Criminally Underrated: Jackie Brown

Jackie Brown is one of my favorite movies, and I've been meaning to write a full post on it forever. I wrote a brief piece for my lovely Twitter pal Sasha James a while ago, and now I've done a longer, if still insufficient (given my deep love of the film) article on the movie for Spectrum Culture's "Criminally Underrated" series. And even now I'm still not satisfied with commenting on the film; I may yet write an even larger piece on the movie and how it shapes my entire view of Quentin Tarantino.

But for now, head on over to Spectrum Culture to read my review of this incredible, occasionally neglected, masterpiece.

Second Thoughts: Inglourious Basterds

Warning -- contains spoilers

The first time I tried out one of these companion pieces to an old review, for Adventureland, I re-evaluated my positive but simplistic reading of the film, finding justification for the four stars I originally gave it and delving deep enough into the source material without the specter of my paper’s word limit to hamper me. In the case of Inglourious Basterds, I already gave it five stars, giving it nowhere to go but down, but I’ll be damned if I knock it one bit. I also agree with everything I said about it, which makes this a relatively useless post. Yet watching it for the third time, now able to pause and jot down notes as opposed to scribbling shorthand in the dark, I find even more to celebrate.

As I noted in my reviews of the Kill Bill movies (Basterds’ logical antecedent, aesthetically and morally), Tarantino displayed a surprising maturity coming off of the bloodbath that was Vol. 1, steering his revenge fantasy into not exactly a sobering meditation on the idea of vengeance but certainly a deeper look at the subject under all that fun. It is of course easy to simplify Tarantino’s work into that of a trash-loving, sub-Godardian man-child, a notion that can largely be traced to Tarantino himself and the public image he’s crafted. Yet a careful review of his corpus reveals him to be one of the most notable moralists in modern cinema, albeit one who stresses the visceral enjoyment of his films over strict messaging (God bless you, Quentin). Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown all concern characters who, like those in Scorsese’s crime pictures such as Mean Streets or GoodFellas, are trapped in lives of crime, unable or unwilling to break free into normalcy. Kill Bill, especially in light of its upcoming sequels and their rumored plots, details a cycle of violence and revenge doomed to repeat forever.

Tarantino examines a similar idea with Basterds, only where Kill Bill demonstrated the cyclical nature of revenge Basterds shows its utterly destructive impact. Admittedly, the idea of a Jewish revenge fantasy against the Nazis has a certain appeal to it, and Tarantino’s style is so frenetic and informed by pop culture ensures that Basterds will be a fun ride. But, over the course of 2-1/2 hours of brilliant dialogue and frenzied mimesis, the film presents the darker side of vengeance.

Because, first and foremost, Inglourious Basterds is a Western, one that reshapes the whole of America into the Old West and presents Europe as the civilized East. Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) is a Tennessean hillbilly, sporting what appears to be a lynching scar. These traits, however, do not stray too terribly far from Western tropes: numerous Western protagonists are ex-Confederates, Southerners like this violent good ol’ boy, and a lynching scar could just as easily be a failed hanging out in the desert. Raine’s assertion that he “has a little Injun in [him]” only further ties him to the idea of the West – he reminds me in some small way of Ethan Edwards from The Searchers, a film that is openly referenced at the beginning as the camera watches Shosanna flee the farm through a door frame. Westerns, of course, revolve chiefly around the idea of personal morality in a world where the “law” is the biggest criminal of all. If Europe represents the more developed East, then those in the West understandably do not trust the powers that be. With Europe under the control of a “Jew-hatin', mass murderin' maniac,” men like Raine feel the need to enact their own brand of justice to find sense in the world.

Yet Tarantino presents Raine, more than any of the other characters, as a rigid, inane fool, unable to process anything other than the desire to kill. Perhaps his heart is in the right place – he assembles a team of Jewish soldiers to seek vengeance for the Nazis’ anti-Semitism, and for all we know he received his neck scar while attempting to help African-Americans in some capacity – but his approach is brutal. Interestingly, Tarantino cuts from Raine’s speech about the “cruelty” they will inflict upon the Germans not to a vision of that cruelty but first to Hitler himself, every bit as narrow-minded and over-the-top as the lieutenant. By cutting to Hitler before showing the actions of the Basterds, Tarantino stresses the link between the atrocities of the two, Hitler’s own outrage at the horrors inflicted upon him as hypocritical as Aldo’s. To bring back the Searchers connection, Aldo’s punishment of carving swastikas into the foreheads of the Nazis he allows to live recalls Ethan’s tendency to shoot out the eyes of every dead Comanche. Ethan knew enough about the race he hated that he mutilated bodies according to their customs, while Aldo’s “branding” has a horrific real-life corollary to Nazis etching Stars of David into rabbis before executing them. Other connections between the “good” Basterds and the “bad” Nazis exist, such as the nicknaming of supporting characters, Donny “The Bear Jew” Donowitz and SS Colonel Hans “Jew Hunter” Landa. Both express a fondness for their titles, as both have earned them. And just as Landa treats Jew hunting as a form of sport (to the point that he lets Shosanna go free simply to give him something to do later), so too do the Basterds regard Donny’s vicious method of killing, clubbing Nazis with a wooden baseball bat, as entertainment. Raine even says it's “the closest we ever get to going to the movies.”

