Usual warning: I spoil unabashedly. I try to avoid it when possible here, but if you are easily spoiled, consider yourself warned.
Finally got a chance to see the Tarantino/Rodriguez double feature Grindhouse last night, and, pardon me for using a hoary cliche, that movie is so punk rock. Freed from some from the fiscal and critical need to make money and to wow the critics with their cleverness, Tarantino and Rodriguez have made the perfect pair of exploitation flicks. In a few reviews I’ve read, that was phrased more like, “tribute to exploitation flicks”, but that’s slightly off, because if you’re a fan at all of exploitation flicks, you’ll know that they pay tribute to themselves. Tarantino and Rodriguez are just carrying on an established tradition.
The first of the two movies is Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, and it’s more openly a parody of various horror movie conventions, from the ham-handed attempts at characterization to the sentimentality that’s supposed to make the terror more terrible to the anachronisms to sort of nonsensical horrors that are included strictly for “wouldn’t that be cool” value. In the last category, for instance, there’s a character who collects the balls off his victims for no discernible reason, and there’s a literalness to the word “balls” that blatantly contradicts reality, but the audience couldn’t give a flying fuck. In the first category, as you can imagine, you have Rose McGowan’s character finally discovering her reason to live when she has a machine gun double as a fake leg. Everything corny bit of dialogue and corny plot twist is a commentary movie-making itself, and not just the blatant exploitation flicks. Rodriguez takes his digs at everything from putting a child in distress to ratchet up anxiety to the hooker/stripper-with-a-heart-of-gold cliche. But he strikes the perfect balance between making fun of movies and honoring our love of these elements.
Tarantino’s feature Deathproof has a little more going on. Rodriguez furthers the genre of jokey horror movies simply by making one that’s better and raising the bar on quality. Tarantino instead decides to tackle the fascinating streak of proto-feminism in some exploitation films, particularly those that have that gritty pseudo-realism going on. (Think the slasher flick vs. the monster movie—the former being the result of the pseudo-realism development in exploitation films in the 70s.) And walking away from Deathproof, I realized all the ink spilled on the topic of how feminist movies like Halloween or Caged Heat could really be is sort of beside the point.
In sum, your average exploitation film with female leads is in a bit of a quandary. A lot of exploitation directors are really fond of anarchic themes, in the political sense of the word “anarchy”—anti-hierarchy and anti-authority. Feminism is consistent with those themes. You want a story about a beaten down underdog who fights back, make your underdog female. The problem with that is that movies that blatantly reject male dominance will turn off the majority young and male audiences. What to do? Well, the traditional solution has been to make movies about women getting revenge on or even just triumphantly surviving violent male exploiters. Plotlines like that—the formula for every slasher flick you can think of, for one thing—let the director have it both ways. You can have a story about the underdog triumphing over the oppressor, but you also give your audience a movie full of scenes where women are tortured and killed in lavish detail, satisfying the money-spending teenage male audience who wants to see the perky cheerleaders pay for the high crime of making them feel the vulnerability of lust. In slasher films, the hero girl is often desexualized to sweeten the deal, so the audience never is put in a situation of empathizing with a sexualized woman. Needless to say, a lot of male directors’ own mixed feelings about their female characters (internalized misogyny vs. the anarchic desire to see the female underdog strike back) play into this equation, but that’s a little more individualized to each director and not up for the same kind of generalization that you can make about the market forces in play here.
After seeing Deathproof, I not only get that Tarantino understands these dueling pressures very well, but he feels them too, and has sort of fumbled the ball on how he wants to handle that. Jackie Brown was a little uneven, for that reason—the movie is at its best when it’s about Jackie, but Tarantino was clearly afraid to let go of the elements that make his movies popular with some of the braindead set. The scene in the movie where Bridget Fonda gets almost randomly blown away was so short and sudden that it’s tempting to argue that Tarantino was deliberately throwing it off, as if to say, “You want to see the hot girl get hers, so there you go, I threw it in.” Who knows, but there’s something angry about that scene that has nothing to do with Fonda’s character and that’s just my best guess. Regardless, the movie is unsatisfactory and disjointed because Tarantino is trying to pull of a balancing act between the story he wants to tell and the story details he has to add to keep the stupid section from squirming too much at having their prejudices go unconfirmed.
