Aging SWM director seeks kickass F, great feet a must

"A tall (maybe 6ft) Amazonian Mulatto goddess walks down her hallway, dressed in a baby tee, and panties that her big ass (a good thing) spill out of, and her long legs grow out of. Her big bare feet slap on the hard wood floor. She moves to the cool rockabilly beat as she paces like a tiger putting on her clothes." – Death Proof screenplay, final draft 2/14/06 It was about halfway through Death Proof that I found myself wondering – why exactly did an overwhelming number of critics shower Grindhouse with heaps of praise? Re-reading a handful of reviews, I realized that there was very little in the way of critical analysis of either Tarantino’s Death Proof or Rodriguez’s Planet Terror. More often that not the approach was form over content – from the basic premise of two directors paying homage to bad cinema, to the (now-questionable) decision to pair the two films into a 191-minute double feature. Grindhouse afforded critics the opportunity to wax nostalgic about their own experiences with sticky floors and bad popcorn, while at the same time legitimizing their admiration for cinematic schlock. It's a shame few took a closer look at the actual films contained within. It was at the end of Death Proof that I came to the following conclusion – Quentin Tarantino needs a girlfriend. "A dateless wonder is a guy who thinks about girls alot but doesn't have much social skills. So he doesn't go out alot. But he's not like his geeky friends, or his fat friends, or his confused sexualitys friends, he goes out... every once in a while. Every once in a while he gets the balls to ask a girl out. Now dateless wonders usually make it a point to ask girls out of their league. Since they don't expect to get the date anyway, why not aim high. And every once in a while, they get their shit together long enough to be charming enough, to get a pretty girl to say yes. And you're that pretty girl." – Arlene, Death Proof screenplay, final draft 2/14/06 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. [NB: Spoilers follow.] Simply stated, Tarantino can't write dialog for women to save his life. Listening to the palaver of the two disparate groups of women in the film – be it about making out or muscle cars – you'd think the screenwriter had never actually spent time with women. This isn't Quentin trying to write intentionally bad dialog, à la The Cheerleaders – the style is identical to that of his earlier films, except that unlike the nameless hoods of Reservoir Dogs, or the multitude of characters in Pulp Fiction, the women in Death Proof aren't characters at all, they're merely character types;  agents for Tarantino's excursions into violence and vengeance. In past films, even minor characters (Gogo Yubari, Honey Bunny) had a certain three-dimensional quality to them. None of that is to be found here. (Unless of course you consider liberal use of "Nigga' please" as character defining.) Several of the lengthy dialog scenes go absolutely nowhere, fizzle out, or are otherwise pointless. For example, Kim and Zoe's story about the ditch in Thailand – neither funny, revealing, nor particularly interesting, its function (as far as I can tell) is simply to prepare us for Zoe's miraculous survival later in the film. Where's the payoff we've come to expect from such setups? I don't agree with those who labeled Death Proof misogynistic – Quentin doesn't hate women, but I do find his particular brand of feminism somewhat questionable. To wit: it's perfectly acceptable to terrorize and brutally kill one group of women as long as another steps in to kick some ass. However, looking at the dynamics he created for the two groups says quite a bit. Jungle Julia, Butterfly & Co. are hedonists – they lounge around, get high, and spend their nights getting drunk in dive bars – and die horrible deaths. Abernathy, Zoe, Kim and Lee are all professionals, and in the movie industry no less. On top of than that, we learn that Abernathy (Rosario Dawson) is a mom, a fact unnecessary to the plot, but of major importance to the fatherless director (cf. Kill Bill). The actress, stuntwomen, and makeup artist hang out in coffee shops and discuss Vanishing Point, while the others dance in bars and give lap dances. Is Tarantino passing moral judgment with this obvious good girl/bad girl dichotomy? Check out this bit of descriptive text from the screenplay: "Jungle Julia, pint of beer in one hand and lit cigarette in the other, does a very sexy dance to the bluesy rock classic. For the audience in Huck's, as well as the movie theatre she's putting on a one-ho-show." This is followed by bartender Warren (Tarantino himself) threatening to hit her "upside the head with a horse cock" if she doesn't put out her cigarette. Am I alone in finding it embarrassing that a 44 year-old white director feels the need to use the expression one-ho-show? And is it even necessary? I'm also not entirely comfortable with Tarantino's handling of Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the John Hughes-loving actress in the cheerleader outfit (labeled Vipers, natch) who is left behind by her friends as rape bait for hillbilly Jasper (Jonathan Loughran, who played the would-be rapist of comatose Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.) It's a bit of nastiness that, while closer in spirit to a genuine grindhouse film, doesn't quite work with everything leading up to it. It's inconsistent, which ultimately is my biggest complaint with the film. Now I'm sure some will no doubt be saying, "But it's meant to be offensive/sexist, it's a grindhouse film!" Except....it's not. 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. Interestingly enough, the films Death Proof directly references – Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary Crazy Larry – are not even grindhouse films, they're both straight-up 20th Century Fox releases. Rather than tossing $60 million in their direction, the Weinstein's should have given Tarantino and Rodriguez each $100,000, a limited crew, and an aggressively tight shooting schedule – maybe then we'd see something resembling those cheesy B-pictures we secretly adore. Regardless, Quentin 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.

