Haha, this assumption that anyone who didn’t like Death Proof is a Michael Bay fan is funny as hell. It’s like the scene in Monty Python And The Holy Grail where the townspeople assumed the lady is a witch because she weighs the same as a duck.
Death Proof is an acquired taste. Some love it, some moderately like it. I’m not at all surprised if some people think it’s not QT’s best work to date (for my money, that honor still belongs to Kill Bill). After all, DP was technically a side project before his next big epic (whenever the hell that will occur). Actually, I’ll be very surprised if Death Proof (which was written in a matter of days) turns out to be a better movie than Inglorious Bastards (a project which up till now boasts of over 10 years of screenwriting).
Scar: We dont think everyone who didnt like DP is a Michael Bay fan. But there are people that praise CGI/greenscreen based films over movies that are live action and dont rely on that stuff to tell a story. It happens alot with the younger generation. They think CGI movies are cool and they ignore everything else thats not constant action/cool FX shots, cuz they dont move fast enough for them. Its like a form of ADD. Its understandable.
I dont think Death Proof is for everyone at all. Its a different film for QT. Its not Pulp 2 and its not even Kill Bill 2. Its an aqquired taste. BUT that doesnt mean its a bad movie either.
And I bet that Bastards will probably be QTs best film so far in his career. It will def be another benchmark for him as a filmmaker.
[quote=“PutneySwope”]
Scar: We dont think everyone who didnt like DP is a Michael Bay fan. But there are people that praise CGI/greenscreen based films over movies that are live action and dont rely on that stuff to tell a story. It happens alot with the younger generation. They think CGI movies are cool and they ignore everything else thats not constant action/cool FX shots, cuz they dont move fast enough for them. Its like a form of ADD. Its understandable.
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Unfortunately, those people are a lost cause with a very short attention span and you are right about that point. However, even though many people in the younger generation may be that way, there are many other people in the same generation that are QT fans. As a matter of fact, I think QT’s fan base is predominantly young. Just look at the average age of the people who sign up on this forum, it’s quite often in the 15-25 years range.
I hope that more of the younger fans are into all kinds of movies, not just the CGI/greenscreen type stuff. Theres so many great movies out there to see that dont employ that stuff.
[quote=“PutneySwope”]
I hope that more of the younger fans are into all kinds of movies, not just the CGI/greenscreen type stuff. Theres so many great movies out there to see that dont employ that stuff.
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I have to wonder why you always put down CGI/greenscreen type stuff too then. Are you not open minded enough to say some movies use it very well? I can take it or leave it but some movies move the media forward and others just barf up the same overworked bullshit. I also wonder if there were people who scoffed at color films or "talkies" back in the day. Did some people watch Planet of the Apes and shout "Hey! Those arent real monkeys! Thats just some guy in an ape suit!" All movies are fake. Who gives a shit if some newish technology allows story tellers to envision films that take movie lovers to a new zenith? HMMM? Seems a bit snobish.
My top favorite films have NO CGI whatsoever but that doesnt mean my list will stay that way.
If the CGI films were BETTER than the live action films I wouldnt have a problem with them, but they usually arent. I cant think of one CGI based film that I like over any of my favorite live action films. CGI is a tool, but its a tool that alot of directors overuse or dont know how to use.
CGI is meant to be in fantasy films, not regular kinds of films. But even then CGI isnt always a good thing. Its used as a creative shortcut usually, not as an artistic tool.
Color and sound is different than CGI. Its just not on the same level. CGI is fabricated, fake imagery. Color and sound are essential sensory based elements.
PJs King Kong cost so much money, its all CGI’d, yet I still like the original stop motion animation film more. I even like the 1976 man in suit version more!
I think it’s used wonderfully in Pan’s Labyrinth which is one of my favorite films of all time. But I would say CGI films are for people who just enjoy watching things blow up. But of course there are numerous other films who have used CGI at it’s best like The Matrix, Lord Of The Rings and Dark City. But right now i’m into the classic films from the 50s and 60s, so CGI films I could really care less about at this moment.
Theres always exceptions when it comes to super hero/fantasy based films, but generally I’m not a fan of CGI based movies.
Well yeah those films are usually by blockbuster whores like Michael Bay or some other fucking fag.
[quote]Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof” and Robert Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” play as if “Night of the Living Dead” and “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” were combined on a double bill under the parentage of the dark sperm of vengeance.