Some critics, including Jonathan Rosenbaum and Daniel Mendelsohn, charged the movie with turning Jews into Nazis, which is precisely the point. Yes, Inglourious Basterds is a celebratory affair, what with its mass appropriation of Morricone scores, perverted New Wave ideals and a sudden break in the narrative so Samuel L. Jackson can provide a back-story straight out of an exploitation movie for a character named for an exploitation actor. His camera movements also have a wit to them, as when his camera moves back and forth between Aldo, Wicki and the co-operative German soldier as Aldo arrogantly barks demands, which Wicki calmly translates before the soldier immediately obeys every command in terror. But as for the story itself, one should note that most of the characters engaged in various schemes for vengeance die; some, like Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), before even knowing the satisfaction of vengeance.

Orphaned by Landa, Shosanna hides out in Paris for three years until opportunity knocks: Pvt. Zoller, a lovestruck German hero (Daniel Brühl) convinces Goebbels to hold the premiere of his latest propaganda film at Shosanna’s theater. She concocts a plan to lock the doors and burn the place to the ground and for the rest of the film is blinded by her desire for revenge. Her hatred is understandable, but it corrupts her. Just as The Bride had moments of cold realization and regret after killing both O-Ren and Bill, Shosanna sobers later when she looks upon Zoller’s (seemingly) dead body, juxtaposed against a shot on the theater screen of his cherubic face, still lined with baby fat, and she understands in that moment that Zoller’s life, while not as terrible as her own, was also forcibly shaped by the Nazis¹. And when she turns him over only to find him alive, he takes his revenge upon her just as she took out her Nazi hatred on him.

In my original review, I compared the climactic slaughter in the theater to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom. It is not a perfect analogy: Powell’s film was intentionally disturbing where Tarantino deals in revelry. Yet they're not far off: Peeping Tom was a thriller that detailed the audience’s role as voyeur at the Cineplex, positioning its tortured protagonist as the representative of both the director and audience, deriving a certain psychosexual pleasure from his kills even as the film’s true audience blanched and protested. Similarly, Tarantino uses the German propaganda film and its audience to contrast with the reaction of the Inglourious Basterds audience which, if my two theatrical viewings were any indication, wild enthusiasm. Without forcing the point or lessening the visceral impact of the moment, Tarantino paints us as no different from the Nazis cheering the mounting pile of dead Americans on-screen, something Americans are accustomed to when the dead in question are German or, depending on what costumes are being worn, British. Of the four “good” guys who enter, only one escapes alive, the rest killed either by a momentary lapse of planning or through an off-putting display of terrorism. One could potentially assign a relevancy to Kill Bill, its cycle of violence mirroring America’s retaliatory strikes and the future generation of terrorists they bred, but Basterds’ connection to the present is unmistakable: here it shows the Americans, somewhat justified in their hatred of an identifiable evil, losing themselves in their own atrocity to stop that force.

The readings don’t stop there, however. Moving beyond Tarantino’s exploration of revenge, one can view Inglourious Basterds as a film about language. In a roundtable discussion with Tarantino, Pitt and Elvis Mitchell included on the DVD and Blu-Ray, the director explained that the idea of all the actors speaking English “with an accent” repulsed him. His conversations have always created tension from their loquacity, framing heavy chunks of dialogue around brief, darkly funny but brutal spurts of violence. Removing the language barriers would cast aside the potential for great suspense. In the opening scene, Landa has the farmer switch to English because, as we discover 10 minutes later, it allowed them to converse without alerting the Jews hiding under M. LaPadite’s floorboards.

In an even longer sequence, the masterfully drawn-out half hour in the cellar of a tavern, Tarantino reaches the apotheosis of the lingual explorations of his career. In the same roundtable discussion, Tarantino noted that, while someone could obviously speak multiple languages, the idea that simple fluency would allow unlimited access for a spy is just as basic and false as the rewriting of all parts into English. The tavern scene is an exercise in restraint (you heard me), the likes of which is rarely seen in modern American cinema: it relies entirely on the suspense of a situation meant to be simple and painless that goes wrong from the start. The two German Bastards, Wicki and Stiglitz, accompany the British spy Lt. Hicox (Michael Fassbender), a hilariously stiff-upper-lipped chap channeling his inner Sean Connery, to the tavern to meet German film star/Allied spy Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Krüger). It was supposed to be a simple meet-and-greet followed by a return to the rest of the Basterds, but a German NCO became a father and thus took the gang out to celebrate. Half of the sequence plays out as a joke, with the group of Germans playing their silly guess-who? game and the spies lingering so as not to draw suspicion by leaving just as they arrived. Then, the Brit begins to give himself away; his German never falters, but his accent is funny, and a Gestapo major steps in and drags out the scene further until, at last, Hicox reveals himself by holding up three fingers to order shots in the English, not the German (or French, if I recall my classes correctly) manner.