Comments

[logboy]

whoa!!! not sure my brain can digest this article and the following comments.
it's saturday evening and i'm at the end of another week where i've been thinking
a lot about the relationship between the online fans of film and the film (grindhouse)
made to appeal to those beyond this little world we inhabit... tarantino's clever, i think,
and he gets a hard time for wearing his references on his sleeve and talking loudly (and
often) about his use of them, his previous uses of them, his potential uses of them.

there was a clip online of an old interview where tarantino described what he does as
an equivalent of hip-hop in film form - sample, slice, remix, make something new with
something old - and i think he has shown himself to be smarter and far dumber than that
too, it's both potentially lazy and incredibly revolutionary at the same time...

and i also think tarantinos 'dragon dynasty' label shows how it's easy to lock into
a way of thinking towards the lower ranks of films, he's a bit oldschool and i feel
from my own formative years having a different perspective which taints my
ways of treating films (where, for me, good transfers on DVD give less of a sense
of grind, more of a sense of revelation at the heavy connections between
so-called trash and so-called classics).

for him, 'grindhouse' theatres personify and embody his initial early,
formative experiences of what are broadly covered by several or so
possible ways; films viewed out of time-and-place, films suffering from a lack of context
as a result, films suffering from publicity and finance which distort in one
persons eye when they remain an honest and worthwhile approach elsewhere.

still, there's plenty to be said about having achieved something relatively unsual, as 'grindhouse'
is is some ways, as tarantinos work is in some ways - because it's relative to its origins, and for
the most part these origins run a million miles from literal use of the elements he has in his films,
and instead you have the ironic $60m movie that could be out-charmed by a misunderstood
and more capable filmmaker like takashi miike half-a-dozen times a year, potentially.

[Jimmy]

My cousin Clara told me that one of her closest friends from childhood is dying of some terrible and rare blood disease. Jolene has moved back in with her conservative, redneck parents in a small Texas town. She's slowly wasting away, in great pain, coughing up blood, not eating at all--it's awful. Clara told me recently that at least Jolene had her pole installed in her room in her parents' house so that she could keep up her dancing during her last days. "Huh?" I had to have that repeated. Jolene is an "exotic" pole dancer, and as she's dying a horrible death and passing her last days in her parents' home--she continues her pole dancing.

Clara is thirty-one, and Jolene is about the same age. As you know, FB, I am forty. I don't know if that qualifies as a different generation, but I think it's illustrative of something I just don't get about younger people. In a perverse, Paglia-esque reversal of feminism, young women in 2007 revel in sexual behavior that demeans them. I think that's true of young men too, to a lesser extent. Perhaps it's just something about this generation I don't get. There's an echo of it in Houellebecq's latest, in which his forty-seven-year-old protagonist dates a twenty-five-year-old for a while. He doesn't entirely get her, and she is very alien to his mature sensibilities.

