Grindhouse, 4/4.

"From first rude frame to lascivious last, Grindhouse guns to be the last word in fanboy fetishism," writes Nathan Lee in the Voice. "Where Rodriguez does grindhouse more or less straight up, Tarantino takes greater license with Death Proof - which is to say the tradition he's elaborating on is the Tarantino Movie." Both "aim for nothing more noble than to freak the funk, and it's about goddamn time. Go wasted, go stoned, go without your parents' permission. In paying homage to an obsolete form of movie culture, Grindhouse delivers a dropkick to ours."

Updated through 4/9.

"Carried along by a current of crude energy and gory élan that rarely lets up, Planet Terror gets the audience worked up into such a frenzy that you start to wonder how Tarantino can possibly top it," writes Scott Foundas in the City Pages and elsewhere. "But one of the surprises of Death Proof is that he doesn't even try. Rather, he mellows the mood with a thoroughly unpredictable road movie in which long, laconic passages of cheerleader-movie-style girl-bonding give way to sudden bouts of vehicular manslaughter and an orgiastic tribute to tough, kick-ass babes."

"I'm almost surprised that Tarantino and Rodriguez didn't convince their patrons, Harvey and Bob Weinstein, to coat the floors of the theaters themselves with the very special shoe-sole-sticking gunk that was an unavoidable aspect of the real grindhouse experience," writes Premiere's Glenn Kenny. "Death Proof offers 'thrills' that are deeply unpleasant and deeply unwholesome, and it's here that Grindhouse comes closest to achieving the 'climate of perdition' that another surrealist critic, Robert Benayoun termed the hallmark of 'authentic sadistic cinema.' A lot of people associate a taste for grindhouse movies with the tiresome condescension of the 'so-bad-it's-good' ethos, but Tarantino understands the aesthetics of aberrance that animated the explorations of so-called trash hounds."

For Rolling Stone, Gavin Edwards interviews each of the trailer-makers.

Updates: Online viewing tip. Vanity Fair posts video from the photo shoot for the May issue: "Rose McGowan, Rosario Dawson, Marley Shelton and the rest of the Grindhouse Girls strut their ample stuff for photographer Patrick Demarchelier." Safe for work, but you'll probably feel silly if anyone catches you watching.

ScreenGrab's Top 10 this week: "Chicks with Guns," Parts 1 and 2.

Updates, 4/5: Austin Chronicle editor Louis Black considers audiences' varied reactions to the several editions of QT Fest that have unreeled in Austin over the years, gets the money quote out of the way - "Tarantino and Rodriguez have made not only two truly great movies but also probably the two most across-the-board acceptable in the history of grind houses" - and then reviews some of his most enjoyable experiences in inner city movie theaters: "The overriding attraction of all these films is their remarkable energy and unrelenting imaginations, a straight-ahead, pedal-to-the-metal construction, no matter how strange the narrative or unskilled the cast. This was the cinema of possibilities."

Also, Mark Savlov talks with Rodriguez about Planet Terror.

When Scott Foundas proposed to Tarantino and Rodriguez that the LA Weekly convene "a kind of roundtable with a few favorite grindhouse veterans, little did I imagine the historic meeting - or, to quote Tarantino, summit - that was about to transpire. Only too happy to answer our call were Richard Rush, who began his career with the classic biker movies The Savage Seven and Hell's Angels on Wheels; Bob Clark, who directed the 1970s creep-outs Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things and Black Christmas before going on to create the Porky's franchise; and the British-born Brian Trenchard-Smith, whose résumé ranges from directing Steve Railsback in the cult classic Escape 2000 to latter-day entries in the Leprechaun and Omega Code franchises. Joining them would be three alumni of the Roger Corman dream factory: Allan Arkush (Hollywood Boulevard, Rock 'n' Roll High School), George Armitage (Private Duty Nurses, Vigilante Force) and Lewis Teague (The Lady in Red, Alligator)."

