Grindhouse (Tarantino/Rodriguez, 2007)

[Antoine Doinel]

It looks like the poor box office performance in the United States has resulted in the release being delayed for the UK (and I presume the rest of Europe).

[Nothing]

The rest of Europe is lined up for the split release anyway, so I don't see why that would be delayed.

[marty]

It was just announced last week that the Australian distributor, Roadshow Films, will be releasing the films later this year but SEPARATELY. What a crock! This is truly pathetic but what do you expect from a major distributor? They are simply whores. This will result in even lower box office performance because Tarantino's film is due out in October and Rodriguez's film later in the year but Australian fans would have purchased the US DVD from Amazon by then. If they though this would make them more money, they are kidding themselves.

[marty]

All I can say about this is that I dont think he's made a decent movie since Jackie Brown so WADDAFUCK.

Totally agree on that one. Jackie Brown is his best film by far and one of the great films of the 1990s. I see Kill Bill and Grindhouse as a boy playing with his big toys and having fun rather than anything awe-inspiring or anywhere close to the level of artistic perfection he achieved with Jackie Brown.

[Narshty]

Agreed, Jackie Brown is sublime. I do like, from a few paces back, the precision and care that went into Kill Bill but the movie (certainly the first part) is essentially flat and has a very bizarre attitude towards its own violence and the on-again-off-again 'humanity' of its characters that I found equally annoying and disturbing. I also think the ending is utterly bankrupt.

It still boggles my mind that Death Proof could cost $30 million or so when Pulp Fiction (much longer, bigger flashier cast, more locations, etc.) only cost $8 million. How on earth does that work?

[Hrossa]

It still boggles my mind that Death Proof could cost $30 million or so when Pulp Fiction (much longer, bigger flashier cast, more locations, etc.) only cost $8 million. How on earth does that work?

Are you forgetting the fact that they smashed two cars into each other head-on, that there were numerous vehicular stunts, and things like giant billboards of Jungle Julia in the background of several scenes?

[justeleblanc]

Isn't it also mostly salaries?

[Barmy]

DP had no actors worth a salary other than Kurt R and Rosario D. The rest are nobodys. The film has little CGI. Driving around in two cars--how much can that cost? If this cost $30M, how much will QT's WWII flick cost?

[justeleblanc]

DP had no actors worth a salary other than Kurt R and Rosario D. The rest are nobodys. The film has little CGI. Driving around in two cars--how much can that cost? If this cost $30M, how much will QT's WWII flick cost?

What about QT's salary?

[Barmy]

I guess I don't see how DP cost almost as much as PT. Robert Rodriguez deserves at least as much salary as QT.

Dawson Upset with 'Death Proof' Rape Scene
By WENN | Wednesday, April 04, 2007

HOLLYWOOD - Rosario Dawson challenged moviemaker Quentin Tarantino on the set of her new movie Death Proof after he made her character leave a friend to get raped.

The feminist actress admits she had huge problems with the scene because she felt one woman wouldn't leave another behind if she felt she was in harm's way--but controlling Tarantino refused to listen to her complaints.

Dawson says, "I talked to Quentin about it several times, because I had a huge problem with leaving her there: 'I don't leave that girl behind; I love that girl, we're friends.'

"Quentin says, 'No,' (and) I say, 'Can I throw her the keys to the car?' and he says, 'No, you can't, that's not how it's going to work.' I was like, 'Damn!'"

Costar Rose McGowan also tasted Tarantino's controlling nature: "I couldn't change the word 'the'."

[Mr Sausage]

I guess I don't see how DP cost almost as much as PT. Robert Rodriguez deserves at least as much salary as QT.

Dawson Upset with 'Death Proof' Rape Scene
By WENN | Wednesday, April 04, 2007

HOLLYWOOD - Rosario Dawson challenged moviemaker Quentin Tarantino on the set of her new movie Death Proof after he made her character leave a friend to get raped.

