Planet Terror
October 15th, 2007
It’s one of the profound mysteries of the movie year 2007: why, exactly, did critics embrace Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof the way they did while dismissing the far superior Robert Rodriguez half of Grindhouse out of hand? I could go on about this, but instead of expounding on the comparative joys of Planet Terror yet again, I’ve decided to join the Close-Up Blog-a-thon underway at The House Next Door and post a number of dramatic close-ups that perfectly illustrate just how much fun Rodriguez is having with the Grindhouse concept. The DVD of Planet Terror, severed from its insufferably pretentious twin, is available tomorrow.
Planet Terror. Robert Rodriguez, 2007. ****
Cleopatra, Sith, Death Proof
April 10th, 2007
Prompted by the grand finale of Rome, we took another look at Cleopatra, which is one of those movies I can rewatch every few years. Compare-and-contrast is a fun enough game, and Marcy, who was never entirely sure which of the HBO characters were fictional, was entertained by noting differences in motivation and plot. Every frame of Cleopatra must have cost more than an entire episode of Rome, but the storytelling is much more contemporary on HBO. The movie nearly bankrupted Fox because it was designed to trump TV by outspending it. Forty years later, it has been shown up by… a TV show. But the images are still twice as wide, and the characters twice as grand.
Here’s what fascinated me, though: the palatial sets, outlandish backdrops, and outsized drama of Cleopatra resemble another, much more recent epic about larger-than-life figures. Along with forties serials, The Hidden Fortress, Ray Harryhausen and all the other usual suspects, there is no doubt that the Cinemascope epics of the fifties and sixties, and specifically Cleopatra, served as a blueprint for the Star Wars films. Archetypes in ever-morphing hairdos and caped costumes acting out eternal tragedies and reciting awkward, overwritten lines of dialogue — especially Revenge of the Sith, the episode in which the galactic shit hits the fan, is the spiritual and cinematic heir of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s four-and-a-half-hour epic.
Read on for more about Star Wars, Grindhouse, and why Jar-Jar Binks is cooler than Stuntman Mike. Also, lots more screenshots.
Grindhouse
March 31st, 2007
My review of Grindhouse is up.
In short: come for Planet Terror (****), get the hell out before Death Proof (*)
Grindhouse. Robert Rodriguez, Eli Roth, Quentin Tarantino, Edgar Wright, Rob Zombie, 2007. **
From Dusk till Dawn
March 19th, 2006
I’ll happily confess to renting this because I once came across Salma Hayek’s Satanico Pandemonium snake dance on late night TV. Should have left it at that though–the rest is trash. QT and Rodriguez are a bunch of hacks. Hacks with hustle, I give them that. Tarantino’s main mode of operation is still the assertion of authority (he probably thinks of it as the projection of cool.) The essential Tarantino scene, which repeats again and again in all of his movies, is one badass motherfucker telling the rest of the bitches to shut the fuck up, or sit the fuck down, or do whatever the fuck he says. Usually, this requires waving a .45 around, and I’m bored to tears with it. From Dusk till Dawn is a mildly satisfying B-picture, but QT’s presence as actor hurts, the script is worse than idiotic, the sfx look circa 1982, and who wants to see Clooney with tatoos? Marcy also raises a good point when she says that Debra Paget’s snake dance in The Indian Tomb is every bit as sexy. Hmm, I see a trend here: otherwise crap movies that try to get by on snake dances.