Together the two separate feature-length stories combine into “Grindhouse,” a deliberate attempt by the two directors to re-create the experience of a double feature in a sleazy B-house. Scratches and blemishes mar the prints, frames or even whole reels are purportedly missing, and the characters have the shallow simplicity of action figures entirely at the disposal of special effects. They are separated by a group of four trailers for still more B-minus pictures.
This evocation of a grindhouse may have existed somewhere, sometime, but my movie-going reaches back to before either director was born, and I have never witnessed a double bill and supporting program much like the one they have created. No, not even in half-forgotten Chicago theaters like the McVickers, Roosevelt, Shangri-La, Monroe, Loop or Parkway. Not even while trying specifically to find “Dog of the Week” candidates for Spot the Wonder Dog to bark at. And it must be said that when it comes to fabricating bad movies, Rodriguez and Tarantino have a failure of will. To paraphrase Manny Farber, you can catch them trying to shove art up into the crevices of dreck.
I can imagine the pitch meeting at which the two directors told Harvey and Bob Weinstein why they had to make this double-header. In that room were the most skilled conversational motormouths I’ve met, and I mean that as a compliment. If Tarantino tells you about the last time he ate an Italian beef sandwich, you want to film it in 70mm. But let’s face it. The fundamental reason young males went to schlock double features in the golden age was in the hope of seeing breasts, or, lacking that, stuff blowed up real good. Now that the mainstream is showing lots of breasts and real big explosions, there is no longer a market for bad movies showing the same thing.
I recall a luncheon at Cannes thrown by the beloved schlockmeister Sam Arkoff of American-International Pictures. “Sam!” said Rex Reed, after seeing Arkoff’s new film “Q,” about a Quetzlcoatl that swooped down on Wall Street to gobble up stockbrokers. “What a surprise! Right in the middle of all that schlock, a great Method performance by Michael Moriarty!” Arkoff blushed modestly. “The schlock was my idea,” he said.
So, OK, “Grindhouse” is an attempt to re-create a double feature that never existed for an audience that no longer exists. What’s the good news? Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” which I liked better, splits into two halves involving quartets of women, most of them lesbians, who are targeted by Stunt Man Mike (Kurt Russell) who uses his “death proof” car as a murder weapon. The movie ends with a skillful scene involving a deadly highway game and a duel between two cars. That and another highway massacre are punctuated by long, too long, passages of bar-room dialogue. The movie has two speeds --Pause and Overdrive.
Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” recycles the durable “Living Dead” formula: A band of the healthy fight off shuffling bands of zombies. I have written before about my weariness with zombies, who as characters are sadly limited. What distinguishes Rodriguez’s picture is the extraordinary skill of the makeup, showing us oozing wounds, exploding organs and biological horrors. The movie wants to be as repulsive and nauseating as possible. The plot, involving go-go dancers and an action-packed doctor, is a clothesline for gore, explosions, bodily mayhem and juicy innards on parade.
Both directors are eager to work in as many references as possible, verbal and visual, to their favorite movies; Russ Meyer seems quoted a lot. The backgrounds are papered with more vintage movie posters than you’d expect to find in a Texas saloon, except maybe in Austin. There are also various cultural references. For example, local disc jockey Jungle Julia’s listeners recite lines from “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” but you would be wrong to think that is a reference to a poem by Robert Frost. No, according to IMDb.com, it refers to Don Siegel’s thriller “Telefon” (1977), where the words were “used as a posthypnotic signal to activate Russian sleeper agents.”
“Grindhouse” is both impressive and disappointing. From a technical and craft point of view it is first-rate; from its standing in the canon of the two directors, it is minor. And I wonder what the point is when two of Tarantino’s women are obsessed with “Vanishing Point” (1971), a movie Tarantino obviously treasures. It explains the appearance in the movie of a 1970 Dodge Challenger, but is an explanation really necessary? Hell, I had a '57 Studebaker Golden Hawk, and it spoke for itself. We feel like the dialogue is movie-buff jargon overheard in a Park City saloon.
My own field of expertise in this genre is the cinema of Russ Meyer, and I was happy to see QT’s closing homage to the tough girls and the beaten stud in “Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!” (1965), which John Waters has named as the greatest film of all time. One heroine even copies Tura Satana’s leather gloves, boots and ponytail. I may have spotted, indeed, the most obscure quotation from Meyer. In an opening montage of his “Beyond the Valley of the Dolls” (1970), there is a brief, inexplicable shot of a boot crushing an egg. Rodriguez uses the same composition to show a boot crushing a testicle. So the Cinema marches on.
