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MORE GRINDHOUSE
Below, Nick Dawson tells us about 11 new Grindhouse clips online. While he was posting that, I was reading some of the early word on the film.
Jeffrey Wells is mixed on the Rodriguez, but he really digs the Tarantino:
Take away the car-chase finale and the Tarantino flick is almost all sublime, groovy-chick dialogue. This is Tarantino amblin’ country, all right — a place where very cool people (i.e., ’70s “street” archetypes) talk and talk and say it just right while sipping a Corona or smoking a Red Apple cigarette or eating a Big Kahuna burger. And yet Death Proof is not, to put it mildly, concerned with notions of unity. It’s a scattershot thing that’s basically two short films in one. Two separate moods or tones and two separate female ensembles linked by Kurt Russell’s “Stuntman Mike” character.
It starts out as a cruising-chicks-in-a-muscle-car movie, then it turns into a hanging-around-an-Austin-juke-joint, Eugene ONeil/The Iceman Cometh piece with Stuntman Mike putting the zen moves on a Hispanic hottie (Vanessa Ferlito) as her friends (Sydney Tamiia Poitier and I forget who else — the press notes should have photos to go with the cast bios) offer snappy commentary. Then it suddenly shifts into a supernatural-psycho-killer-after-hot-girls movie ending in a major wipe-out/head-on collision sequence (with individual death-and-dismember- ment shots thrown in), and then finally a hot-chicks-get-even film ending with that balls-out country car-chase.
It’s a foxy, half-crazy, smirky B-movie wallow with nary a thought or a theme of any kind, but it’s a complete fuck-all pleasure to just rock and ride along with, and the car-chase finale (the star of which is New Zealand stuntwoman Zoe Bell, who stunt-dubbed for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill) is the absolute shit.
And over at Ain’t It Cool, the estimable Neill Cumpston writes the “only Grindhouse review you ever nead to read.”
An excerpt:
First off, the movie lets you know you’re going to get your poop kicked out of you, formed into a set of brass knuckles, and now here comes a poop-punch….
First 300 and now this? I think the summer of 2007 just went, “Hey, let me take you to a free taquito buffet” and you eat all these taquitos and then the summer goes, “Here comes a foot to your stomach”, but you go, “It’s full of taquitos” but it’s too late – there’s a boot in your stomach only the boot is really a motorcycle and you puke up a bikini girl who blows you and then kills your boss with a hammer.
That’s what Grindhouse is. It’s a taquito buffet that you puke up after getting hit with a motorcycle, and it turns into a bikini chick that blows you and kills your boss with a hammer.
Rodriguez and Tarantino probably don’t read this site, but someone should tell them they can use that last paragraph as a quick blurb.
