The Fake Life - Love movies? We do too!

Friday, December 22, 2006

Test For Worthwhileness Of Friends Invented

They've just released a trailer for Grindhouse, the double bill of exploitation flicks made by Qunetin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, and if you don't like it, you suck.

Now back when people were actually making these flicks for real they had no money and, usually, no skill so would end up with crude and barely coherent mash ups of images and promises of death and sex for the trailers. To see highly skilled film-makers deliberately try and recreate that gives me the worry that they are missing the point a bit. It's certainly very post. I'm just hoping the final product isn't post-good, like Once Upon a Time in Mexico.

A sexy chick with a gun for a leg gets a lot of screen time and I'm not really sure it's authentic grindhouse. Quite apart from involving complex fx, it feels more like Rodriguez treating this as an excuse to go more 'out there', making something more extreme and, let's face it, more imaginative than what really went on in these movies. What went on usually involved a knife and lots of fake blood as that's all they had the money for, and it was that lurid simplicity that was part of the charm.

Pissy little arguments about the authenticity of the project aside, I really love the sexy chick with a gun for a leg. Do you? Our friendship depends on it. This really does look like a fun time at the movies, even though two feature length movies plus trailers does seem both butt-numbing and commercial suicide (are they going to charge twice for this presumably 3hr+ movie). Regardless, I'm there.

Another fun thing to look for is Jack Burton gone bad as the killer in Tarantino's portion - Death Proof. Please note the long pauses with plenty of eyebrow work in the acting, suggesting a deeper sadness or vulnerability underneath the hard exterior that is exactly the bloody same as Michael Madsen's acting in Kill Bill. Whatever works, Quentin, but how many more aging tough guys facing mortality are you going to include?

One final question: We know that Rodriguez basically makes insane genre shit and we love him for it, but is Quentin getting the last of his filmic youth out of his system before turning to other, perhaps more serious, projects, or did he come to the conclusion in his long break after Jackie Brown that being the great white hope of American arthouse cinema was just a detour and his real passion was in filming kick-ass kung fu movies?