Jack Phillips wrote:I take your point, but I'm not overly concerned about fixing credit where it's due (a worthy enough enterprise, but I leave that to others). I am merely using "Tarantino" as a term of convenience to talk about a body of work that is, in some sense at least, continuous. In much the same way, I might speak of Welles's cinema when discussing ideas that originated with Gregg Toland.
That's a pretty big stretch. We're not talking about directors and their cinematographers, we're talking about people who have been known to exaggerate claims of authorship. Welles' cinema is well documented from many sides, whereas Tarantino's body of work is still considerably small and written coverage of his work is extremely biased toward one-sided celebrity. I can't tell you how many books I read in college that incorrectly cited the origins of ideas or didn't even attempt to research credit, just to make larger generalizations about said celebrity. And I don't mean just on Tarantino.
For example, Robert McKee's "Story" is a complete waste of time if you're going to qualify his statements based on so-called supportive arguments where he simply says "my point F is true because Robert Towne came up with the ending of Chinatown". No matter how much of a point he may have had with story structure or what he wants to portray as the commercial viability of such a design, it all goes out the window when he tries make an example where he simply isn't interested in avoiding false generalizations.
My problem with your statement is that the credit for the ideas in Pulp Fiction have always been in dispute and without a clear view of what was Tarantino's choice or Avary's, you can't make points that depend on generalizations. Furthermore, to suggest that examining Tarantino's body of work is similar to Orson Welles is somewhat disingenious. We're talking about a still relatively young director who does not have anywhere near that prolific a filmography - a very necessary element of invoking auteur theory - and whose body of work reads far more as a roadmap of other films than his own.
He's made 5 films, two of which are arguably remakes (among 3 more he has planned). Of the 8 screenplays he's written, he still purposefully instructs his interviewers and producers to downplay any credit due to his original collaborator. This despite the fact that on at least two features where he has sole credit, Avary conceived both the original story and stuck with the films, doing additional screenwriting through to their completion. I could also mention the origins of From Dusk Till Dawn, where Tarantino's memory of Bob Kurtzman's treatment is an entire 20 pages shorter than is argued. Who knows what carried over from Joe Esposito's draft?
If you can't already tell, I've read a lot of books on both directors (Tarantino/Avary), looked through a lot of scripts and I have to say, it does pain me when I see article after article dancing around due credit to avoid libel, or biographies that defend Tarantino's downplay of his own derivative writing by citing "the poster defense". So yeah, generalizations based on assumptions or one that may intentionally downplay the still debated authorship of Pulp Fiction is one I'm going to call out when I see it. Not to be a jerk, but to clear up a statement that is based on a potentially intended illusion.
Like Death Proof or not, it's the first film where he's been entirely on his own as producer, writing, director and cinematographer. If anything, this film should serve as the reference point for his creative choices and not a gray area as murky as Pulp Fiction, even though it is obviously his most famous film and arguably the launching pad for his peak as a celebrity.
glaswegian tome wrote:Do you happen to have a link to their thoughts on it? I'd be interested to read that.
Whose thoughts, specifically?
Last edited by DrewReiber on Tue Oct 09, 2007 4:10 am, edited 2 times in total.
glaswegian tome wrote:Ah, I messed up and quoted the wrong part of your post. I meant Tarantino's and Rodriguez' thoughts on the fact that Grindhouse was a major bomb.
Empire, October 2007
Basically, Tarantino blames the fans and Rodriguez blames the marketing. I side with the latter, because I was at a freaking film school and there were people who hadn't even heard of the movie by opening weekend. Same went for a few of the people I talked to at the theater, who confirmed that they only showed up because a friend clued them in a day or two prior. It's interesting, because the Weinsteins had to leave their entire marketing team behind at Miramax. Their new people were just that, inexperienced. It explains why the TV ads were indecipherable and I'm really glad that at least someone behind-the-scenes picked up on that. Who knows, maybe if Machete is ever released they may be able to salvage this banner?