But then, I think this is just a reflection of straight men's need for sexual conquest and their attraction to children--something I have never entirely grasped. Tarantino merely has the children in his movies deliver clever lines while scantily clad. I haven't seen it in years, but I recall something similar of River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves in Van Sant's My Own Private Idaho: sexy rent boys delivering lines from Shakespeare. I haven't seen too many of his films, but my favorite of Tarantino's women was Daryl Hannah in Kill Bill. Madison from Splash has not aged all that gracefully. The actress was almost unrecognizable to me, and it was her obvious mileage and middle-aged cynicism that made her compelling and tremendously attractive to me.

Frankly, I think you have not gone far enough. I think Tarantino is a complete douchebag, utterly full of himself. As Cinephiliac wrote, he thinks his shit don't stink. He proved that by freely using the n-word in basically his own voice in Pulp Fiction. He thinks the rules don't apply to him. He doesn't think he's a film god. He thinks he is God. Sure, he's made a few good movies, but he's nothing more than a lecherous old prick who hasn't suffered enough to develop any measure of humility. To paraphrase Mickey Rourke as Charles Bukowski in Barfly, "He doesn't need love. He needs a taste of death."

[Jimmy]

Oh, and while we're on the topic of great ones gone and one-ho shows, I'll share this. I just wish I could have worked "nappy-headed" in there.

[mike]

Barry was also the captain of the plane in the original Airport giving level headed advice to Dino.

As to his role as Ullman in the Shining, the role, as originally written, was very much like the book. In King's word's Ullman was an "officious prick" and not very likeable. Nelson played him likeable and heightened the foreshadowing in the movie.

Don Ho, we will miss you as well.

[Peter Nellhaus]

I would call Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry a quasi AIP film. It was produced by former AIP co-founder James Nicholson for his production company which had a distribution deal with Fox. Also, two of the stars, Peter Fonda and Adam Roarke, were AIP veterans.

Sorry to read that you got mugged on 42nd Street. I guess I left NYC in time. Actually, my favorite theater to see AIP and New World films was the Academy of Music theater on 14th Street with that huge screen.

[Baby Acapulco]

Mr (Mrs?) so-called-filmbrain: I'm the person that emailed you on Friday, a good friend of Quentin's living in Austin. That's in Texas.

If I seemed a bit harsh in the email it's simply because Q is my nigga, and I got his back. Still, I told him about your post and he was pi$$ed off. Loser bloggers telling a famous man he needs him a woman? Where do you get off? I don't know if he'll bother to reply, but if he does you should watch out. You're name will be mud in the morbidly huge film bloggers circle jerk.

[Filmbrain]

instead you have the ironic $60m movie that could be out-charmed by a misunderstood
and more capable filmmaker like takashi miike half-a-dozen times a year, potentially

Excellent observation logboy...I couldn't agree more.

Jimmy - I was honestly left speechless about the dying pole dancer story. Hey -- perhaps Quentin can co-opt that into his next screenplay?

Peter - That mugging was a right of passage (of sorts).
When did the Academy of Music theater close? Was that the one on 14th and Irving Place? I don't think I ever went there.

[Filmbrain]

Baby Acapulco --

Ummm....let me guess. Harry Knowles? Sandra Bullock? Jungle Julia?

Oh well, back to the circle jerk...

[Jimmy]

I wonder if Mr./Mrs. Baby Acapulco is truly the FOQ he/she claims to be. It would be interesting if "Quentin" commented on your post. (I always find it awkward when you film-types refer to public figures by their first names. It reminds me of President Bush calling Lord Robertson, the former head of NATO, "George." But I guess all the kids are doing it.) It's kind of a no-win situation for Tarantino, though, at least if he owns up to his toady's remarks, which address not the merits of your arguments but the fact that you've impugned the machismo of a "famous man." This reminds me of the Family Guy episode where Meg publishes an unflattering article in her school newspaper about Luke Perry, who discovers it accidentally because he reads through every high-school paper in America. Should Mr. T write you directly, I sincerely hope you'll post the entire thing here for our circle-jerking pleasure.