Also: Scott Foundas's "guide to the best of the rest of [Tarantino's] grindhouse fest" at the New Beverly Cinema in LA.

"The only real knock on Death Proof is that it's, well, too good of a movie to really fit into the exploitation genre," writes Ross Moroz in the Vue Weekly. "But after Planet Terror, which suffers from the opposite problem (sacrificing plot, acting, dialogue, et al to better serve the genre), Death Proof is a revelation, and is one of Tarantino's most genuinely enjoyable pictures."

"There's no way around this film's junky, self-annihilating compulsiveness except to meet it head-on, call it crap and defy it.... Grindhouse's frenzy of vengeance indicts all of American pop culture. It's an Abu Ghraib action extravaganza." Who else? Armond White in the New York Press.

Gavin Edwards's piece on the trailers for Rolling Stone has been duly noted, but have you seen that cover? Cinematical's Erik Davis has: "Not only does it objectify women and promote violence, but it also makes you really want to see Grindhouse this weekend." RS offers a video extra to boot, plus excerpt from the cover story, and of course, Peter Travers's 3½-out-of-4-stars review.

Cinematical has a review of its own as well. Nick Schager: "Rodriguez goes for full-blooded faithfulness, Tarantino goes for genre analysis and reconfiguration, and the results are, ultimately, about as coherent and fulfilling as a typical grindhouse double-feature."

The Hollywood Reporter's Gregg Kilday considers this weekend's box office prospects: "Precedents look to put the movie in the low- to mid-$20 million range."

Brian Orndorf at Hollywood Bitchslap: "Grindhouse is as pure a theatrical experience as they could possibly make in today's in-and-get-out marketplace. It's a heavily stylized, volatile, atomic sensory shockwave that is so hip and ice cool, you'll need to visit MySpace just to bring your overall awesome back down to a manageable level."

"Planet Terror is a visual, technical, emotional failure," writes Jeff GP at the Six-Reel Shuffle. "It fancies itself a non-stop, heart-pounding romp, but is a self-satisfied bore."

Glenn Kenny is reminded of a precedent: Stanley Donen's Movie Movie, "no masterpiece but an enjoyable confection," was also a two-for-one package, "fake trailers and all."

David Poland: "The first, Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror is, to a great extent, shit. The second, Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof is, to a great extent, The Shit."

Updates, 4/6: AO Scott finds the "essence of Grindhouse in a scene in Death Proof in which two "vintage American muscle cars" pull onto a highway "full of late-model minivans, SUVs and family sedans.... Grindhouse, soaked in bloody nostalgia for the cheesy, disreputable pleasures of an older form of movie entertainment, can also be seen as a passionate protest against the present state of the entertainment industry. Those Detroit relics, modified with loving care in someone's garage or backyard, may waste gas and burn oil, but they seem to have an individuality - a soul - that the homogeneous new vehicles, with their GPS and their cruise control, their computer chips and their air bags, can never hope to match."

"What will get lost in all the ballyhoo about the correctness of the term's use, the length of the two movies together (after cuts, the film comes to about three hours and 10 minutes) as a marketing impediment, the level of its financial success, and whether or not Tarantino's film represents a aesthetically regressive move is the actual nature of Tarantino's achievement," predicts DK Holm at Quick Stop Entertainment - and you may remember, Doug's written Quentin Tarantino for the Pocket Essentials series. "[T]he level of the mimicry doesn't end just in its overexposed shots or the chick banter. Tarantino has gone on to conceive of a plot that is just as odd as some of the better more experimental 70s drive in films."

"For the most part, Rodriguez chooses to reproduce the effect, rather than the particulars, of those old films. He cranks everything up to 11," writes Andy Klein in the LA CityBeat. "I preferred Death Proof, partly because it's designed as an homage to stunt people in general and to Zoe Bell in particular.... Tarantino seems to have designed the whole film to shout, 'Hey! This is my pal Zoe! Isn't she fuckin' awesome?' Well, yes, she is."