He blows all that away pretty easily in Deathproof and finally makes the “woman gets her revenge” movie that we all want to believe is inside other exploitation films. And he does it with such ease that it’s hard to tease out how he tweaked the formula so that the audience is unabashedly on the side of the good girls rather than the bad guy. (And they totally were—by the end of the film, the audience I saw it with was literally cheering and hollering the good girls on.) But thinking it over, there’s a couple of things he does to tip the scales. The first is to make the bad guy’s motivations rather blatant—he’s a hoary man who resents pretty young women for not giving up the sex that he feels entitled to. His sense of entitlement is portrayed as unfair and pathetic and contrasted negatively with the women, who are portrayed very firmly as existing for their own reasons and not just as sex objects. (Though the camera spends a lot of time lingering over their bodies, as this is an exploitation film and sexing up every frame is mandatory.)
The other thing he does is dismantles the strict dichotomy in these movies between the femmes who die and the tomboys who live. Carol Clover’s book Men, Women, and Chain Saws is basically the Bible on this, and she details out how slasher films will make huge distinctions between these two categories of women, especially how the femme group is sexual and the tomboy heroine is usually a virgin. Tarantino establishes the division, with there being a group of women who are sexy party time girls and a group who are Hollywood stunt women, but he spends the entire film subverting this dichotomy, mostly through dialogue.
The dead-on nature of all the details in both movies and in the fake trailers and commercials between them is almost worth a post in itself. Somehow Tarantino and Rodriguez pull off the hat trick of creating an entire fake drive-in movie theater experience, with the garbled dialogue from film strip damage, reel issues, and film decay problems all throughout the double feature without making these elements seem gratituous or pretentious. Plus, the fake trailers are worth the price of the ticket. Here’s hoping someone actually does make Machete. And the scene in Deathproof where they party down at the Texas Chili Parlor is almost too much like regular Austin life.
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anarchonisms
If that even WAS a typo, it’s the best typo ever.
———-MORE SPOILERS———–
I thought that Russell’s character was also different from the typical slasher movie in terms of how desperately weak he really was. Sure, all slashers getting revenged upon have a stagger moment when they convert from the predator to the prey, but Stuntman Mike was a huge baby. When he first pulls over to tend his widdle biddy shoulder wound, he’s crying his eyes out. If it weren’t for the way his character was introduced - as a cocky, self-assured ladies’ man able to talk a young woman into
MISSING COMMENT - THE MANAGEMENT APOLOGIZES
so I said, “Why yes, Zoe Bell, I will marry you.” And we lived happily ever after.
————-SPOILER ENDS———————–
Here’s hoping someone actually does make Machete.
Oh, and no matter how feminist-ally I may be, the best line (and its aftermath) in the whole production may just have been “Where are my wife and daughter?!?!”
(even more spoilers)
According to some reports, Machete is going to be made into a feature-length film although it looks like IMBD has categorized it as direct-to-video. I’m definitely getting it. Mexican revenge on anti-immigration crooked US senators?! By throwing machetes through them?? This is the movie I’ve been waiting for.
I have to agree, the last half of Death Proof was really mindblowingly amazing, not just because it was well done with the usual Tarantino flair for hot outfits and snappy dialogue, but because it felt like the delivery of a promise long overdue. Not just in a half-assed way; not with any equivocation, but a straight-up beatdown of a villainous predator on women. And yeah, I agree, along with many others I’ve talked to, that the unmasking of Stuntman Mike as a wimpy crybaby, his invincibility pierced by the mere FACT of resistance, was one of the defining and most satisfying moments of the film.
“You just fucked with the wrong Mexican!” was worth the price of admission all on it’s own.
And I’m really impressed with Kurt Russell for playing a character that subverts the entire image he’s built up over the years; as my friend said, “He’s the anti-Plisken”.
So are you or are you not saying that Tarantino is not a feminist filmmaker? He gives the kind of big fat juicy roles to women that 100 years of directors gave to men. Jackie Brown was a whole movie about a strong woman character breaking free of men. Kill Bill? That was a thinly veiled allegory about a woman going through several layers of hell to get custody of her daughter. Death Proof is a warning to directors that their sadists are sick and pathetic and don’t stand a chance unless they attack by surprise. Oh, and if my memory serves me well, the only T & A Tarantino has served up in any of these movies was 3 seconds of Bridgit Fonda’s butt.