The feminist actress admits she had huge problems with the scene because she felt one woman wouldn't leave another behind if she felt she was in harm's way--but controlling Tarantino refused to listen to her complaints.

Dawson says, "I talked to Quentin about it several times, because I had a huge problem with leaving her there: 'I don't leave that girl behind; I love that girl, we're friends.'

"Quentin says, 'No,' (and) I say, 'Can I throw her the keys to the car?' and he says, 'No, you can't, that's not how it's going to work.' I was like, 'Damn!'"

Costar Rose McGowan also tasted Tarantino's controlling nature: "I couldn't change the word 'the'."

It's a bit over-the-top to be calling it a "rape scene;" and although the 'joke' is obviously meant to centre on the suggestion of possible violation, be it rape or otherwise, at the same time, such suggestions are as much assumptions on the audience's part. We assume it must be sexual violation in part because, well, we're working on the stereotype of a blue-collar, over-all wearing mechanic. Whether or not Tarantino is playing on that or his sense of humour is just basely juvenile, I can't say, although I am sure what side certain members on here will take.

I have to take issue with the insidious attempts of that article to demonize Tarantino, especially for being 'controlling,' as tho' he were the only director, artist, or person working in an artistic medium to want to control every aspect his product. Yes, how wonderfully self-destructive that urge is. Let us all join in narrowing our eyes at him. Meanwhile, Stanley Kubrick is wonderful.

[Barmy]

Rose McGowan SHOULDN'T be allowed to change the word "the". Who does she think she is?

And when I first read that article, I actually thought Rosie was referring to something that had been cut from the film.

[exte]

Quentin Tarantino: I'm proud of my flop

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 27/04/2007

Undaunted by the US box-office failure of his latest film, Quentin Tarantino can't wait to unveil a new, souped-up version at Cannes. He talks to John Hiscock

The hard-core Quentin Tarantino fans who lined up to see the much-anticipated Grindhouse on its opening weekend in the US seemed delighted with the filmmaker's £30 million homage to exploitation films. But, to everyone's surprise, it was the least successful opening of any of Tarantino's films in the past decade.

Quentin Tarantino (right) and Robert Rodriguez
Double trouble: Quentin Tarantino (right) and Robert Rodriguez, with whom he made B-movie tribute film Grindhouse

It seems too few people wanted to see an ode to a largely extinct form of cheap, sex-and-violence filled movies popular in the 1950s and '60s. Especially one that consists of two different films back to back.

In some countries, the films will be shown separately. In Britain, as in the US, the plan was originally to show them as a double feature. Now, however, the film has been pulled from the schedules while the distributors work out what to do with it. "It will definitely be released here, but we don't know in what form," they say.

"Oh, it was disappointing," says Tarantino of the poor opening weekend when I meet him in Beverly Hills. "It was disappointing, yeah." Then he brightens and laughs. "But the movie worked with the audience."

He should know. He had spent the weekend driving around Los Angeles area in his yellow-and-black Mustang, seeing the film eight times in different cinemas to gauge audience reaction.
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"People who saw it loved it and applauded, but maybe a lot of people just didn't want to see two movies," he says.

Grindhouse, which has taken just £12 million at the US box office in the three weeks since it opened, consists of two bloody, 85-minute movies: Planet Terror, by Sin City director Robert Rodriguez, a long-time Tarantino collaborator, and Death Proof from Tarantino himself.

Planet Terror stars Rose McGowan as an exotic dancer whose career is cut short when her right leg is eaten by flesh-craving zombies, and she is fitted with a machine-gun prosthetic. Death Proof, which stars Kurt Russell as a psycho stunt-driver, is Tarantino's "slasher" film, except the slasher uses a car to kill young women instead of a knife.

To make the film look authentically B-grade, Tarantino and Rodriguez scratched the prints and edited out "missing reels". They also included fake exploitation-movie trailers directed by pals Rob Zombie, Edgar Wright and Eli Roth to run during the "intermission".