Martin Tsai in the Stranger: "Ultimately those "Prevues of Coming Attractions" steal the show from the two feature-length main programs, especially the one by Shaun of the Dead director [Edgar] Wright for the phony movie Don't."

"[W]hat truly makes the contemporary taste for grindhouse movies worth considering is how often the progress of film as an art form depends on the re-evaluation of stuff that was considered junk in a previous era," writes the Oregonian's Shawn Levy:

Just as Edgar Allan Poe and Gustave Flaubert made high art out of penny dreadfuls and cheap romances, respectively, the low genres on display at the grindhouse have inspired young filmmakers to make great aesthetic leaps forward for decades....

With a combination of foreign exoticism and exploitative vitality, films like Breathless and Shoot the Piano Player led hip young American audiences to reconsider the second-tier American films of an earlier era.

Among those audiences were young men who would go on to invigorate the mainstream Hollywood cinema with a double shot of global art and Hollywood pulp, directors such as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Brian De Palma, George Lucas and Francis Ford Coppola. Their earliest films - Mean Streets, Duel, Sisters and, yes, Star Wars - felt like old Hollywood make-work gussied up into something vital with new techniques and attitudes.

"Lovingly made and yet lazy in its reinvention, it's as if the duo thought straight homage was edgy enough to withstand the dulling down that happens when so-called cult cinema is spoon-fed to audiences as a market-tested wide release," writes Aaron Hillis for the Reeler. "Grindhouse is compelling enough to play for over three hours without sagging, but it's not the mind-blowing ride it presents itself to be. Frankly, its affected mean-spiritedness is inexcusably tame, especially when compared to the lurid rarities programmed at each QT Fest."

Dana Stevens for Slate: "Death Proof is a reminder of what there was to like about Tarantino in the first place: his uncanny ear for dialogue that's at once naturalistic and deliriously wordy, his kinetic action sequences, and his voracious love for cinema in all its incarnations, especially the sleazy ones. With its lean 90-minute running time and a near-complete absence of CGI, Death Proof feels like an experiment in austerity after more than a decade in which Tarantino had free run of the special-effects candy store. And it works fabulously, much to the surprise of this generally Tarantino-weary writer." Then: "Planet Terror, Rodriguez's feature contribution, is 10 minutes shorter than Death Proof, but it feels 20 minutes longer."

"The Rodriguez segment is terrific and shows a director in complete control of tone, image and story," writes the San Francisco Chronicle's Mick LaSalle. "The Tarantino, by contrast, has flashes of interest and eventually achieves a certain visceral impact, but it's long-winded and juvenile, the work of a director who hasn't grown and, what's more, seems afraid to try."

The Washington Post's Stephen Hunter on Planet Terror: "Okay, here's what you get for your entertainment buck: lots of folks being shredded, atomized, liquefied, splattered, Cuisinarted or otherwise deconstructed by gunfire. Lots of folks." And: "Tarantino's Death Proof is so narratively simplistic that to describe it is to ruin it. Let's just say it's a car-chase movie fused with a women's acting workshop and leave it at that."

"[W]hile some of the ineptitude in Planet Terror is obviously affected - the camera swaying as a door slams, the jumbled close-ups that disorientingly lead into a scene - it strikes me, looking back over [Rodriguez's] career, that his imitation of a graceless, bludgeoning hack is remarkably similar to, well, Robert Rodriguez working at full tilt," writes Nick Pinkerton at Stop Smiling. "If [Tarantino's] B-side Death Proof had been released on its own, it would have accounted for some of the most taut, toe-tapping, and consummately enjoyable filmmaking of Tarantino's career - but it seems that a slim, streamlined model like that wouldn't suffice to meet perceived expectations of Quentin's showboat sensationalism, hence Grindhouse."