But this weird long rant about Tarantino (I can’t speak as much about Rodriguez) is just bizarre. He is the most influential filmmaker of the past quarter century and for more than 10 years he has been turning out great films (Jackie Brown is actually the best of them) centered around strong female protagonists and marketed them to a traditional male demographic. They are as close to perfectly made films as they can be.
Assuming that these kinds of films are going to be made, and they are, they are as pro-feminist agenda as they can be while still being art and not preaching.
So instead of subtracting points, why not go see Death Proof and see Stuntman Mike as a perfect straw man: a man who feels entitled to kill women by terrorizing them because he is a complete coward himself and then gets what he deserves, yell Whoooo HOOOO with the rest of the audience and understand that it is an entertainment that happens to sneak your basic agenda before a crowd of 100 million that would otherwise never bother.
This movie was one of the most fun experiences I’ve ever had at the theatre. I’d recommend it to everyone.
I do love that Stuntman Mike, in opposition to most slasher villians, is essentially a Nice Guy(TM), in that he’s outwardly nice and even a bit charming (if kinda creepy), but inside he’s filled with misogyny and sexual resentment towards young women. He’s also a coward who crumples at the first sign of resistence on the part of his victims. When Stuntman Mike was bawling in his car after fleeing the women I was laughing so hard I could hardly breathe.
Most people I’ve talked to have saw Deathproof as the weaker of the two films, though. My brother and I have been the only two people I’ve known who’ve unequivocally loved it. While I admit that the movie dragged in places, being too wordy, and some people I know just don’t like car chases, maybe its the sort of issues that Amanda highlights that have made people dislike it. I’ve heard it derided as a “chick flick”, and that the movie was essentially “a bunch of dumb boring chicks talking about stuff I don’t care about”. One guy even said that Tarantino’s repeated use of strong women who get violent revenge is indicative that Tarantino has “issues”.
I thought Death Proof addressed the everyday, low key racism black people face every day with Rose McGowan’s comment about Julia looking like a “black man,” and Abernathy’s reaction to the car salesman’s “colored girl” line. I also love that Tarentino named the character Abernathy.
I thought Planet Terror was icky. There is a lot of pus in that movie.
Have not seen the movie, but Tarantino did a long interview with Esquire in March, as a lead-up to this movie being released. It’s interesting, even if you’ve obsessively researched him before, just for the art direction in the article.
You see this exploitation disguised as feminism in video games, too.
We’re not just talking about Tomb Raider and Lara Croft here; go all the way back to 1986, when the Metroid series started, and the lead character was not immediately apparent as female (huge armor suit and a gender-neutral/obscure name, Samus Aran.)
It seems nice to have a female lead character, but when you beat the game, the amount of clothes she takes off is directly proportional to how fast (double entendre?) you are. Really.
Fortunately she’s never nude, but you better be able to beat any game in the 20-year history of Metroid in 2-3 hours if you want to see her in a swimsuit.
Bearing in mind that I haven’t seen Grindhouse, I have a hard time accepting that Tarantino is an intentionally feminist filmmaker. I think he just likes to see kick-ass women on screen. Now by the standards of Hollywood, that’s feminist, but I see very little evidence that he buys into, let alone endorses, the wider feminist cause. For a start, his films are so introspective, so divorced from a wider social context (with the possible exception of Jackie Brown), that it’s hard to read any consistent politics into them.
More Spoilers…
The only part of Death Proof I was actually bothered by was the joking and unresolved way in which (Lee?)’s being left with the ethically suspect backwoods owner of the Challenger was handled. While I’m aware it’s a reference to any number of exploitation cliches, it didn’t play like a subversion. It played like a laughing-off of sexual assault, is how it played.
EL, I’m not going to cheapen the situation by unilaterally declaring him a “feminist filmmaker” or not. He is a director intrigued by and constantly drawn back to the tension between the urge towards feminism and the urge towards objectification and misogyny in exploitation films. I think he’s drawn more to the former and I think this movie was him finally feeling the confidence to do it right. Other than the minor quibble, I agree completely. I love how Tarantino subverts the stupid sector’s demands for misogyny.
