of the Week
(2007-03-13)

Tip of the Week
(2007-03-06)

Killer Looks
(2007-03-06)

Young American
(2007-02-27)

Euro Bash
(2007-02-27)

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