"[I]t's an exploitation bonanza in which the most effectively exploited element is the marketing concept," writes Dennis Lim in the Los Angeles Times:

Planet Terror is especially disappointing given that zombie movies, even at their trashiest, are rarely ever dumb - if anything, since they basically dramatize the return of the repressed, they often serve as ready-made sociopolitical allegories.... The recent wave of zombie movies has encompassed a variety of approaches: the paranoid urgency of 28 Days Later, the stoned humor of Shaun of the Dead, the anti-Bush sting of George Romero's Land of the Dead and Joe Dante's Homecoming. Rodriguez's movie will be remembered as the one with the jar of pickled testicles.

[...]

Straightforward as it seems, Death Proof is one of Tarantino's most peculiar films: at once controlled and indulgent, derivative and unique. In refining the language of homage, this singular filmmaker has made his most original movie since Pulp Fiction.

Also in the LAT, Kevin Thomas recalls watching B-movies in LA's movie palaces.

"Explosions, car chases, women cavorting in skirts the size of hankies: Planet Terror packs it all in, but even though the movie may seems haphazard on the surface, it was clearly made with a Zen master's meticulousness," writes Salon's Stephanie Zacharek. But Death Proof is "more exhilarating, and in its perverse, twisted way, more elegiac."

Planet Terror's "muscular compositions evince the wit and sophistication of early John Carpenter - in essence, this is Assault on Precinct 13 with the hungry undead in lieu of pissed-off gangbangers," writes Mike D'Angelo at Nerve. As for Death Proof, "Some will complain that Tarantino overindulges his yen for profanely digressive conversation - not to mention his foot fetish - but the abrupt shifts from mundane to mayhem are calibrated with a sadistic precision worthy of Hitchcock at his most playful. This is the director's most formally audacious work since Pulp Fiction, and arguably his finest."

"[G]rindhouse theaters were nasty places, full of nasty people, and most of us wouldn't be caught dead in one." Grady Hendrix, writing for Slate, is not buying into the nostalgia. "Exploitation movies were like layers of grit wrapped around a few minutes of 'the good stuff' - full-frontal childbirth, the flaccid genitals of middle-aged sun worshippers, a woman being scalped.... 'Crap + 20 Years = Art,' however. The affection people have today for exploitation movies is misplaced, because these movies stink."

Updates, 4/7: "Rodriguez has more plot ideas than time or interest to do all of them justice," writes Time's Richard Corliss. "Planet Terror is less a remake of grindhouse movies than Rodriguez's light-hearted spinoff of his 2005 Sin City; the gravity of that superb multi-story narrative gives way to this entertaining stew of attitudes and effects." But Death Proof "doesn't show me much innovation, or much fidelity to the old grindhouse tropes." And in general: "You won't find sex, or even the aura of sexuality, in films by the current generation of pop-referencing auteurs. They swarm all over the violence in 60s - 70s grindhouse movies but are squeamish in showing the eroticism that once was crucial to the genre."

LVJeff opens the discussion among the Cinemarati.

The Philadelphia Inquirer's Steven Rea talks with Tarantino and Rodriguez.

At Hollywood Bitchslap: Peter Sobczynski ("A Grade-A Celebration Of A Grade-Z Art Form"), the Ulimate Dancing Machine ("There’s a KILLDOZER reference. Therefore, it rocks."), Dawn Taylor (Who doesn't love muscle cars, hot chicks and pus-spewing zombies?") and Rob Gonsalves ("Lower your expectations a bit.").

"The immensely talented writer/director Quentin Tarantino deserves no accolades for making a stand-alone movie," writes Jeff GP at the Six-Reel Shuffle. "He should receive praise for making a thrilling, exuberant, visually stunning and often elegantly paced movie."

"[A]s often as female characters in grindhouse films ended to end up on meathooks or on their back (or both), the genre served up some of the toughest, meanest, righteous, resourceful ladies to ever grace the screen (Switchblade Sisters, re-released a few years back by Tarantino himself, is a prime example)," writes Dan Mucha at Facets Features. "The girls of Grindhouse are kicking ass and taking names, and you better hope you are not on the list!"

Roundtable: Four Cinematical writers discuss. Plus, a full-blown review from Jette Kernion.