When people mention they are skeptical of the idea that Tarantino might be deliberately feminist in his thinking, I can’t help but point out he dated Margaret Cho for awhile, which makes it all the harder for me to imagine he’s as ignorant of these analysises as people might think. Painting him as someone kind of dumbly obtuse to these issues doesn’t fly with me. He seems like he overthinks anything, why would he suddenly be like, “Heh, chicks with guns,” when it came to the centerpiece of many of his films?
I really enjoy Tarantino and Rodriguez flicks, but I was not sure whether I wanted to see Grindhouse. After this review, I’m sufficiently intrigued that I will have to see it eventually (small child= no too many movie nights).
Also the fact that each of his “feminist” movies gets tighter and more cohesive in its themes says to me that he’s thinking about these issues and improving on his ability to deal with them in each consecutive movie.
I will say that a lot of what he’s doing in terms of feminist themes flies completely under the radar if you don’t know the exploitation history he’s endlessly referencing.
Rob Zombie directed the trailer for Thanksgiving. When I saw it, one of the real trailers was for a remake of Halloween, directed by Rob Zombie. Just another sweet little dig at themselves.
I loved this movie, especially Death Proof. Not only did he subvert the genre totally, he put together the most badass chase scene in 25 years or more without wussing out by using CGI. And Zoe Bell’s stunt work on that car? Wow!
Here’s another vote for Machete! the movie.
Yeah, one of the things that stood out to me here is that a big majority of the movie is just the girls sitting around talking. It’s hard to really analyze this movie without mentioning that, IMO. Not sure if that’s a ‘feminist’ thing or even a good or bad thing. In most films it seems the meat of the movie is centered around action, and in the end you get a lot more talk that reveals the plot and brings the drama to an end. In this film it’s inverted. The end of the film is all action and no talk.
But it does seem that one of the reasons that ‘chick flicks’ are looked down upon is that is that drama/women talking is seen as less interesting than action/men blowing things up. That’s an oversimplification (and it could be true for most people- I’m still not sure about that), but it does seem like Tarantino is trying to see if he can get an audience interested in what the girls are saying and then use that to generate the emotional payoff at the end of the movie.
I thought Machete was funny at times, but wouldn’t want to see it made into a movie. A film where the hero is some kind of assassin of Senators-even in a strictly tongue in cheek fashion- was already wearing thing at the end of the preview.
I loved the sitting around talking bit, probably in no small part because the Texas Chili Parlor scene goes down exactly how nights like that go in Austin—drinks, old records, beer signs that are a million years old. The chili there is good, too. But seriously, who cares if they talk alot? It’s Tarantino—the talking is the best part. It might have been a subtly feminist jab at the blow-’em-up audience (the one that doesn’t bitch about how much Travolta and Jackson talked in Pulp Fiction), which would be cool.
I think that Tarantino is starting to get a grip with feminism, and I think that he is dealing with the issues, but from a man’s point of view. And like most men, he has a long way to go. Tarantino doesn’t make films that revolve around emotional epiphanies (chick flicks) because he either doesn’t understand them or they don’t interest him. Look what happened to Scorsese with The Age of Innocence. A masterpiece by a director who includes action. The movie is perfect in every respect, but it failed with Scorsese’s regular customers who want their drama with some violence. Heck, audiences wanting action goes back to Sophocles and Aeschylus. As much as I think that TAOI is a masterpiece, the emotional drain without the entertaining violence leaves me tired at the thought of watching it again.
Scorsese eventually tried TAOI and didn’t return to the genre (yet) and went back to his strengths, namely the destructive nature of violence in The Gangs of New York and The Departed and did his very best work. (I thought Goodfellas and Raging Bull great films, but Goodfellas inferior to Godfather II, it’s inspiration, and RB lacking in a character I liked.)
Tarantino is leading with his strength, action films. He understands and loves the genre. His first major contribution was dialog during the writing process and his second was letting the actors get it exactly right. (I’d say his third is editing, but Sally Menke is his career long editor. (And another woman, Thelma Schoonmaker is Scorsese’s editor since Raging Bull).)
I suspect that during Pulp Fiction, when working with Uma Thurman, he finally realized that he could get great performances out of women he had previously made Reservoir Dogs (and an unsurviving amateur film.) Reservoir Dogs didn’t even have a woman in a role. I think that he then realized that he could sell as original his tributes to his favorite films as new ideas if he had the central characters all be women.