Of course, this sequence serves to thin the Basterds of their German-speaking crew, allowing for a deliriously funny bit that plays on the American indifference to other languages. Bridget, wounded but capable of making the premiere, fatalistically asks if any of the surviving Basterds can speak a language, any language, but English, three of them – Raine, Donowitz, and Pvt. Omar Ulmer – volunteer to speak Italian; Ulmer can’t even speak the language, but that still makes him “third best” at it. Brad Pitt only has one note to play in this warped opera, but damned if he doesn’t bring the house down with his delivery of “Bongiorno.” That moment is pure comedy, but it’s even funnier because it proves Tarantino’s point that using American and English actors for foreign roles is absurd. It also establishes that Raine, comparative to the rest of the major cast, is incapable of change: the man we meet two hours ago is the exact same man we see in this vanilla-colored tux (of course he would dress himself in pure, noble white), and he will be the same man at the very end.

That’s what makes Landa such a perfect foil for the American. Compared to the rigid, two-dimensional Aldo, Landa is a chameleon, able to adapt to any situation to exploit it to his benefit. Fluent in German, English, French and Italian (God knows if he’s got any other dialects bouncing around in his head), Landa was not born to exterminate Jews, and he seems to have no real anti-Semitic hatred of them. He takes to the title of “the Jew Hunter” because his own ability to read situations gives him an insight into a group of people doing everything at their disposal to gain what they want, namely survival. He discerns the Basterds’ plot but decides to “help,” simply because he understands that the success of D-Day will eventually break Nazi rule and he wants to get out while the gettin’s good (not to mention the sizable profit he extracts from the U.S. government). Landa is possibly Tarantino’s finest creation, and inarguably one of the best screen villains ever written, played to perfect by Christoph Waltz, who finds just the right note of peevish arrogance under Landa’s collected, erudite exterior. Like so many brilliant villains, Landa can foresee every contingency save the most simple and glaring: he’s such a masterful schemer and reader of men that he meets his match in Raine, a man too stupid and implacable to be read.

If it seems I am reading too much into the film, that I’m projecting what I perceive as depth onto a filmmaker primarily known for an open foot fetish and discussions about Madonna and Quarter Pounders, perhaps that’s true. But I cannot help but feel that just about everyone, detractors and supporters alike, sell him short. His film quotation may lack the intellectual reasoning of Godard’s, even Jarmusch’s, but his enthusiasm is just as bountiful as theirs. Furthermore, where the characters who inhabit Godard and Jarmusch’s worlds typically exist to explore philosophical conceits, the people who roam Tarantino’s odd creations are fully realized and tangible, no matter how absurd. I believe a clear distinction should be made between Quentin Tarantino, the artist who has bridged the gap between art film and populist entertainment better than anyone outside the New Hollywood group, and “QT,” over-simplifying self-promoter extraordinaire, the man who discusses his films in terms of the movies he’s referencing or playing up how sexy his leading ladies are (though he’s actually written some of the finer parts for women in modern American movies)². Tarantino’s films are all worlds that beckon the audience to come inside even as the characters are desperate to break out of it. For all of its fist-pumping, Nazi-killin’ glee, Inglourious Basterds is a decidedly bleak affair, one that uses its exuberant use of film history and quotation not simply to parade the director’s pop culture knowledge but as an integral part of its structure, then applies that elation into a sobering look at the effects of terrorism on both sides of the ideological line. Inglourious Basterds isn’t simply the best movie of the year; it is a reminder that great films can still be fun as hell.

¹In Tarantino's script, the director adds a passage for this moment that reads thus:

Her eyes go from the audience...
.up to the big screen...
.Which holds FREDRICK ZOLLER in a tight handsome CLOSE UP.
The Face on the silver screen, breaks the young girl's
heart...

²I think it's revealing that Tarantino, never at a loss for words, never records a DVD commentary for his own work (save a track for True Romance, which he didn't direct).
³In an ancillary note, I must say how much I love the way Tarantino presents Landa's pent-up feelings as warped sexual explosions. The first such example, the strudel scene, shows him viciously attacking his food with testosterone-fueled gusto, to the point that he has to enjoy a cigarette afterward (furthermore, the scene ends with the woman, Shosanna, gasping for air with tears streaming down her face). The second, his confrontation with Bridget Von Hammersmark, starts with a sort of foreplay as he slowly, elegantly removes her shoe and ends with him choking her (choking enhances sexual pleasure, which is why some people die from autoerotic asphyxiation), shot from angles that make the action look like a sexual act.