DrewReiber wrote:I'm really psyched about seeing the full cut of Planet Terror. I bought the Grindhouse book to find that not only did the Planet Terror script include many deleted scenes *and* the alternate scenes ...
... I don't know how many others noticed, but the deleted material was pretty substantial for 14 or so minutes.
According to the DVD Talk review of the Planet Terror disc, it doesn't contain any deleted scenes or the "missing reel" (whether it exists or not). And there are some issues with the framing of the film on DVD.
Antoine Doinel wrote:the Planet Terror disc, it doesn't contain any deleted scenes or the "missing reel" (whether it exists or not).
Oh well, disappointing but not shocking. We've still never seen the entire final action scene from Desperado or the complete deleted scenes from Once Upon a Time in Mexico. Hell, the infamous ending shot from Sin City: That Yellow Bastard was in the making-of book but nowhere on the set...
And there are some issues with the framing of the film on DVD.
I was under the impression the jury was still out on this.
EDIT: According to the same article you linked, they admit the framing was probably the intention of the director and not a big deal.
the Planet Terror disc, it doesn't contain any deleted scenes or the "missing reel" (whether it exists or not)
We know it doesn't exist. On the Q&A disc that comes with the exclusive Best Buy steelbook edition Rodriguez spells it out:
The accidents that would happen before didn't really serve the picture. What if it did? What if you went to a theater that made all the right accidents? Like, you'd be watching a very boring section, there'd be a bad splice, like some action was missing, and suddenly you're back to the next good part. So I decided to do that, just make the movie all the good parts. And, uh . . . you know the second act, the end of the second act of a movie is always where . . . oh, the good guy is actually the bad guy, the guy you thought was bad is really the good guy . . . and, uh, they're gonna be fighting the whole movie but at some point they're gonna fall in love and it will be great for them in the last act. And the main hero, who has a very mysterious past you don't know about, will finally reveal it at the end of the second act. . . I took out that section [audience laughter] and made it the missing reel.
[Harry Knowles]: But did you film the missing part?
Didn't even film it.
[Harry Knowles]: So you knew in advance you . . .
I knew in advance I didn't want to see that shit ever. Because, uh . . . it's just more bullshit until you get to the third act. Every movie's the same—the second act is all about “We've gotta find the cure, we've gotta find the cureâ€
the Planet Terror disc, it doesn't contain any deleted scenes or the "missing reel" (whether it exists or not)
We know it doesn't exist.
My response was more directed toward the pre-release solicitations from Genius, because I would have liked to imagine that they weren't that malicious or inept (it's one or the other).
Still curious to see the deleted sequences from inside the base, though. Heck, I wouldn't even mind seeing a stringout of the silly inserts involving Rodriguez's son Rebel surviving throughout the film for no discernible reason. The final shot after the credit has my interest piqued.
Btw, the aspect ratio complaints are definitely exaggerated. Someone on Home Theater Forum had been posting screen comparisons from something they bootlegged before the release and I can definitely say they were NOT representative of the actual presentation.
So after the abomination of Death Proof, my hopes for Planet Terror were fairly low, but I found myself won over by the film's devious ingenuity, in particular the sequences involving Marley Shelton's hands (her character's trajectory in the film is easily the highlight). After a while the pus and blood antics wear a little thin but Planet Terror has an infectious energy and while it's not a particularly accomplished film, compared to Death Proof it's the Lady From Shanghai.
Abomination is right. Watched Death Proof this past weekend and I have a question. Was it nominated for any Razzies? What a miserable movie! It wasn't just me, but my two co-viewers who felt this way as well. It got to a point where one eventually was left slack-faced and asked "Is anybody else embarrassed by this". And the implied left behind rape scene was just the rotten cherry on top of an extremely unpleasant and misogynistic movie.
And to people defending the dialogue, I have been around rough & tumble women before and I have never, ever heard them talk in this manner.
And speaking as an American - Is this the director the U.S. wants to hold up to the world as our most inventive and celebrated active filmmaker?