Spielberg used to focus on teenager movies, Jaws, Close Encounters, E.T. but eventually grew up to make fantastic films aimed at adults. But Spielberg has always seemed to be a more fully formed human being than Tarantino. If Tarantino does grow up, watch out.
So what do you make of QT presumably casting himself (presumably–although maybe Roberto Rodriguez had to convince him to do it, but I doubt it) as the rapist soldier with the tentacle dick in Planet Terror?
I still feel that both Death PRoof and Kill Bill have this strange tension where women are only allowed to kick ass AFTER being subject to horrible fetishistic deprivations, essentially. Like, they have to be degraded utimately first, and their bodies have to be turned inot meat for male pleasure, before they are allowed to start kicking ass.
i came to the comments to say the same thing. it just made me feel icky. i would have loved it if we could’ve seen lee kick the car owner’s ass.
another thing that bugged me was that dr. cross, in planet terror, wasn’t the one who finally got revenge on her dirtbag husband - it was her daddy. very unsatisfying.
all in all, though, fucking awesome. i loved the trailer for ‘don’t’.
if you. are thinking. of going. into. this. house. DON’T!
oh, not to mention, grindhouse passed the mo movie measure spectacularly! loved the women just sitting around telling stories.
Bah. Way overrated. We got so bored by the Rodruigez flick we walked out without ever seeing the Tarantino one.
I don’t think it’s deep, Ethan. Tarantino always plays the part that is written so that the actor can suck balls. He was basically the only decent man in the second movie.
Ethan, considering that Deathproof is a commentary on movies that fit your description, I’d say your take is a tad off. See: My post. Where I point out that he remakes the revenge flick so it’s what we want it to be.
Bitter, there’s no doubt that the movies only play well to an audience that loves the genres. But that doesn’t make it overrated. I’m glad to see them shine without having to water down their obsessions to make bank with audiences that aren’t in on the joke.
i’m gonna be a snot and say actually eli roth did the thanksgiving trailer.
also, is anyone buying into the theory that the second half of death proof took place before the first half? i didn’t pay enough attention to his scar, i admit, so i’m not sure if there is anything to this idea or not. just curious.
(my comment re: thanksgiving was directed to stogoe, btw)
and ps, i really appreciate this post.
SO–o out of it.
thought Pulp Fiction was ugly, pointless unmitigated
warrantless violence…for its own sake.
so never watched Kill Bill(s) or like that
watched ‘My Big Fat Independent Movie’ as kinda funny
and finally understood that they we’re all spoofs
But there’s innit there enough of that nasty shit out there in real life
so as to render inuring all of us …to more….?
“Oh DO Shut-Up , Dr. wet-Blanket…do!”
[Funny : There’s a word for Tarantino’s films which covers like, ‘egregious’
‘pointless’ & ‘for its own sake’…couldn’t think of so googled it.
Here’s one result….totally spot on.
“‘Grindhouse’: An enthusiastic homage to the good old days of grimy …
Rodriguez revels in badness for its own sake. “Planet Terror” is intoxicated by
its own absurdity; it tries to raise incompetence to the level of craft, …
www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/06/arts/flik7.php”]
Guess they liked it too. Or not…didn’t look.
Done.
“…and RB lacking in a character I liked.)”
That’s kind of the point. Are there any likeable characters in Happiness?
It’s hard for me to see the anarchic, anti-authoritarian aspect of slasher films. The films themselves, being low budget, non-mainstream, maybe, but their themes, with the bad guys getting it in the end are far from anarchic.
And I’m not sure anarchy, as opposed to anti-authoritarianism, is feminist. Equality between men and women presupposes an established order (that includes, but is not limited to, equality between the sexes.) Is that what anarchy strives for? Has anarchy become synonymous with local, ie small, government?
Ethan says:
I have to disagree with that, at least in Death Proof:
****SPOILER****
In Death Proof the first set of women are not degraded or subjected to anything. They are ambushed and killed immediately. (other than Rose McGowan’s character, who is also killed fairly quickly). In the 2nd part of the movie the women start fighting him off immediately, and other than Zoe Bell, are more pissed than scared. There is none of that running away and tripping crap, there is at no point anyone cowering in fear, none of that. As soon as they get Bell to safety, they grab weapons and go get him.