Kill Bill: Vol. 2

Just as Kill Bill: Vol. 1 closed with a reflective moment that pointed the way to its sequel, so too does Vol. 2 begin with a moment of self-reflexive peevishness to link it to its predecessor: The Bride drives in a car against a background that is clearly a rear-projection effect and speaks directly to the camera in a camp monologue that essentially proves that Tarantino can't even get to his film's title without a speech of some sort.


From there, however, Vol. 2 becomes a different beast entirely from its wacky sibling. It begins properly on the same segment that opened Vol. 1 and provides the full backstory of The Bride's near-death at the hands of her former colleagues. It's a brilliant vignette that shows a pregnant Bride rehearsing her wedding in a quaint chapel in Texas, with a gentle build-up from a nice but somewhat condescending reverend to Samuel L. Jackson's contractually guaranteed appearance in every QT film. The Bride goes outside for some fresh air and finds...Bill (David Carradine ) She doesn't seem frightened, and Bill, with his long hair and pipe flute, hardly looks intimidating. They hold a civil, even pleasant, conversation, Bill asking her why she's giving up her old life and The Bride describing how she's found happiness in this simpler life. Bill comes inside with her and she, in a misguided attempt to avoid trouble, introduces her former lover as her father. Tommy, the fiancé , asks "Dad" to give The Bride away, and immediately the scene takes a turn. Bill's tone of voice drops just enough to let us know that something's gone horribly wrong, and Tarantino pulls the camera outside the chapel in time to see the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad arrive with machine guns.

With this severe and tense opening, Tarantino balances the the pronounced Asian influence of the first film with a spaghetti western feel. Kill Bill: Vol. 2 is dusty, arid and punishing where Vol. 1 was sleek and raffish. In fact, Vol. 2's more campy moments directly involve martial arts segments, while the humor elsewhere is as dry as the desert where much of the film's action occurs. Tarantino moves from that chilling opening scene to the present, with Bill driving to a mobile home in the middle of the desert to meet with his brother Budd (Michael Madsen ), a broken-down sad-sack who works as a bouncer at a local strip club that is so empty his only task is to clean the flood-prone ladies' bathroom. The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad members we've heretofore seen had all found a certain contentment in their "retirements": Green lived the domestic life while O-Ren fought her way to the top of Japan's criminal underworld. But Budd's story has an air of tragedy, or at least would if he had any redeeming qualities. Bill hasn't spoken to his brother in years, and Budd says that he pawned his Hattori Hanzŏ sword when asked if he kept up his swordsmanship. We learn later that this is a lie, signifying two things: Budd, ragged and defeated as he is, has a fundamental threshold of dignity, and he knows that telling his brother he sold his sword signifies that their relationship is beyond repair. At last, the Tarantino gift for character re-emerges.

The influence of Westerns has of course been evident through both films primarily in the omission of The Bride's true name, going so far as to censor any spoken reference to it in Vol. 1. Tarantino slyly plays up the mystery of the (Wo)Man with No Name conceit, and by dumping the reveal of her identity -- Beatrix Kiddo -- in the middle of the film in an amusing aside, he cheekily subverts the idea that withholding a character's name makes him or her more dangerous. There are also a handful of shots that could sneak their way into a pantheon of great Western shots, such as a dissolve from a shot of the sun with perfect lens flaring into a slowly focusing profile of Beatrix, dirty and battered, shuffling her way through the desert looking sun-dried and weak but wired with pure rage, the fading sun surrounding her head like a terrifying halo.


Kill Bill in its entirety is, naturally, a personal film, given that it concerns a woman seeking her own brand of justice for crimes committed against her, but Vol. 2 feels that much more intimate. She's literally boxed-in when Budd springs a trap and buries her alive, and she reminisces about her time with cruel martial arts master Pei Mei (Gordon Liu, who also played the leader of the Crazy 88 in the last film), who pushes a younger, undisciplined Beatrix to the breaking point where up to now she was a formidable warrior. Tarantino reflects the constricted mood by constantly framing his characters inside the shot: as Beatrix sneaks into Budd's mobile home, he hears a noise and comes to the trailer's small window to scan the area. Pei Mei can punch through wood only inches away, each blow opening a new window, and a later flashback involving Beatrix realizing she's pregnant and being attack by a rival assassin group ends with the sent killer framed in a hole made by a shotgun blast before leaving.


Even the enemies have a closer connection to Kiddo. Vernita shared a mutual professional respect with Beatrix and O-Ren was likely friends with The Bride, but Budd is the brother of the lover who wronged her, while Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) is the perfect foil for Beatrix. Like Thurman, Hannah is a tall, intimidating blonde , but Elle is a sadist where Beatrix has some level of humanity. The two women clearly hate each other, but they also share a begrudging respect for one another, and Beatrix brings out the only sense of honor in Elle: Driver poisoned Pai Mei for plucking our her eyeball for insolence and she hides a black mamba in a suitcase of money to kill Budd. She does this because she cannot stomach the idea of Beatrix, "the finest woman [she] ever met," dying in such a shameful manner at the hands of an oaf. (Blade Runner fans will also get a kick out of Elle's demise, as Hannah's wild thrashing matches her death scene in that film).