I really don't appreciate the reviewer's insinuation that Tarantino's film being reviewed as poor somehow automatically reflects the work of those he is attempting to emulate. Actually, I'm pretty much sick of it at this point. Anyone who implies that Tarantino is the prism by which to read "b-movies" from the 70's shows me that he/she doesn't know anything at all.
Not to mention that Tarantino's film was just barely even a reference to the 70's B-movies it was supposedly emulating, much less an homage. Rodriguez really got it right in that sense, but I felt that QT was paying homage to himself more than anything.
An interesting if not really successful experiment. I picked up the DVDs and decided to try and make a night of it. I did feel that the films worked better viewed together, where a lot of Tarantino's overly talky film contrasts well with Rodgriguez's stripped down (though not stripped down enough) action/gore film.
In the end neither really seemed to work though. Death Proof first:
Having finally seen it I would agree with the criticism that this feels the most self-indulgent Tarantino film yet, surpassing even Kill Bill. The various chats between characters that felt so fresh and (dare I say it?) quirky in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction felt so successful to me because they seemed to add a relatively naturalistic edge to the characters and that contrast between characters having petty pop culture arguments and discussions compared very well with they way they then still took on their own cliched roles in their own stories - it felt as if it was both a comment on the lack of self awareness of the characters as to the artificiality of the world they were living in while at the same time being fascinated by their own cultural artifacts and also on the way that the characters seemed to be creating their real lives in the style of the films they watched and enjoyed.
It kind of makes sense that Tarantino dropped trying to make films set in the 'real world' to focus on creating films that the characters in his first three films would have watched with Kill Bill and Grindhouse - as if he was trying to get to the heart of what people found 'cool' about the films. But I think Kill Bill and Death Proof unfortunately fell into the trap of becoming only about what Tarantino himself felt was cool about those films. It became a reductive rather than expansive exercise and sadly I was left feeling it would have been much better if he had put more energy into advertising and distributing his source material better than making films which mediated them through his sensibility.
Kill Bill and Death Proof might be films that will work better in the context of a retrospective look back at a career where their role as 'films the characters in his films watch' will seem much more obvious, but at the same time I have a nagging feeling that Tarantino has shot himself in the foot - instead of imagining his characters being familiar with Vanishing Point or Sonny Chiba films, Lady Snowblood, spaghetti westerns or anime because they actually watched the same films that we the audience have watched, I think in future that Tarantino's characters will only have watched the films Tarantino made for his characters to watch i.e. Kill Bill and Death Proof. They will be at one remove from the source material itself, if that makes any sense, and make Tarantino's world seem even more insular and in a conversation with itself because with these films he has in a way appropriated the source material.
To put it another way Godard was content to make allusions and hang up posters to point his audience in the direction of seeing the films that he wanted to associate the films he was making with for themselves. Tarantino doesn't seem to want the audience to seek out the source material he is quoting, he wants to recreate it for you so you don't need to.
It seems a strangely reductive and possessive mindset (My idea of what the film is saying is this: "why do you want to go and see those subtitled, scratchy prints of sometimes foreign films when you could see my film that recreates the experience but with relatively well known actors and which most importantly is a new film, not twenty or thirty years old because, after all, you don't like seeing any film that old, do you?". Ironically this message backfired since the audiences who didn't like seeing old films and weren't familiar stayed away from the film), compared to a Godardian pushing people into doing their own damn research into the rest of cinema rather than implying that he has done that for them and all the audience needs to do to learn is just watch his film and listen to his soundtrack.
One of the main problems I have with both Death Proof and Planet Terror (and Kill Bill) is that they admirably focus on subtext but at the expense of 'text'. The pop culture conversation scenes in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction were the icing on the cake, not the stories themselves. Jackie Brown still remains my favourite Tarantino mostly because he uses blacksploitation but at the same time creates a strong story with interesting characters of his own to anchor his own story. When Jackie is singing at the end of the film, sure there is a reference there, but more importantly the scene is so powerful because of the events that have occured in Tarantino's film not any other film that he is referencing - that is just the extra moment that ties his film in with the genre it is referencing, but not in a way that destroys his own film as it does so by turning it into just a homage.