For those countries where Death Proof will be released separately, Tarantino plans to add 30 minutes he had to edit out. "There is half-an-hour's difference between my Death Proof and what is playing in Grindhouse," he says. "I wrote my script - I couldn't be prouder of my script - then I had to shrink it way down to fit inside this double feature.

"I was like a brutish American exploitation distributor who cut the movie down almost to the point of incoherence. I cut it down to the bone and took all the fat off it to see if it could still exist, and it worked. It works great as a double feature, but I'm just as excited if not more excited about actually having the world see Death Proof unfiltered."

It is hard not to marvel at the 44-year-old filmmaker's constant enthusiasm. He talks so rapidly that his words seem to tumble out on top of each other in stream-of-consciousness monologues that are liberally sprinkled with the names of obscure, B-movie directors and exploitation films long forgotten by nearly everyone but himself.

A film fan from the time he could talk and walk, Tarantino has an encyclopaedic knowledge of movies that most experts have never even heard of, and he likes nothing better than to talk at length about them.

He has an almost touching faith in his own abilities and is incapable of believing his own movies are anything but flawless. Like a child looking forward to Christmas, he is eagerly anticipating Death Proof having its solo première at the Cannes film festival.

"I can't wait for it to première," he says. "It will be in competition, and it'll be the first time everyone sees Death Proof by itself, including me."

The idea for Grindhouse came when Rodriguez was at Tarantino's house and saw a poster for a 1957 double bill of Dragstrip Girl and Rock All Night. He mentioned that he had always wanted to do a double feature. Tarantino instantly came up with the name Grindhouse, and a movie was born.

Tarantino and Rodriguez, who met at the Toronto Film Festival in 1992, have been occasional collaborators ever since Tarantino played a drug dealer in Rodriguez's Desperado in 1995.

He was the executive producer, writer and co-star of Rodriguez's vampire movie From Dusk Till Dawn, and he also directed a segment of Sin City, while Rodriguez composed some of the music for Tarantino's Kill Bill.
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"I can't imagine doing Grindhouse with any other director in the way me and Robert did it because I just had complete faith and trust in him," says Tarantino. "So much so that we didn't actually see each other's movie completed until three weeks before the film opened. It was as if we worked in little vacuums and cut our movies down, and then put them together and watched it all play, and then made a couple of little changes after that, and pretty much that was it."

Critics' reviews were mostly enthusiastic, but Daily Variety asked: "Did anyone besides Tarantino and Rodriguez ever really care about the grindhouse movie genre that much to begin with?"

Tarantino cares passionately; and, probably not coincidentally, at the time Grindhouse was released, he was supervising an eight-week "grindhouse festival" at a Los Angeles cinema, featuring deliriously bad films from his collection, including what he says is one of his all-time favourites, The Girl From Starship Venus by the British sexploitation director Derek Ford, which he programmed as part of a double bill with The Legend of the Wolf Woman.

The festival was a great success with Tarantino fans, who revere his dual status as the film geek who made good and the reigning avatar of postmodern cool.

Raised by his mother in a Los Angeles suburb, Tarantino dropped out of school and took a job as a salesman in a video store, where he brushed up on his already-voluminous knowledge of martial arts and B movies.

He worked as a production assistant on a Dolph Lundgren exercise video, and with a friend, Roger Avary, he wrote the screenplay for Reservoir Dogs, which marked his debut as writer-director-actor.

They followed that with screenplays for True Romance and Natural Born Killers and then Tarantino returned to the director's chair for Pulp Fiction, which won him more than a dozen major awards.

He adapted Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch, and turned it into the 1997 film Jackie Brown. Then he dropped out of sight, making "Where's Quentin?" a Hollywood catchphrase, until he returned with the two-part martial arts comedy-thriller Kill Bill.

"I think I've gotten more technically proficient as a filmmaker because you can't help but do that," he says. "Having gone through the pre-production, production and post-production processes, you kind of know how to do it now; it's not a gigantic mystery any more. Maybe that's one of the reasons that, from Jackie Brown on, I've always tackled things I didn't know how to do, so I could learn how to do them."