After failing in theaters as a double bill, “Grindhouse” was split by the Weinsteins into two shorter films. The Tarantino, then lengthened by the director, played at Cannes, where Harvey Weinstein admitted at a press conference that, for daring to release the combined films at a running time of three hours, he received a “public spanking.” Now that might have made a movie.
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So Roger Ebert says in the review that he has never witnessed a double-feature quite like this one! So does this mean that QT/RR failed in getting the entire experience right?!
I’ve never ever been to a Grindhouse theatre but if there’s someone that really knows about movies it is this man, Roger Ebert. I really respect his reviews, but either way Grindhouse was a complete different and exciting experience for me. I really hope he returns back to his show, he’s the only critic that makes sense to me. Oh and the leasbian part he was referring to Dakota and Fergie, remember that Grindhouse is the whole experience, so when he’s reviewing this, he’s talking about the entire experience. Great review though, the man really knows his stuff but B movies might not really be his thing. And I also think he despises all zombie films except Romero’s movies. Although he did give Day Of The Dead a bad review so. . .
Ebert was best buddies with Russ Meyer, he knows his shit when it comes to b-movies methinks. Even though he openly admits that I Spit On Your Grave is the worst movie he’s ever seen (he’s partially right).
I Spit On Your Grave is a very brutal film but its definitely not as bad as Ebert and Siskel made it out to be. Its actually a really well made shocker. Of course the scenes of rape are completely disgusting, but artistically speaking, the film itself is excellent IMO.
I only saw it once as a kid in the 80s, then I gothe Millennium Edition DVD with Joe Bob Brigg’s and the director’s commentaries. It really helps you see through the controversial aspects and understand it more as a work of art. In reality it is definitely a strong pro-feminist film. Its one of my favorites from the Grindhouse era.
I don’t think the running time was an issue as it is said at the end of the review. I think a movie that has three titles might have been a bit perplexing for audiences. Because in truth QT mentioned in the Johnathan Ross show that people don’t have to settle in their seats for that long of a time. They can just watch Planet Terror and a few trailers then go home. And maybe some other day they can go again and watch Death Proof. But I agree with the review in part, because generally speaking for other people who never got the whole “Grindhouse” concept didn’t really get this movie and it did miserably at the box office because of that.
Its 2007, people have cell phones, they have DVDs, computers, everything is super fast. Why would average audiences want to sit in a theater for 3 + hours to watch 2 traditional exploitation movies? Its not that it was a bad thing, its just society has changed from the way it was in the 70s. They want everything to go fast, with lots of explosions and action scenes. They want Michael Bay type movies. Thats just reality.
I really dont think most audiences even understood what Grindhouse was. They probably didnt care either.
[quote=“PutneySwope”]
I Spit On Your Grave is a very brutal film but its definitely not as bad as Ebert and Siskel made it out to be. Its actually a really well made shocker. Of course the scenes of rape are completely disgusting, but artistically speaking, the film itself is excellent IMO.
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I like Roger Ebert but no one has the right to try to get a movie out of the theatre no matter how much you hate it.
Yeah that whole thing was ridiculous. It made me lose alot of respect for them actually.
I didn’t know they tried to get it out of theaters, that kinda sucks.
Granted, I’ve never seen the movie with the famous Joe Bob Briggs commentary. But I think a great movie does not need an accompanyng commentary to make it great, it should speak on its own.The appeal of revenge movies is that you get to feel the same amount of satisfaction the victim feels when he/she eventually exacts his/her revenge. All I felt during I Spit was utter boredom (except for the bathtub scene, that was great). Different strokes for different folks I guess.
I felt more bored by Thriller: A Cruel Picture, simply because there was no real moments that I felt defined her getting revenge. It was more subtle. I Spit def kept my attention throughout from the creepy atmosphere alone. I felt the strong need for revenge after seeing her get raped for 25 minutes straight in the film. Thats why the film works so well because even though its brutal as hell, it makes you crave a revenge spree and it gives it to you. The movie is awesome IMO.
I watched the film by itself first, then I listened to the commentaries. Its not that they made the film so much better, they just shed light on certain aspects you might not think of on the first viewing. Listening to why the film was made and where the idea behind it came from was very interesting too. Thats really what commentaries are for.
You got to listen to the Joe Bob Briggs commentary. Im not a huge fan of I spit on your grave but the “I spit” commentary is a real joy to listen to and is my favorite commentary.
I dont know alot of people who like it actually. Im in the minority I guess. Its one of those movies youre not supposed to say you like I think because of the rape scenes. I cant dismiss it just because of that. I really think its a well made low budget film that happens to be offensive.