Those women didn’t engage in any of the common slasher movie behaviors nor were they subjected to any of the common slasher movie degradations.
On the other hand, as far as Kill Bill goes, you can’t have a revenge movie without a reason for revenge.
Epi, you’re responding to the other meaning of the word “anarchy”, the one used by anti-equality people to discredit it and equate it with chaos. Anarchy, the political philosophy, advocates a world where there is no established hierarchy. It works on the theory that no person should have power over another.
Feminism is anarchic, all right. The established order is that some men have power over others and that men have power over women. Anarchy posits that this is wrong and that men should not have power over women. As for slasher flicks being anarchic, they are in the scenes where people are grabbing back power and protecting themselves instead of leaving it to the police, I suppose. I guess I meant that exploitation films in general tend towards themes celebrating anarchy, with outlaws and misfits being the heroes.
Whether or not the dissolution of power will lead to a peaceable society hasn’t been tested. I’m skeptical that we can get rid of all hierarchies, but again, it hasn’t even been tested.
Epistemology:
Anti-authoritarianism is an essential component of anarchism. I don’t understand why an established order is necessary for equality of the sexes. Anarchism has a long history of supporting women’s rights and equality (though not perfect, of course).
Oh shoot. Amanda made a much better answer while I was typing.
Ethan: I think QT played the soldier completely without sympathy in a stock situation that ended differently. Actors play the parts, and some are villains. And while we are at it, horror, schlock and action movies are not everyone’s cup of tea. They are violent and somewhat repulsive.
ugh, i dunno why i said dr. cross in my above comment - i meant dr. block. sorry!
stogoe:
Hate to be a bother, but Rob Zombie actually directed the trailer for “Werewolf Women of the S.S.” Eli Roth did the one for “Thanksgiving”.
“Epi, you’re responding to the other meaning of the word “anarchyâ€?, the one used by anti-equality people to discredit it and equate it with chaos. Anarchy, the political philosophy, advocates a world where there is no established hierarchy. It works on the theory that no person should have power over another.”
For an excellent, if fictional, exposition of anarchism as feminism read The Dispossessed.
Same here. I’ve never been to a movie with as much audience participation as this one. By the end of Deathproof the entire theater was booing and laughing at Stuntman Mike and roaring with applause when the women beat him down.
I want to think that what QT is doing is a subversion of the genre. But lately I’ve begun to doubt whether he thinks through these things all that deeply. He seems to be mimicking his favorite movies rather than subverting them or unpacking the issues in them. I love his films, but he seems to be a filmmaker without a point of view. I’ve just been very conflicted about QT lately; I do want to believe that behind his tributes is a whole lot of serious consideration of messages and themes of genre flicks, but somehow I can’t be sure that’s what is going on with him. In Death Proof, we have the unresolved Lee situation - is QT laughing off a potential rape, or is he poking fun at genre flicks’ (and the audiences’) stereotypes of “backwoods” men that make us read this character as a rapist? And there is something almost fetishistic about the way he films the girls’ death scenes that doesn’t have the gross-out “I can’t believe this shit!” factor that made Rodriguez’s exploding heads funny. I get that Rodgriguez is trying to bring it, while QT is going for a more somber mood, but there is still something deeply unpleasant about it.
And the dialogue here is just not up to QT’s standards. Most of Pulp Fiction was also just people shooting the shit. But they talked about things that were interesting and were said in interesting ways. The only line from Death Proof that I still remember is “Whatever with your however.” So I’m also in the camp that liked Rodriguez’s contribution much more than QT’s.
Amanda:
If there is a time when we live without hierarchies (or minimal or shifting ones), it won’t be a reversion to our more primitive days. Our own past, and the more primitive societies of the animal world, are both littered with harsh hierarchies.
More likely, the empowerment of the underprivileged will require, not anarchy, as you explain it, but hierarchies more wise and benign than we’ve seen.
I saw Grindhouse on a double (or technically a triple) bill at a drive-in theater over in Shelton, Washington. I figured it would be a perfect match. “300″ was the opening movie. I couldn’t help but think “Manowar” and their devoted and buffed fans were fighting the Persians. Talk talk talk. Kill Kill kill. solo. Kill some more. Bridge. Verse. Chorus. Outro.