He is unmarried but is seldom short of female company. He broke up with his longtime girlfriend Grace Lovelace in 1995 and spent two years with Mira Sorvino. He also dated director Allison Anders and comedienne Margaret Cho.

But as a friend said: "It takes a pretty special kind of girl to give up her life to watch kung fu movies with him for a year and a half."

Although he has shaped a pop-culture persona as big as his films, Tarantino is not among the most prolific of moviemakers, averaging one film every three years or so.

"I want to make movies. I have to make movies," he says. "The reason I don't make more movies is that I want to live life in between. I give it all to the movies, and it's like I'm climbing Mount Everest every time. When I get off the mountain then I want to be able to enjoy some time in the chalet at the bottom.

"When I make a movie it's an adventure, but when I get through with it then I get back to my friends I've put on hold for a year. The opposite sex, adventurous travel, sleeping late, watching mindless television, reading a novel, trying to go to sleep at night - they all become very appealing again.

"But the real, real reason I don't make more movies is that I'm a writer, and I always have to start with the blank page and that's hard. You are starting from scratch every single time. Nothing you've done before means a damn when you've got to start all over again."
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His next project will be Inglorious Bastards, a Second World War film he has been working on for several years and which he calls his "Dirty Dozen, men-on-a-mission movie".

Having already paid homage to martial arts, revenge, slasher, Japanese and road-rage movies, Tarantino is also planning a new genre, a form of spaghetti western set in America's Deep South which he calls "a southern".

"I want to explore something that really hasn't been done," he says. "I want to do movies that deal with America's horrible past with slavery and stuff but do them like spaghetti westerns, not like big issue movies. I want to do them like they're genre films, but they deal with everything that America has never dealt with because it's ashamed of it, and other countries don't really deal with because they don't feel they have the right to.

"But I can deal with it all right, and I'm the guy to do it. So maybe that's the next mountain waiting for me."

It's a safe bet that his "southern" will also include homages to several other movie genres.

"Look at my movies and there's usually at least three genres operating on all cylinders, bumping into each other," he says. "It's like I don't know if I'm going to make a tremendous amount of movies, so I keep trying to knock off three movies with each one I do."

[Barmy]

QT dated Maggie Cho? I guess that's proof he's gay. And it's scary to think that 30 minutes of "fat" (as QT called it) were cut out of DP. This guy is delusional.

[The Elegant Dandy Fop]

QT dated Maggie Cho? I guess that's proof he's gay. And it's scary to think that 30 minutes of "fat" (as QT called it) were cut out of DP. This guy is delusional.

Oh man, that Margaret Cho comment made my day.

Yeah, I keep getting a bad feeling the 30 minutes will just be more girls talking about Vanishing Point and the lap dance scene.

[Narshty]

So Death Proof is getting a UK release on its own in late September? And they're actually hoping to make money?

[Joe Buck]

I agree. I thought the cut down version already had enough fat. Not that I mind dialogue but that looooooong stretch of nothing but the girls talking in between Kurt Russell sightings was torturous. That really needs to get broken up. It was just the same old Tarantino shit. “Motherfuck thisâ€

[DrewReiber]

I'm finished with graduation, which swamped me over the last two weeks. Mega responses are on their way, and my apologies for both lateness and the undoubtedly overwhelming amount of forthcoming words.

[Barmy]

Harry Knowles LOVED DEATH PROOF!!!!

[jbeall]

Harry Knowles LOVED DEATH PROOF!!!!

Quel surprise.

When the word "fanboy" finally makes it into Webster's, there will be a picture of Harry Knowles beside it, provided there's room on the page.

"Ain't it cool?" No, Harry, it ain't cool.

[exte]

I'm sorry if this is not more specific, but proving something others can see for themselves isn't worth my going through and creating specific shot comparisons.

I guess Drew's finally back, considering...

