Movies can achieve many things – they can wrap a warm blanket of comfort around you, they can help you escape, they can enable you to see things you would never have dreamt of seeing, they can open up large vistas of new ideas and experiences, they can take you back to a time when life was better and more simple, they can recreate the feelings of a happier time of life….
They do different things for different people, and in some cases such experiences and feelings lead an individual into a career in the cinema. Quentin Tarantino is one such person – the Pulp Fiction director’s heritage is now the stuff of legend; his time working in a video store, his encyclopaedic knowledge of films, his obsessive referencing of other films throughout his work. For myself, there are a few films I remember and rather less films that I remember how I feel when I first saw them – and in the case of both Resevoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, I can still remember, years later, the unique sensation of cinematic shock that I left the cinema with having seen the films on their original release. Morally questionable, undeniably gripping and audacious, technically astounding; they were nothing if not unforgettable.
It’s fair to say that Tarantino’s career has been inconsistent since then, which has meant the stakes on his next film were always going to be huge. Never one to shy away from a challenge, he hasn’t exactly played safe with Grindhouse (released in June in the UK, and experiencing a lukewarm box-office reception in the USA). Clocking in over 3 hours, it’s a ‘tribute’ to the experience of watching over the top B-movies in the ‘grindhouse’ cinemas of 70s New York, where seedy exploitation was the purpose and sum of the films’ experiences. There was no real British equivalent, but think B-move sensibility with a building to watch them in to match.
The first thing to say about Grindhouse is that, as you would expect, it’s technically brilliant. There are actually 2 films here, one directed by Tarantino, one by his friend and Sin City creator Robert Rodriguez, as well as trailers for films that don’t exist directed by other guests. As any practioner of any art form will tell you, it’s one thing to be bad, it’s quite another to be deliberately bad. There can be little doubt that the deliberate tackiness and the unbelievable tenor of the piece are the signs of those who are masters of their crafts. The performances are just about all perfect as well – just the right side of self-parody, they are note-perfect for the context. Of the two halves, Rodriguez’s is the weaker – a mutant/zombie action movie given a contemporary war-on-terror twist, there’s just too much happening for anyone to get really involved with it. Tarantino’s segment comes across like an updating of Spielberg’s Duel, with the tables being turned and turned again on viewers and characters alike. Here, at least, the characters are what you remember.
So it’s a mixed bag, lit with technical brilliance. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. It’s also an insulting waste. Is all that’s left of Tarantino’s undoubted talent to hark-bark to something that will never be fully revisited? It seems that he’s yearning for a time when – like standing on the terraces at British football games – comfort wasn’t everything in the viewer’s experience. He wants something vital and visceral, in contrast to the anti-sceptic experience of current-day multiplex viewing; in that there may be something to hearken to. But Grindhouse isn’t it; gripping and impressive as the second-half may be, the whole thing little more than three hours of one potential genius and a less-gifted friend disappearing down a blind alley while showing stunning contempt for the audience. The films may have ‘missing reels’ and ‘authentic’ scratches, but the film’s lack of success in America seems to show that audiences want entertainment and stimulation, not the self-indulgent fantasies of the clever kids in the corner.
All this, and we haven’t even touched on the film’s non-existent moral compass and context. That may again be the point, but at least in his early films and, to a lesser extent the Kill Bill saga, it was possible to construct an argument for moral interpretation. Here that’s probably out of reach.
I have a memory – possibly a false one, but it’s mine and I’m sticking to it – of an early interview with Tarantino where he talks of his wish to make a film about the way the break-up of a romantic relationship seems to those involved like the centre of the world, the only thing worth talking or thinking about, while for everyone else life carries on as normal. That interview may never have happened, or he may not have meant it, but all the same that is a film I would like to see. I want to see Tarantino prove beyond doubt that he is the consummate film-maker many know him to be but struggle to convince his detractors to believe. For now, we are left with Grindhouse; occasionally entertaining, frequently disgusting, technically brilliant and utterly empty.