Shifting the focus from the blank desire for revenge onto the genuine characteristics and humanity of Beatrix requires Thurman to stretch out a bit from simply looking gorgeous and deadly, but she rises to the task with gusto. When she finally reaches Bill and finds her daughter whom she thought dead, Tarantino exhibits the most emotion he's ever allowed to be shown in one of his films as Thurman's doe eyes fight back tears. This scene, which opens the final bit of the saga, sets the stage for a serious rumination on revenge and violence.

In the scene preceding Kiddo's reunion with Bill and B.B., Beatrix visits an old Mexican pimp in a border town who knows Bill's whereabouts. More important that Bill's location, though, is what we learn about him through this man: as Beatrix notes in her narration, a young, fatherless Bill did what all fatherless children did and sought father figures. This pimp runs the border town with a militia of his whores' bastard children and mutilates the face of any prostitute who steps out of line, but he used to take Bill to the movies, where the little kid developed his first crush on Lana Turner that shaped his obsession with blondes. If Vihalo represents the sort of men who shaped Bill's youth, it's no wonder he grew up to be an insane, possessive killer. Indeed, he seems to have passed his sociopathy onto B.B., who watches bloody samurai films alongside her educational cartoons and admits to taking her goldfish out its bowl and watching it flop around before stepping on it. But she also contains some of Beatrix's morality, confessing that, after she killed the fish, she felt remorse for the first time.

B.B.'s presence in the film shows how the cycle repeats itself: Bill, in a brilliant speech comparing Beatrix and her desire for normalcy to Superman and his alter-ego (his real costume according to Bill), reveals his knowledge of Beatrix's psyche, and he knows that she enjoyed the thrill of killing even if he didn't force the answers out of her with truth serum. While Kiddo will offer love and support for B.B., she's so fundamentally outside of typical social norms that the child will be at least partially shaped by her mother's bloodlust. Furthermore, Tarantino's recent announcement of a planned third (and possibly fourth) volume concerning the desire for those left alive but wounded in some way by Beatrix seeking revenge and a fourth presumably focusing upon B.B.'s reaction to Vol. 3's outcome demonstrates how Tarantino is setting the child up to help continue the cycle of violence and vengeance and its all-consuming nature, a theme he revisited with Inglourious Basterds.

The end of the film, featuring Beatrix locked in a bathroom crying until her sobs turn into laughter, reminds me of the last shot of Sergio Leone's Once Upon a Time in America, in which De Niro's character, aged and alone, crawls fatalistically into a bed in an opium den and the film freezes on his peculiar facial expression, his drug-induced smile potentially a sign of inner contentment following a preceding flashback or a haunting reflection of that flashback's insincerity and manufactured comfort aided by the opium. Beatrix cries for Bill, whom she still loves in some way, but she laughs because she won and reclaimed her daughter. But in that laugh is a hint of madness, an indication that she will never find normalcy in life and that she and B.B. are in for a potentially rough ride ahead. For the moment, however,Tarantino is content to give Kiddo her moment.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1

Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill is a two-part "movie-movie" that tells one story yet begs to be considered separately of its two films, not simply because the they project largely different moods but because each is such an orgiastic display of obscure film knowledge that even a reviewer who largely does not recognize and identify the majority of the references to Western and Eastern cinema outside of broad genre familiarity (such as this reviewer) cannot hope to contain the films' sheer sense of mimetic revelry in one review.

Of the two, Vol. 1 is the more audacious: who else but Tarantino would dare to open his film with a stark black-and-white shot of a pregnant woman begging for her life, then jump from that scene and the somber opening credits to a brightly lit, dazzlingly quaint suburb where two hot chicks engage in a kung fu fight straight out of an exploitation movie? Yes, Kill Bill: Vol. 1 is a film that announces that it's style over substance from the start, one built on a story of vengeance that affords more emotional weight to a samurai sword than the plight of its wronged heroine (in this installment at least).


The style, though speaks for itself. Vol. 1 is, quite possibly, the most immaculately composed action movie since Kurosawa's Yojimbo or High and Low. Even as someone whose understanding of visual composition extends only so far as a loose grasp on the rule of thirds (which this film helped me learn), I stand mesmerized by Tarantino's acuity.