[Jimmy]

PS - That's not to say that Like Anna Karina's Sweater is on the level of a high-school paper. You're at least as high up the food chain as Reader's Digest.

[Donna Fadoushbag]

"You're at least as high up the food chain as Reader's Digest."

Jimmy's a dick...and his snarky jabs illustrate why I've come to hate blogs.

[Filmbrain]

Donna --

While I share you distaste for blog-snark, Jimmy's an old friend, and I can assure you there wasn't a hint of snark in that comment, just some good ole' fashioned ribbing.

[Donna Fadoushbag]

May I retract my "dick" accusation then? My apologies, Jimmy.

[Jimmy]

Yep, it was just ribbing. But I'm still a dick. Hopefully that doesn't reflect on Filmbrain.

While Tarantino strikes me as a real tool, some of my favorite artists are assholes. I'm quite fond of the work of Japanese psych lord Asahito Nanjo. The man is a genius and a fantastic musician. But he's dishonest and untrustworthy. Ask any musician he's ever worked or played with. Human decency has little to do with artistic merit. It's not quite the same thing, but I recently watched The Third Man, in which Orson Welles said, "In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Some of my previous remarks were offered in defense of Tarantino's work, in fact. For example, I think his portrayal of young women may be more realistic than Filmbrain gives him credit for. But I find his public persona, at least, insufferable, and I stand by my insults. Anyway, who cares what an insignificant jerkoff like me thinks? Hopefully Mr. T has sufficiently thick skin to withstand a few jabs from a nobody in a casual blog comment. And while my humor is often dry enough to sail right past many readers, rest assured the following remark is offered entirely in earnest: Whatever anyone may have to say about Quentin Tarantino, you can easily find ten worse things to say about me.

[Jimmy]

No apology necessary, Donna. I invited it, and anyway, you were right, just for the wrong reasons.

[John Figler]

Talk about inquiries into arcane aspects of "Death Proof". I got a good'n for you. Not to flog my post about the film or anything, but I left the following comment for myself, about a subject that, as a graphic designer, I found eye-catching and subtly witty:

"In the Kurt Russell close-up photo (bottom-most),

(SEE: http://figskin.blogspot.com/2007/04/does-grindhouse-cheat-you-fair.html )

he is standing in front of a vending machine picturing a cola brand I don't recognize. This may be another instance of the filmmakers' conscious avoidance of product placement in some, though not all, cases. For instance, I noticed one character pulling a smoke from a phony pack of cigarettes."

Did anyone else pick up on this? If so, is this something Tarantino has done before?

[Filmbrain]

The fake brand Red Apple cigarettes have appeared in almost all of QT's films. Not sure about the soda though...

[Peter Nellhaus]

The Academy of Music theater closed sometime around 1976 if I remember correctly. It became the Palladium where they had live concerts. For a truer grindhouse experience, there was also the Variety Photoplays theater on 12th or 13th Street and 2nd Ave, or close to that intersection. You had to actually go to the theater to see what was playing because the person who answered the phone was going to tell you. Most of the time they showed junk like film by Ted V. Mikels. I usually walked by just to look at the posters. The one time I recall seeing anything there, they showed Henry King's "Carousel" (the only R and H musical I like), with my personal cult film, Noel Black's "Cover Me Babe".

[Steve from Controlled Burning]

The cigarettes and cola are just like Big Kahuna Burgers...fun, trivial stuff that gets cycled through many of his films.

My initial thought was that Grindhouse was a really fun experience overall, but if you take all the elements (films and trailers) on their own, the degree of enjoyment and quality varies. After all, it was meant to be a full-blown experience rather than a singular, "good" movie, right?

What I think is most telling about Death Proof is that it has long, boring stretches of dialogue that don't seem on a par with previous QT films, and acting that seems amateur at best in many cases. But when I think back on films I've seen from the era being homage'd, they were rife with boring, badly acted scenes that buffered the action. So in a way, QT has created such a loving tribute to those films that he knows he's making a less than stellar one himself. Which seems great if film is all you care about; not so great if you want vast ticket sales (as one would expect the W's do).