When he turned inwards (or up himself as some might say) with Kill Bill there was no real story there except the basic framework on which to hang homage from - a revenge movie and a child. What kept my interest in Kill Bill, despite its overlength and indulgence, was the feeling that at least Tarantino really respected the films he was copying. That at the same time he was making the films to introduce audiences to various different cinema eras he was also in awe of them a little bit himself. I didn't get that from Death Proof, in which Tarantino seemed so superior in relationship to his 'grindhouse' material that he made a film much more about himself than about the era he was supposedly homaging.
While Kill Bill felt like a fan boy film in both the best and worse senses, Death Proof seemed insufferably smug. At the same time as feeling superior to his 'road warrior', Vanishing Point and Russ Meyer-esque 'chick gang on the rampage' sources he somehow managed to make a film that did not equal, let alone surpass, them. So at the same time it was not a successful Tarantino film it also was not a successful homage film. I could imagine fans of the films being referenced (in both Death Proof and Planet Terror) feeling slightly short-changed and mildly irritated by the attitudes of the film. The only homage sequence that really worked for me was the section where the second group of girls are being covertly photographed by Stuntman Mike and we see them through his camera lens laughing, having fun and being frozen in time when he clicks another photograph off, with the nice Ennio Morricone track playing.
(I should say that this feeling of superiority is not related to what I think about Tarantino or Rodriguez themselves. I am sure you would really need to love the source material to put yourself through the rigours of actually making a film tribute. I mean that from the finished films themselves I detect a sense of the material being 'beneath them' so they do not have to treat it particularly seriously, which sort of damages the sense of campy fun the original, seriously made, films themselves had)
After getting all that Tarantino context out, on to the film itself! At the same time as being unable to take the Grindhouse films any more seriously than just pieces of entertainment, I think the post-modern approach does encourage the kind of questioning of the attitudes of the characters, especially since the film goes to great pains to make this a modern set grindhouse film in which the characters send messages on mobile phones and PDAs to each other.
I get the sense, from the grainier, scratchier first section of Death Proof compared to the second half that Tarantino is suggesting the first section is a 'movie' and the second is 'his movie'.
Unfortunately the incredibly drawn out character scenes do not seem to add anything interesting to any of the characters. The dialogue seems to slow down a film, and in this style of film too much chat and not enough action is a fatal flaw! It also makes pushing the reset button after the first sequence particularly irritating as it has given Tarantino another opportunity for a twenty minute dialogue/argument/bitching session as we meet the next set of ciphers.
One of the best things about watching Death Proof and Planet Terror together is Rose McGowan's characters, much more of a classical victim in Death Proof, seemingly friendless and treated badly by the other girls before becoming Mike's first victim. This contrasts extremely well with her kickass (or shoot-ass?) go-go dancer in Planet Terror, and I particularly liked the scene of the lapdance with Mike while McGowan (is it strange that Stuntman Mike's name stuck in my mind while I can barely remember any of the female character's names? was it intended to work that way, to emphasise the interchangability of the two groups of girls?) watches in the background before she gets the chance to do her own dance in Planet Terror.
I quite liked the car crash climax to the first section of Death Proof, with the scene being repeated from the four different girl's experiences, but I was left with the feeling that a classic opportunity for a split screen sequence was missed that would show both Mike's car reaching and passing the girl's car and the conversation inside at the same time.
Kurt Russell was great (but didn't seem to have enough to do) and I now have a crush on Vanessa Ferlito but I was still left with the feeling that for all the talk I never really got any deeper insight into their characters and so never really felt involved with any of the characters - the girls are cute (and Ferlito does a brilliant dance!) but for the amount of time the film spends with them I really wanted to be left with more of a connection to them than that. Similarly some time was spent with Stuntman Mike but beyond hearing a little about his past roles and his speech about the book he carries with him there was little to add to the audience's understanding of why he does what he does.