Good thing, too, as it keeps me from focusing too deeply on the plot. Tarantino, of course, tells the story out of order, so we meet The Bride (Uma Thurman) when she's beaten to a pulp and awaiting the worst. She only has time to tell her tormentor, "Bill, it's your baby" before she's shot in the head and sent into a coma. Then we leap four years into the future as she tracks down one of the people of her old squad of assassins who betrayed her. The woman, Jeannie Bell a.k.a.Vernita Green a.k.a. "Copperhead" (Vivica A. Fox), a colleague in the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, is not the first name on The Bride's list, we later learn, and Tarantino eventually doubles back to cover that as well.

Where the non-linear storytelling of Pulp Fiction added a degree of excitement to its freewheeling joy, the temporal distortion of Kill Bill is more an affectation, a holdover from the writer-director's apparent need to live by Jean-Luc Godard's maxim, "A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end...but not necessarily in that order." Vol. 1's structure exists, it would seem, to ensure that the final, more outlandish, fight occurs at the end of the film rather than its chronologically appropriate time before the shorter duel between Copperhead and The Bride (once code-named "Black Mamba"). Couldn't Tarantino have simply written the film so the less epic fight came first? Well, perhaps not, as Vol. 2 shows the fights growing increasingly anticlimactic (more on that later).

Of course, if the film's temporal structure is nothing more than an affectation, it certainly doesn't stand out against the rest of the film. One can defend his Death Proof primarily on the grounds that "it's supposed to be cheesy and dull," an argument built on sand but largely true, as Tarantino is so loyal to his beloved B-movies that he would design a film to deliberately ape their banal segments as well as their exciting ones. You see the first traces of it here, though Vol. 1 is anything but boring: after adding his own voice to Elmore Leonard's work in adapting Rum Punch into Jackie Brown, Tarantino here filters his unique voice through the sieves of Chinese wuxia and Japanese yakuza flicks, jidai-geki and kung fu; thus, characters spit out hilariously stilted dialogue focused solely on warrior codes of honor, vengeance and purity: ex-Viper O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), a half-Japanese half-Chinese woman born and raised on an American military base, climbs to the top of the Yakuza power ladder, she only expresses rage when one chauvinistic, xenophobic lieutenant decries her mixed blood ("expresses rage" might be too soft a phrasing to communicate the severing of a head).


For those who wish to catalog the specific spoken and visual references, godspeed. Vol. 1 takes Pulp Fiction and snorts Vincent's prime heroin, resulting in a bloody, foaming frenzy of film quotation. The most obvious form of genre reverence is easily witnessed in the casting of Sonny Chiba, king of the Japanese martial arts films, as Muramasa-esque master bladesmith Hattori Hanzŏ, a character itself named for the real-life ninja Chiba played in Shadow Warriors. The plot itself, of a woman exacting revenge for the death of her family, comes from a 1973 Japanese film Lady Snowblood. Those with time to kill might enjoy perusing an unofficial list of the various films and television shows references and marveling at the obscurity of some of his choices.

This mimetic orgy more or less allows Tarantino to get away with murder. Critics have accused the director of glorifying violence from the on-set of his career, but Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown largely alluded to the violence. Even the infamous ear scene in Dogs was blocked from our view by the assailant. Tarantino's movies, including his recent Basterds, create the illusion of gratuitous violence by teasing out situations with suspense that is practically, well, not Hitchcockian, as it relies on strength of character; where Hitch drew us in with the ominous threat of some device, Tarantino uses his loquaciousness to make us give a damn about these characters and to hang on every threatening word. When violence at last erupts, it's brief and brutal, occasionally funny in a gallows way but even in those situations carrying an undercurrent of vicious finality.

Kill Bill: Vol. 1 doesn't much give a damn about that; after suffering the abuses of misrepresenting critics for years, he finally decided to become what they'd always cast him as and absolutely let loose.Tarantino takes the so-called "blood explosion" from the end of Kurosawa's Sanjuro and uses it for every severed appendage -- and oh boy are there a lot of them. Refusing to use CGI, QT uses the wire works that made a return to prominence with the Matrix films and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, but for all the skill of the choreography, the violence is decidedly campy. People fly through the air after receiving a normal punch or lose arms in comedic fashions; Vol. 1 presents all the violence Tarantino supposedly injected into all of his films, but it's so absurd that the swifter kills of his other films maintain a severity and an unsettling feeling where this is just the hyperviolent equivalent of a sugar rush. Even in a film as unsubtle and meaningless as this, Tarantino's sly enough to make the film's animated segment its least cartoonish part.