The drive-in experience enhanced Grindhouse quite a bit I swore I was going to see commercials for Grizzly! , “Laserblast”, or “Eat My Dust”. Ah the nights at the drive-in in the 70s. Good times.
I busted a gut when Sybil Danning appeared to star in the ‘trailer’ of “Werewolf Women of the SS”. Last time I saw her was when she did a self parody with Leanna Quigley on a Rhonda “Up All Night” skit on USA network.
Ever heard of “Faster pussycat, kill kill kill?”
Elena, he can have a unfeminist moment without that derailing the entire theme of the movie. It cheapens things to put things to an ideological purity test. This isn’t the Bible-as-viewed-by-fundamentalists—one contradiction doesn’t make the whole thing fall apart.
For what it’s worth, I think he had to get rid of Lee for the last scenes, and he got lazy and sent her off with a cheap joke instead of wasting time disposing of her. He didn’t have any good choices there, since not having the character at all would have made the dialogue lose a lot of punch.
No, Summerisle. As you can tell from my post, I think that this is the first exploitation film ever made. Interestingly, one of the characters in the movie wears a Faster Pussycat shirt throughout.
SPOILERS!!!!!!
The first guy I talked to about this movie (not the 5 I went to see it with) Said
“I thought it kindof sucked that Kurt Russel went out like such a punk.”
Which I think sums up pretty well why some people aren’t gonna like this movie. Because deep down they want him to win, and they sympathize with him, so they are certainly not going to like the way it ends.
Personally the final scene of the movie was the first time in a long time where I got to watch a movie and be proud to be a woman. I’ve been itching to see that kind of revenge for years.
Also, I disagree that the dialog was uninteresting. I was so entertained, but then, I’m a girl, and those conversations are just like the conversations I have with my friends. “You know what happens to people who carry knives? Mother**** get Shot!” Hilarity. It felt real to me, not like a lot of dialog in “chick flicks” even where it seems contrived and overly emotional a lot of the time. Maybe I jsut like it because it reminded me of my friends, but I still liked it!
I thought one big problem with Deathproof was that Kurt Russell was portrayed in an inconsistent way. He crys like a baby when he gets shot in the arm and when the girls beat him. But he is able to ram a car at about 100 miles an hour and still not be afraid. Didn’t he fear the pain he would feel after crashing into them. After all he supposedly did get injured fairly badly during the first crash. Plus he has a scar on his face so its not like he never had to deal with pain. Or was he just a crybaby because he was no longer in control?
assman -
>Or was he just a crybaby because he was no longer in control?
Exactly.
Amanda, I love you. This is the exact kind of dialogue I love getting into after watching genre films. I posted a link to your review on a movie discussion list that I belong to and have already made one convert to your website–a male one, to boot!
“Didn’t he fear the pain he would feel after crashing into them. After all he supposedly did get injured fairly badly during the first crash. Plus he has a scar on his face so its not like he never had to deal with pain. Or was he just a crybaby because he was no longer in control?”
It’s explicitly described in the dialogue that Stuntman Mike uses his car as a phallus proxy. His Death-Proof hot rod is his armor, and the little weak fleshy thing inside is the vulnerable part. So it made perfect sense that once his perfect “control” of the weaponized phallus is challenged, he’d suddenly be reminded that his real body is still subject to real pain and weakness. Not inconsistent at all.
Like the creepy texas sheriff’s monolouge says, He needs the car in order to shoot his goo.
Kurt Russell was awesomely cast- he’s got those twinkly blue KRrraazy eyes.
I didn’t get into deathproof until the second half, after he’s killed off the first set of women.
I thought it was funny- Abernathy spends most of her lines talking about not having sex, and just holding hands, and she has a unicorn on her shirt, and then it turns out she actually has a baby.
During the whole chase scene at the end, i did keep thinking “dude, what about the girl they left with the “ethicly suspect” (good line) car guy” and “what are they gonna do? that car is trashed! are they gonna have to buy it? are they just gonna leave that other girl with the crazy redneck?”
-and then, after rosario dawson gets done breaking mike’s neck and they all jump up in the air and THE END flashes on the screen, i realize that this is tarintino, and I am just asking stupid questions.