The other thing that stood out after the fact was that much of the hardcore violence was difficult to watch. The tire-over-the-face moment especially rough, I would say. But, during that era, when CG had not yet become the tool of the day, violent effects were sometimes quite horrific, if only because you knew that they somehow made it look like a knife went through a person's head, or something along those lines. With CG effects, you can marvel at how realistic it looks, but you also know it's just a computer graphic and therefore the fright is reduced.

I'm still trying to fathom what the hell was happening in some of the Eli Roth Thanksgiving scenes.

[ColinS]

"I'm also not entirely comfortable with Tarantino's handling of Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), the John Hughes-loving actress in the cheerleader outfit (labeled Vipers, natch) who is left behind by her friends as rape bait for hillbilly Jasper (Jonathan Loughran, who played the would-be rapist of comatose Uma Thurman in Kill Bill.) It's a bit of nastiness that, while closer in spirit to a genuine grindhouse film, doesn't quite work with everything leading up to it. It's inconsistent, which ultimately is my biggest complaint with the film." filmbrain.

No inconsistence at all.

Oh, for sure what the women did by leaving Lee on her own, and Abernathy saying Lee is making a porn movie are quite stupid and irresponsible. However, you have made a cardinal error of hillbilly prejudice.

Show this back water guy some love. He obviously was quite meticulous in taking care of that car. He advertised it's sale in the newspaper, and he trusted the women to take it out and return it. Now why would he go out and wreck his chance for what could be a sweet financial windfall for a prized collector's car, by raping Lee?

Granted, he might take too much of a "forward" approach to chatting with Lee, he assuming "porn chicks" are easy, but I believe Lee would be able to sweetly, she having established her charming sweetness, let him know the girls did not tell the truth. With that revelation, he may be a bit upset and quite worried that his car comes back in one piece, but to automatically decide to rape Lee?

That's is some serious prejudice against "hillbillies" there. Not all hillbilly men are inbred rapists.

I left in your Jasper reference from "Kill Bill..." for the simply reason that you made a false assumption that an actor who plays a character type in one movie is automatically playing that same character's action in another movie. You fell into the Tarantino's trick of f'ing with audience expectations. If you think I am off base, listen/read a lot of the disappointment of many "fans" who expected Stuntman Mike to be Snake Plisskin (badass of "Escape from New York"). Tarantino's oeuvre IS about f'ing with audience expectations of genre conventions all the time.

Now, if he was just doing these injokes without any forms of transcendence I would not apprecitate him as artist in the least. I find it shocking that a critical analysis of this film is a bit clouded by prejudice of Quentin Tarantino personality (good or bad) to miss a true masterpiece of cinema poetry in the first half of the "Death Proof." It is a cinematic lyrical treatise on fatalism from the opening shot to the horrorible murders. And this is what makes Tarantino so great; he by his directions and attention to details elevates certain archetype elements of "trash" genre films to make movie art.

"Is Tarantino passing moral judgment with this obvious good girl/bad girl dichotomy?"

No.

After all, practically all of Tarantino's characters so far, do stupid things and/or are criminals. But I felt for the loss of those women as I was dazzled and repulsed by the gore of the death carnage. Theirs were indeed lives taken away in an instant without warning or impending signals to themselves. Arlene might have had a bit of premonition but she was lullabied (quite directly by Julia on the back porch) back to the easy going of a girls' night out not looking for any trouble. For sure, this is quite familiar in the slasher genre convention, but the elements (shots, ordinary dialog (extraordinary in itself for me, no overreaching cleverness), music, etc.) Tarantino uses make the loss of these women cinema mood poetry. It really shows his love for women, and whether we agree that violent revenge is the best way to replace loss in life, at least in the movies were can be rejuvinated by a kick ass carthartic conclusion of a revenge flick conventions. So he gives the women their inspiring moment of glory to overcome victimization. And true to form as a movie making artist Tarantino showcased his virtuosity in the second half as well. "Death Proof" is a cinematic masterpiece of a very high caliber.

I must admit, I approached seeing this film with very low expectations, but to my surprise what a gem I discovered.