The House of Blue Leaves showdown in particular stands as a hallmark of contemporary action sequencing even if it's all one big joke. The prolonged fight with the Crazy 88 is a madcap free-for-all as wildly visceral and unhinged as it is meticulously crafted. Before the fight breaks out, Tarantino's camera roams the restaurant as if searching for the action, but in his Scorsesian tracking shots he builds a mood of tension simply by breaking from The Bride's POV for a few minutes. In Uma Thurman's tall, powerful presence we feel safe, but Tarantino turns the patrons and employees of the restaurant all into devices because by following them we assume that they will soon prove important. The actual fight is an exercise in formalism, using flawless editing, framing and mise-en-scène all while keeping our attention rooted in the action of the characters and not those behind the camera. Supposedly, the proposed conjoined version of the two films, dubbed "The Whole Bloody Affair," reinserts all the censored footage and plays in color (I guess the decision to film most of it in monochrome allowed it to pass the MPAA board, which for any other body would be the stupidest thing you could imagine them demanding but for them is something more akin to a typical Tuesday). Having seen the color version, which appeared in the Japanese release, I have to confess a certain fondness for the high contrast black-and-white that gives the OTT bloodbath a certain elegance.

Yet while that sequence works and works brilliantly, aspects of Kill Bill: Vol. 1 are trapped in the director's movie-movie euphoria. As with Spielberg and the Indiana Jones films, Tarantino is so loyal to the B-movies that inform his project that he also ports over some of the unfortunate racism of those movies; in one extraneous scene, a Japanese man with the most hideous fake buck teeth since Mickey Rooney offended his way into our hearts in Breakfast at Tiffany's accosts O-Ren's psychotic 17-year-old bodyguard Gogo (Chiaki Kuriyama). Furthermore, the music selection, normally a Tarantino staple, is the weakest of his career. It's not that the music is bad, and indeed its broad sampling of the Green Hornet and Twisted Nerve themes along with contributions from the RZA, Japanese guitarist Tomoyasu Hotei, all-gal garage rock band The 5.6.7.8's and more is perfectly appropriate for a film that exists on the strength of its odd references. But where the music of his other films helps not only to create a world but invite the audience into it, here it's simply another part of the referencing.

Still, the worst thing I can say about Vol. 1 is that, compared to Tarantino's more substantive use of references and violence, it is merely a "fun" movie, an bizarre charge to level against a film and even more useless when you consider how absurdly enjoyable the film is. In The Bride we find the greatest example of a female character kicking butt with a blatantly phallic weapon since Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And there is some depth when we reach the end, when The Bride emerges from her slaughter to face O-Ren and, without ever making it explicitly clear, the director lets us know that the two assassins used to be friends. Tarantino's non-linear structure finds its relevancy here, as we see the first emotional consequence of The Bride's quest for vengeance, followed by a reminiscence of The Bride's time with Hanzŏ, where he gives her his final sword with a warning: "Revenge is never a straight line. It's a forest. And like a forest it's easy to lose your way, to get lost, to forget where you came in." With this line, juxtaposed harshly against the cartoony glee of the preceding bloodbath, Tarantino sets the stage for a more mature rumination on the theme of revenge, one that he would explore not only in the film's next chapter but in his most recent opus.

Inglourious Basterds

It occurred to me right before I walked into the theater to see Quentin Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds that perhaps the reason for his bizarrely misspelled title was to ensure that newspapers could print it without fear of censorship. I don't know if that's true, but the film certainly deserves as much press as it can get. Described by its director as "a spaghetti western but with World War II iconography," it combines the maturity of his Jackie Brown with the cartoonish joy of Kill Bill and the audacity of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. If it is not his greatest film, it is certainly his most daring.

The title describes a small unit of Jewish-American soldiers led by Tennessean Lt. Aldo Raine, sent behind enemy lines before the D-day invasion to wreak havoc in Nazi-occupied France. As is Tarantino’s M.O., the actions of these eight are largely alluded to, shown only in the briefest of snippets that make the campy nature of what is -- on a deceptively simple surface layer -- a Jewish revenge fantasy even funnier. That's impressive when you consider that the action scenes in the film are taut, short and thoroughly brutal, a frank depiction of the horror of war. So frank, perhaps, that we have to laugh.

The timeline jumps immediately after the character introductions to a rather camp Hitler panicking over the Basterds’ successes, as the insurgents -- Tarantino casually drops sly equations of the soldiers to terrorists a few times -- have picked up nicknames that only enhance their mystery and intimidation: the scalp-loving Raine becomes “Aldo the Apache,” the bat-wielding Donny (Eli Roth) “the Bear Jew.”

But this, to the undoubted dismay of some, is not simply an exercise in video game Nazi killing. Those disappointed likely wish it contained more of the violence for which Tarantino found fame. But I fear some people have their own fabricated image of what typically constitutes Taratino's violence, as his films largely suggest violence through the dialogue or by placing the result of violence just off-screen. Only Kill Bill Vol. 1 contains any persistent blood and gore, and that movie is so marvelously cartoony that you don't take it seriously. That the Basterds would take a back seat in their own movie actually makes sense in the director's world.

Far more integral to the story is Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), a Jew in hiding from the Nazis who runs a cinema in Paris. When a young war hero (Daniel Brühl) falls for her, he arranges for the premiere of Goebbels’ new propaganda film, of which he is the subject, to be held at her theater, thus allowing her chance for revenge on the entire Nazi high command. Where Raine's tear across France plays like a visceral black comedy revenge story, Shosanna's tale has a personal edge that gives the movie a severity we haven't seen in Tarantino's work in a long time.