The only real lesson learnt from Death Proof was that stuntpeople (and film people in general) must be psychopaths! With Abernathy being seduced by her friend's antics and Lee being destroyed by them. There was a kind of poetic justice that Mike stupidly decides on a girl gang fresh off a film set and in the mood for life threatening antics though! (by the way, this must be the stupidest reason for getting somebody onto the bonnet of a moving car that I have ever seen, another sequence that seems to suggest that the filmmakers are saying 'well, it is always a contrivance to get people into these situations in these films so we might as well make it as dumb as possible'. That seems another moment that denigrates the source material and those films that actually did have coherent plots!)
Rather than the second half of the film being about an innocent group of girls menaced and then becoming monsters themselves I was left thinking they were just as crazy as Mike, if not more, and just needed the meeting with Mike to give them an excuse for a violent car chase. This is when I think the film did its swerve into Russ Meyer girl gang stuff. Leaving their companion alone with a lacivious redneck is a big clue to this group living for kicks rather than sensibly!
If they were really going to make that suggestion they might as well have gone fully for it and shown the prerequisite 70s style assault scene that at least confronted the audience with the situation rather than letting them get off the hook just by Lee actually saying 'Gulp!' and leaving it at that! It felt as if the filmmakers wanted to sidestep certain elements of grindhouse cinema that might be unpalatable to a modern audience. It seems that a real film from that era would not have shied away from that, in fact the only question would have been of how much nudity they could get away with. If they were going to make a film about this type of cinema they shouldn't have tried to play down these elements, in fact they should have tackled them head on. I am also left with the sense that, again if this were a true film from that era, the girls would have returned from killing Mike to find their companion assaulted and then proceed to deal out their own brand of female justice to Jasper too! Or even better have found their companion assaulted but having killed her attacker 'I Spit On Your Grave-style' and find that their interlude with Stuntman Mike was nothing compared to her experience. She could even have taken Jasper's balls as a kind of trophy, which would make a good connection to Planet Terror (and maybe help Planet Terror's testicle obsession make some kind of sense!)
Another missed opportunity came after the first car chase sequence after Mike has been shot and is pouring alcohol over his wound. How in the world did they not have him pouring J&B whisky over his arm (with the label carefully turned towards the camera to aid audience recognition, naturally)? I suppose the bottle they chose had a yellow label which was close enough!
The main switch from Mike to the girls having the upper hand was interesting and pushes it into that 'crazed girl gang' film homage where the male assaulter is emasculated. Unfortunately Death Proof labours this point absurdly with Mikes frontal assault on the first group of girls being replaced by an anal approach for the second group and then his own comeuppance comes as the girl rams his own tail using a bunch of sexual epithets!
The final freeze frame ending of the celebratory, empowered through violence women dancing round the crumpled body of their male assaulter was quite fun, bringing to mind many a B-movie with a strangely dubious final message!
There is one way in which this film adds something to Tarantino's work though - it seems he has expanded his sphere of interest from just foot to entire leg fetishism! (I hate to think what he is going to do once he reaches the area at the top of the legs!)
Planet Terror: Definitely a zombie movie of the infected subgenre and even more speficically of the Italian persuasion (I supose not coincidentally is Umberto Lenzi given thanks in the end credits)
I am more of a fan of the more coherent zombie film myself and so I enjoyed Planet Terror but never really found it exciting or with anything particularly new to say. It similarly also seems to play to the notion of grindhouse films being narratively incoherent and therefore ripe for parody while containing a similar sense of superiority to the material that did not contrast very well when a more affectionate parody might have gotten a better fan reaction, and it felt even more than Death Proof that you needed to be a fan to be familiar with the subgenre within a subgenre that Planet Terror was associating itself with.
It seemed to me that there was a mash up of Nightmare City (the look of the zombies, the fight out amongst planes on the landing strip), Zombie Flesh-Eaters (the eyeball/splinter interaction, though done much faster in Planet Terror!), The Beyond's child's face/gun interaction (though not as spectacular as in Fulci's film) and that there were bits of Contamination seemingly mixed in as well.
