Death Proof

And here's the second half of Grindhouse. I dunno. For a movie that ran nearly two hours, I'm not so sure this was all that exciting. It was Tarantino to the core, with plenty of drawn out conversations between characters, a randomly inserted black-and-white scene, abrupt character deaths, and a willingness to play fast and loose with story pacing conventions, and while the final product wasn't bad or anything, it was also much less entertaining overall than the campier and crazier Planet Terror. The gist of the plot here is that Kurt Russell is a retired stunt driver with a death-proof car - that is to say, a car designed to keep its driver safe even in the event of a horrific crash - who has a penchant for murdering young women. In short, it's a slasher film where the serial killer's weapon of choice is a muscle car. Knowing this much about the plot heading in, I expected the movie to involve several well-choreographed death scenes as Kurt Russell stalks and runs down a bunch of women one-by-one. That's not how it unfolded at all, though. Instead, we meet a group of four women, learn who they are thanks to that Tarantino-style exposition where the characters use a lot of profanity in debates over small-scale things, and then see them all get run down by Kurt Russell about an hour into the film. A "fourteen months later" inter-title appears and we're suddenly meeting four entirely new girls and experiencing the same drawn-out exposition to who they all are, and then Kurt Russell appears again and tries to run our new set of ladies off the road. Except this crew of women includes a stunt driver and a stuntwoman, and they're badasses in general, so they fight back. The whole ordeal climaxes in a lengthy and pretty excellent car chase before ending, well, rather abruptly, and with a plot thread or two still dangling. I watched this right on the tails of Planet Terror, the way the Grindhouse experience was intended, and it just didn't keep up the adrenaline and absurdity of its predecessor on the twin bill. Early on, especially, it just feels like Tarantino is trying for that "lost '70s film" aesthetic, letting the background music skip and using a few too many intentionally clunky jump cuts. It still worked pretty well as a standalone piece, but it took on a whole different tone and feel - a very small-scale one, really - than Planet Terror, which was about a zombie apocalypse and had a girl with a machine gun leg. But anyway, that's that; I've now seen Grindhouse, and I've also seen every Quentin Tarantino feature film. Yay.