Yes, that’s the point; but it’s not good enough.
They do different things for different people, and in some cases such experiences and feelings lead an individual into a career in the cinema. Quentin Tarantino is one such person – the Pulp Fiction director’s heritage is now the stuff of legend; his time working in a video store, his encyclopaedic knowledge of films, his obsessive referencing of other films throughout his work. For myself, there are a few films I remember and rather less films that I remember how I feel when I first saw them – and in the case of both Resevoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, I can still remember, years later, the unique sensation of cinematic shock that I left the cinema with having seen the films on their original release. Morally questionable, undeniably gripping and audacious, technically astounding; they were nothing if not unforgettable.
It’s fair to say that Tarantino’s career has been inconsistent since then, which has meant the stakes on his next film were always going to be huge. Never one to shy away from a challenge, he hasn’t exactly played safe with Grindhouse (released in June in the UK, and experiencing a lukewarm box-office reception in the USA). Clocking in over 3 hours, it’s a ‘tribute’ to the experience of watching over the top B-movies in the ‘grindhouse’ cinemas of 70s New York, where seedy exploitation was the purpose and sum of the films’ experiences. There was no real British equivalent, but think B-move sensibility with a building to watch them in to match.
The first thing to say about Grindhouse is that, as you would expect, it’s technically brilliant. There are actually 2 films here, one directed by Tarantino, one by his friend and Sin City creator Robert Rodriguez, as well as trailers for films that don’t exist directed by other guests. As any practioner of any art form will tell you, it’s one thing to be bad, it’s quite another to be deliberately bad. There can be little doubt that the deliberate tackiness and the unbelievable tenor of the piece are the signs of those who are masters of their crafts. The performances are just about all perfect as well – just the right side of self-parody, they are note-perfect for the context. Of the two halves, Rodriguez’s is the weaker – a mutant/zombie action movie given a contemporary war-on-terror twist, there’s just too much happening for anyone to get really involved with it. Tarantino’s segment comes across like an updating of Spielberg’s Duel, with the tables being turned and turned again on viewers and characters alike. Here, at least, the characters are what you remember.
So it’s a mixed bag, lit with technical brilliance. It’s not meant to be taken seriously. It’s also an insulting waste. Is all that’s left of Tarantino’s undoubted talent to hark-bark to something that will never be fully revisited? It seems that he’s yearning for a time when – like standing on the terraces at British football games – comfort wasn’t everything in the viewer’s experience. He wants something vital and visceral, in contrast to the anti-sceptic experience of current-day multiplex viewing; in that there may be something to hearken to. But Grindhouse isn’t it; gripping and impressive as the second-half may be, the whole thing little more than three hours of one potential genius and a less-gifted friend disappearing down a blind alley while showing stunning contempt for the audience. The films may have ‘missing reels’ and ‘authentic’ scratches, but the film’s lack of success in America seems to show that audiences want entertainment and stimulation, not the self-indulgent fantasies of the clever kids in the corner.
All this, and we haven’t even touched on the film’s non-existent moral compass and context. That may again be the point, but at least in his early films and, to a lesser extent the Kill Bill saga, it was possible to construct an argument for moral interpretation. Here that’s probably out of reach.
I have a memory – possibly a false one, but it’s mine and I’m sticking to it – of an early interview with Tarantino where he talks of his wish to make a film about the way the break-up of a romantic relationship seems to those involved like the centre of the world, the only thing worth talking or thinking about, while for everyone else life carries on as normal. That interview may never have happened, or he may not have meant it, but all the same that is a film I would like to see. I want to see Tarantino prove beyond doubt that he is the consummate film-maker many know him to be but struggle to convince his detractors to believe. For now, we are left with Grindhouse; occasionally entertaining, frequently disgusting, technically brilliant and utterly empty.
Yes, that’s the point; but it’s not good enough.
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