Similarly to Death Proof though, I ended up with the feeling that little of Planet Terror matched the delirious craziness of any of the source material and much of the fun then came from the meta-level of watching Bruce Willis turning monstrous and Naveen Andrews seemingly channelling Ian McCulloch. (I still have no idea what the obsession with balls was about though! Is that a reference to SS Experiment Camp and crazy doctors with obsessions with collecting/transplanting testicles?)
I did think Marley Shelton was excellent in the film and a lot of the stuff with her paralysed hands works extremely well! There was some fun with seeing all the characters getting little moments which then crop up again to give them small moments of triumph, such as Shelton finally getting feeling in her hand at a crucial moment, or Cherry's go-go moves paying off in the action climax. Lots of foreshadowing and pay-offs such as those occur for every character!
In the end though I was left feeling both the films were vastly overextended, even more than the ten minutes added for their extended cuts. Both became wearying at around the 75 minute mark and it might be because of this strange kind of post modern superiority that I keep mentioning (again only in context of what I see in the films rather than making any judgement about the particular filmmaker's personal attitudes). There is a kind of joke about the lack of characterisation in grindhouse films and both films seem to keep the audience's engagement with the characters to a minimum while at the same time spending a lot of time in conversations that would only deepen characters if we had been able to connect to them on more than a post-modern level. So there are sequences that would normally develop characters but are not able to do so because of the premise of the films being parodies of exploitation films, yet at the same time both films by including such scenes end up lacking the pacing of a good exploitation flick - forget the one missing reel, there were a good three or four points in Planet Terror where a missing reel could have been added to keep the action up while removing as much of the plot mechanics as possible!
At least Planet Terror felt more faithful to its sources than Death Proof and there were a few stand out sequences and funny lines such as Fergie's 'no brainer' and "I don't suppose there are any other biochemical engineers around?" It was also nice to see 'the poor man's Michael Biehn', Jeff Fahey, playing Michael Biehn's brother and it is always great to see Tom Savini ripped apart!
The stand out part of the whole Grindhouse experiment were the trailers. They allowed for the parody, the hyperbolic narration and most importantly the removal of all the long, deadly dull scenes!
It might be strange but I do not really want the long version of Machete, Thanksgiving, Don't or Werewolf Women of the SS. They work perfectly in trailer form and give more of a sense of what the whole project was working towards than the Death Proof and Planet Terror feature films did themselves. You would also never get the brilliant smash cut from the Machete trailer from the bad guy asking where his wife and daughter are to the waterfall threesome!
One of the great things about exploitation trailers is that they distill often terrible films down into their great moments, the moments that define the film as they show the essence of the ideas which made the film worth making!
I also find it very strange that these films had all their dirt and scratches digitally added - couldn't they just have filmed on actual film and dragged it around a parking lot to get real wear and tear on it, added actual splices and cigarette burns? Otherwise it just seems like an extra pretentious touch added to show just how crappy these films as supposed to look for audiences who might never have seen poorly preserved film material, ironic when we consider the emphasis in forums like this one on how good films are supposed to look!
But really my only big criticism for both of the films is that I wish they had gone even further with their experiment and taken their films into even more extreme, absurd and disturbing areas. It seems obvious why the films failed to be successful at the US box office - they were too strange and niche to be a big hit for mainstream audiences and too tame for fans of the genres they are referencing.
This was only compounded by the films being separated here in the UK and the almost schizophrenic marketing of 'La Boulevard De La Mort' being worthy of a Cannes showing while Planet Terror got a quiet release later on once all the hype (even if it was negative) had died down and everyone had moved on.
A couple of things to say in defence of the films though - I love Rose McGowan and she gets a great role in Planet Terror and as I mentioned above a nicely complementary one in Death Proof. The soundtracks are great as well. Finally, I would much rather see films like these that even though I do not think they work as well as they could still show some personal interests of the filmmakers in their choice of subjects rather than a completely commerically minded decision.
But please, please stop QT acting!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Sun Dec 09, 2007 3:30 am, edited 9 times in total.
Holy shit, colinr0380. Out of curiosity I c&p'd your post into word perfect and checked the word count. It's 3313 words long. I think this might be a record; hell, it's longer than the essay I'm about to sit down and begin.