The bomb going off between the two guys: Aliens. The truck crashing through the building/glass: T1 & T2. The hanging from the helicopter. True Lies. There's a lot more, but I'm tired and can't remember.

That's some serious reaching if I've ever seen it. I assume that the relationship between El Wray and Cherry Darling is a reference to the Star Wars prequels. ...backup your statements with actual arguments.

[DrewReiber]

I guess Drew's finally back, considering...

Perhaps that's because I've seen the Terminator films and I've seen Planet Terror. Your ability to take that generalized claim any further died due to your own lack of support and an approach to discussion that rarely digs deeper than the past 20 years of movies. I know you're still burning with passive aggressiveness that you can't get anywhere, but that doesn't change the fact you're trying to defend a guy who only supports every argument ever made about him with his statements, actions and filmmaking.

For a guy who spent his career basically trying to walk in the shoes of his idols while pretending to be them, it's not helping his case that he's admittedly lined up 2-3 remakes over the next several years. Come Drink With Me, Inglorious Bastards, The Psychic, whatever... I assume if he had gone along with remaking Friday the 13th, you would be just as rabid about defending his so-called integrity as an artist. But hey, it's ok, I understand how much it means to you if you can at least keep the isolated walls of fantasy big and strong on a message board. Good luck, you're going to be doing this a long time.

As for the other discussion,

I just assumed the person I was speaking to hadn't actually seen Tattooed Life yet. A huuuuuuuuuuuuuge chunk of that film appears in Dawn (plot and dialogue, at times word for word) and a number of shots and other elements of the final fight during the House of Blue Leaves fight in Kill Bill. There are several other instances throughout Suzuki's career, including the "gangster walk", but again I felt it would be better for people to discover this on their own rather than wade through hours of shareware programs trying to figure out how get screen captures when I am not that computer savvy. It wasn't meant as an offense, it's just a lot of work when my point will become very evident as that person is still getting to watch an excellent movie in it's own right.

[tavernier]

A.O. Scott saw Death Proof at Cannes, and confirms what I was hoping for.

Some new material has been added, most notably a lap dance performed by Vanessa Ferlito for Kurt Russell and a scene in and around a rural convenience store where copies of Film Comment are prominently displayed on the magazine rack.

There is a God.

[Antoine Doinel]

Liam Lacey from the Globe & Mail pretty much confirms my suspicions. That "Tarantino's cut" adds a whole lot of nothing (lapdance aside):

The new Death Proof has a lot more talk, though unfortunately, no more rock than its original version. The climactic car chase, which lasts about a half-hour, is exactly the same, but more of the scenes of girl talk are included. There's also a raunchy lap-dance sequence, and a new black and white section, set in a convenience-store parking lot. Finally, Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) who enjoys crashing into carloads of young women, is now an aspiring filmmaker, who makes videos of his victims.

It's strange to note that the car chase is exactly the same when Tarantino went had previously hoped to extend the scene when he first started talking about bringing Death Proof to Cannes. Also, the French title of the film -- Le Boulevard De Mort -- has a lot more zing.

[Barmy]

I would have respected QT if he had cut out some interesting stuff for the US version. Looks like he didn't. And now he's making it even more masturbatory by making SM a filmmaker. Lame.

Separately, Eli Roth recently talked to the Rotten Tomatoes web site about getting the Weinsteins interested in a second GRINDHOUSE experience, this time with Roth doing THANKSGIVING and Edgar Wright doing DON'T. The beauty of that to the Weinsteins, who are still scratching their heads at the flop of the first GRINDHOUSE is that both films could be shot on the cheap, the way grindhouse movies are supposed to be, and Roth said he doesn't even need a full script for his: "We have the outline, the story ideas, but part of the fun of GRINDHOUSE is actually not having a script," Roth told the site. "I wouldn't want to write it too detailed. You've just got to work out the kills and then see who's around and grab a camera and have fun." This could actually be cool... too bad no one went out to see GRINDHOUSE in the first place while movies like DISTURBIA and most remakes make a shitload of money.