|
COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
With the three-hour-and-eleven-minute "Grindhouse," the writer-directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have put together an entire evening's entertainment devoted to the violent schlock movies and decrepit theatres that they loved as kids and never stopped loving. "Grindhouse" is a single film with no intermission, but it includes two new features and such divertissements as trailers for ridiculous imaginary pictures ("Werewolf Women of the S.S."), ads for revolting food at local restaurants, and artifacts of down-at-the-heels moviegoing from decades ago. At climactic moments in the two features--say, just as the hero and the heroine are about to get it on--the scene sometimes comes to an abrupt halt, and the words "Missing reel" flash on the screen. Now and then, the movie develops hiccups, as if frames had been chopped out--a tribute to needy projectionists of old who kept the images they liked best. And deep scratches, as lovingly inscribed as the speckled antiquing on a blanket chest, run through long stretches of film. The general intent here is to louse up the surface of the movie as much as possible and make that degraded surface, in a kind of high-tech punk conceit, a central part of the experience. Tarantino and Rodriguez are trying to re-create their memories of moviegoing as a blissfully sullied urban folk ritual in which sprawling teens squandered their time in seedy picture palaces.
Why would such technically sophisticated filmmakers, who...
Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.
|
Bookmark this article
Print this article
Link to this article
Email this article
Digg It!
Add to del.icio.us
RSS