I'll probably end up reading all of it, too.
Last edited by Mr Sausage on Sun Dec 02, 2007 7:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Well I did have two films I used the post to think through my reaction to, a bunch of trailers and QT's career slide to cover!
Also I think I need a good editor to shape my rambling into something coherent, stop me repeating myself and help me to be more concise with my comments!
colinr0380 wrote:Well I did have two films I used the post to think through my reaction to, a bunch of trailers and QT's career slide to cover!
Also I think I need a good editor to shape my rambling into something coherent, stop me repeating myself and help me to be more concise with my comments!
Please, do not take that as a criticism. I read the whole thing and it was worth it. You're one of the few members who has earned the ability to write very long posts.
(I also just realized that for some reason I cannot figure out I called you "zedz." Mistake has been corrected).
colinr0380 wrote:so I enjoyed Planet Terror but never really found it exciting or with anything particularly new to say.
Though I found Planet Terror exciting and it was one of my favorite movies this year, the latter criticism (nothing new to say) is my only major problem with the film. If you want to see something new and refreshing in that genre, I really recommend you see Fido.
It sort of begs the question if the firm who came up with this idea actually watched Death Proof. Seems like this would make far more sense for Planet Terror.
Also, does any else notice that since the films have been split, Planet Terror has been pretty much ignored? I wonder if this is purely a marketing decision or if there is an actually rift between Tarantino and Rodriguez or Rodriguez and the Weinsteins.
Ignored by who/what?
I think Death Proof gets talked about more on the internet because it's so divisive: People either hate it and want to rant against it or they love it and feel the need to defend it. Planet Terror inspires far less drastic, non-binary responses and so there doesn't feel as much a need to talk/write about it.
Perhaps you're right domino. It's just as the films have gone overseas virtually nothing has been heard of in terms of discussion or promotion of Planet Terror. It may be happening but I haven't seen it.
Yeah, especially seeing how there are no severed arms in Death Proof and the only real "gore" in that film is on screen for about two seconds, this marketing doesn't make any sense.
Dylan wrote:
Yeah, especially seeing how there are no severed arms in Death Proof and the only real "gore" in that film is on screen for about two seconds, this marketing doesn't make any sense.
colinr0380 wrote:
At least Planet Terror felt more faithful to its sources than Death Proof
Depends what you mean by that. While re-watching my Planet Terror DVD recently, I was reminded by several shots of similar set-ups in John Carpenter films, especially Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape From New York. Then, on the audio commentary, Rodriguez admits that he wasn't really doing a 70s movie, he was doing an 80s film. He even acknowledged the debt to Carpenter, going so far as to claim that PT would fit perfectly between EFNY and The Thing (except, I presume, for the text messaging). Now that I've heard him say that it makes complete sense. Of course, Carpenter was never a grindhouse director, so now we're gonna have to listen to every dickfor complain that R didn't deliver what was advertised.
Anyway, I'd agree that PT is more faithful to Carpenter than DP is to, say, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.
colinr0380 wrote:
At least Planet Terror felt more faithful to its sources than Death Proof
Depends what you mean by that. While re-watching my Planet Terror DVD recently, I was reminded by several shots of similar set-ups in John Carpenter films, especially Assault on Precinct 13 and Escape From New York. Then, on the audio commentary, Rodriguez admits that he wasn't really doing a 70s movie, he was doing an 80s film.
Anyway, I'd agree that PT is more faithful to Carpenter than DP is to, say, Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry.
True - but if he was trying to make the 'lost John Carpenter film' from the early 80s as he states in his commentary then I think he completely failed - no John Carpenter film would ever be so incoherent as Planet Terror. That is why I'd ignore all Rodriguez's wishful thinking and bracket it with the 80s Italian films, which it seems closer to whether intentional or not. However I still don't think Planet Terror reaches the craziness of something like Nightmare City or Contamination even if it matches their 'anything goes' approach to an infected rampage!
Last edited by colinr0380 on Sun Dec 09, 2007 3:32 am, edited 1 time in total.