That being said, I really liked Planet Terror better- it was just plain more fun, without all the creepyness. Tarintino really needs to stop doing cameos. I know that will never happen, but frankly, i don’t need more opportunities to think “oh, look, it’s quentin tarintino being creepy again.”
I had the same thought at first. But the thing is, when the women are killed in the first half of the movie, they’re ripped to shreds in an extremely gruesome and violent way. Tarantino even replays the crash four times so we can see each woman’s death close up and in slow motion. But when the women kill Stuntman Mike at the end, it’s cartoon violence. They’re giving him these big punches and his head is flying back and there are cartoony sounds when they hit him and the way it’s edited reminded me of comic books. Why wasn’t his death depicted in a similarly violent and gruesome manner?
(P.S. I liked the movie.)
“…the money-spending teenage male audience who wants to see the perky cheerleaders pay for the high crime of making them feel the vulnerability of lust…”
Once again, you grossly overestimate the complexity of the male libido. The money-spending teenage male audience simply came to see some gore, and would like to get some bare tit into the bargain. In the scenario you describe, the filmmaker discharges his duty with a single stroke. Zat simple.
[…] Oh, and Pandagon has a really interesting feminist take on parodies of exploitation films. […]
i would think that guys would be interested in how ‘girls’ (women) really talk with each other. Couldn’t say how accurate it (Deathproof) really is, but it was damned entertaining. And i think it’s pretty clear that Zoe Bell is a MOVIE STAR!!
Raging red: exactly! The way that death scene was edited made me feel uncomfortable and you just summed up why perfectly.
There’s no arguing with the fact that QT has strong female characters. But he is a fanboy and that keeps him from really getting it right. He might dress Uma in sneakers and a yellow jump suit instead of a more typical skin-tight shirt and tiny shorts a la Lara Croft, but he will still show a female body being ripped to shreds just for the fanboyish love of gore. I typically don’t mind his missteps because the good usually outweighs the bad in his films, but I wouldn’t go as far as call him a feminist.
“But when the women kill Stuntman Mike at the end, it’s cartoon violence. They’re giving him these big punches and his head is flying back and there are cartoony sounds when they hit him and the way it’s edited reminded me of comic books. Why wasn’t his death depicted in a similarly violent and gruesome manner?”
Maybe because Tarantino wanted his viewer to laugh, enjoy and feel joy for the violent revenge of the girls at the end of the movie but in contrast feel the horror, violence and disgust for the violent way in which the first group of girls is killed. You can laugh at what the girls do to Mike but not at what Stuntman Mike does to the first group of girls.
That’s a good explanation.
Anarcha-feminism: www.anarcha.org
[…] http://pandagon.net/2007/04/15/thats-why-its-called-go-go-not-cry-cry/ […]
I enjoyed Grindhouse very much, but I thought that from a narrative/cinematic point of view, QT just became really self-indulgent when piling on the dialogue. I know he’s all about the dialogue, and have enjoyed it in his other films, but did we really need an 8 minute long sequence explaining Julia’s lapdance trick on Butterfly (complete with pointless random friend acting it out) or 15 minutes of arguing over whether Zoe should do the half mast? I exaggerate, but the dialogue could have been just as revealing, real, and witty if it had been cut down by half.
Also, some of the clumsy exposition should have been smoothed over (Zoe asking, apropos of nothing, “do you still carry Roscoe?”) and some of the dead-end threads should have been minimized (why so much attention to Julia’s text messaging, when it results in nothing?).
And whereas Rodriguez used the missing reel joke in an incredibly hilarious way, QT only used it to tweak viewers who were wanting to see a lapdance… instead of a comment on story structure, it becomes a psyche-out.
I also thought the dangling thread of Lee with Jasper was annoying. I waited until the end of the credits to see if we would find out what happened to her, but no such luck.
Anyway, I’m not critiquing from a feminist viewpoint, just as a moviegoer who likes well-paced screenplays. So I guess I’m actually off-topic here…
Grindhouse
p.. In case you’ve been under a rock, and for, I suppose, posterity, this is the deal with Grindhouse: it’s a “double feature” of two films, Robert Rodriguez’s “Planet Terror” and Quentin Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” with fake trailers at…