"Grindhouse is mightily enjoyable, but it's never quite delivers the gluttonous gratification we'd guess directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, who slap each other heartily on the back throughout, felt while making the film," writes Alison Willmore at the IFC Blog.

"I cannot help but wonder how far we can push post-modernity and ironic viewership until it deflates into itself," writes Drew Morton at Dr Mabuse's Kaleido-Scope, where he gives Grindhouse a B-.

The Boston Globe's Ty Burr: "To my mind, Death Proof has lower lows but much higher highs - where Rodriguez is happy to play in the fields of genre pastiche, his partner just can't help making a Quentin Tarantino movie."

"Unlikely to be duplicated in this manner on home video formats, Grindhouse is a theatrical must-see for any serious genre film buff," writes Jim Tudor at Twitch.

Online viewing tip. Via Brendon Connelly, Rodriguez and Tarantino on Charlie Rose (after Lawrence Wright).

Online listening tip. And now Rodriguez, too, is a guest on The Treatment.

Robert La Franco talks with Rodriguez for Wired.

"The closest approximations to the kinds of stuff I actually saw on 42nd Street back during those years is to be found in the hilarious previews by Robert Rodriguez, Edgar Wright and Rob Zombie," writes Peter Nellhaus.

"As a bit of a film geek fascinated by the moviegoing experience, I enjoyed the film's unabashed nostalgia for the tawdry pleasures watching these movies offered," writes Chuck Tryon. At the same time, "Given that Reservoir Dogs is now fifteen (!) years old, I'm starting to find myself becoming nostalgic for the moviegoing pleasures of the early 1990s and the excitement that Tarantino's earliest films offered."

Updates, 4/9: "[W]hen you watch Terminator or Star Wars, or the recent Frank Miller adaptations, Sin City and 300, you're seeing B-movies dolled up in the glad rags of an A-feature," writes Ryan Gilbey, who explains to Observer readers why Britain never really saw anything quite like the American grindhouse experience. Further down that same page: "Philip French's top-five B-movies."

Also, Henry Cabot Beck: "In spite of all the blood and goo, Planet Terror is a good-natured romp, witty and nasty, as only the best movies in this genre are, bringing to mind the classic Re-Animator (1985), and Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series.... Death Proof's best feature is Kurt Russell, who takes the smiling Burt Reynolds character from chase movies like Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and twists the charm into giggling menace. His comeuppance is a crowd pleaser."

Devin Gordon talks with Tarantino for Newsweek.

So the movie opened this weekend and was beaten at the box office by Blades of Glory, Meet the Robinsons and Are We Done Yet?. David Poland challenges his readers: Answer the question, "What went wrong with Grindhouse?" in 25 words or less.

In Planet Terror, "McGowan edges out Uma Thurman in Kill Bill as the ultimate abused-and-fetishized action-movie femme," notes New York's David Edelstein. At the same time, "It's always a trip to watch exploitation auteurs ogle their female characters while those ladies are busy nailing male voyeurs." As for Death Proof, it's "a small masterpiece, dredged up from the psyche of a movie freak who loves women onscreen almost as much as he loves to punish women onscreen, and who (this is what makes him an artist) gets off most on his own ambivalence."

"Embracing trash is a way of not giving a damn about feelings or art or anything else except craft," declares David Denby in the New Yorker. "Tarantino and Rodriguez aren't going against the flow; they're trying to get ahead of the flow. What they'd like, of course, is to bring to their version of trash that extra touch of madness which turns exploitation into wit.... The two men love movies, love movie culture, love audiences, but how can you accept a love that expresses itself obsessively with an assault on the human body?"

"Something funny happened at the showing in Sherman Oaks," writes Jerry Lentz. "After Planet Terror ended half the audience got up and left! I guess they thought it was over? Of they just didn't get it."

"Top Reasons Grindhouse Bombed." Mark Bell has six at Film Threat.

More from Variety's Anne Thompson.

Posted by dwhudson at April 4, 2007 6:24 AM