The two stories never fully converge, at least not beyond a final setting, but they each promote a similar, thoroughly Tarantinoesque look at history: the story of Raine’s men presents us with a revisionist war movie, one that piles on the director’s seemingly limitless depths of film knowledge into a referential melting point that doesn’t become the sum of its quotations like some of his past efforts. Shosanna’s, on the other hand, looks at history through film itself. When that hero, Zöller introduces himself, he notes that her marquee displays the names of filmmakers who wouldn't normally get top billing, as she simply admires them. When a British soldier is sent to join the Basterds and help them formulate their own plan to burn the cinema, the general in charge of "Operation Kino" (played up by Mike Myers, who comes the closest to overplaying his part but only has one scene) chooses the operative based on his encylopedic knowledge of film history and a deep understanding of German filmmaking both before and during the Third Reich.

Shosanna's plan to use film literally as a weapon reflects the spirit of the nouvelle vague and contrasts brilliantly with the propaganda film to be shown in her cinema; what is propaganda if not psychological warfare? Godard used film as a weapon too: first against itself, to free cinema from the oppressive rules and structure forced upon it, then in his workings with the Dziga Vertov group and beyond blending that radical approach to filmmaking with radical politics to match. Tarantino's approach is as much of a wry nod to that director as the name of his production company, Band Apart.

While I love Death Proof in connection to Grindhouse as a whole, I admit that the writing left a bit to be desired (or a great deal, if you see the extended cut). Inglourious Basterds, however, contains some of Tarantino's finest moments. In the opening scene, Shosanna hides with her family under the floorboards of a dairy farmer's home. The SS Colonel Hans Landa comes to search the place, and in the course of his conversation with the farmer reveals his entire character in frightening progression. As he switches effortlessly between languages and engages in polite discussion with his suspect, we eventually realize that he isn't probing the farmer about the possibility of hidden Jews, he knew where they were before he stepped foot in the house. This one scene not only defines the tension present in much of the film's dialogue but in the film's ability to lead you in one direction only to completely throw you at every turn. Basterds is brilliantly self-referential able to draw incredible suspense from the repeated mention of a glass or milk, or a perversion of the Cinderella tale of the missing shoe. There's also an interesting analysis of the equation by Nazi propaganda of Jews to rats, with Landa bringing up the comparison that people tend to hate rats without any solid reason for doing so; they just hate rats.

In Death Proof, Tarantino fully switched from punchy, idiosyncratic dialogue to full-on verbosity, and in a way he cleverly parodies himself with the dialogue in this film. Conversations are drawn-out until the characters themselves are sick of them: the longer these undercover soldiers or Jewish refugees find themselves trapped in chats with Nazis, the greater the chance they'll be find out. The characters are trying to pull away from the dialogue their writer keeps feeding them, which only furthers the tension. It climaxes with a bloodbath in the theater, and, for all the talk of this being nothing of a revenge fantasy, Tarantino brilliantly contrasts the German audiences who moments before were enjoying watching a film of a soldier mowing down Americans with the audience of Inglourious Basterds watching an inversion of the same. For all its comedy and fun, Basterds offers a sobering look at the cost, both physical and psychological, of vengeance, and the way he forces us to confront, even if many might not notice it, our own sense of bloodlust when it comes to Nazis recalls Michael Powell's brilliant exposé of cinematic voyeurism, Peeping Tom.

Though a few characters aren’t tied up very well (or at all), I can’t find much to fault with Inglourious Basterds. Its perfect cast knows exactly what Tarantino is shooting for here, and they play up the dark humor brilliantly. Brad Pitt, always at his most interesting in comedic roles, commits so thoroughly to Raine’s slack-lipped hick that you can’t help but laugh whenever he’s on-screen; the scene where he tries to speak "Eye-talien" to fool his way past some Nazis is one of the highlights of Pitt's career. But veteran Austrian television actor Christoph Waltz steals the show as the amoral, terrifying Landa, “the Jew Hunter.” Waltz captures Landa’s polite charm and vicious madness in equal measure. Landa is the sort of person who will compliment your impeccable fashion as he stabs through your shirt, always calculating and never caught unaware. He alone is worth the price of admission, and a second viewing.

While Raine’s final line might not reflect the film itself, Inglourious Basterds is an audacious movie you can’t afford to miss. After spending the better part of a decade using his skill for film quotation to create madcap worlds of B-movie revelry, Tarantino has finally returned to his New Wave roots and use them to propel an intelligent story. It lacks the “anything goes” quality of Pulp Fiction, but here at last is a film worthy of the potential he displayed in that film. It also reinforces that nobody -- though many have tried -- can truly nail down what makes Tarantino such a bold and irresistible director. Who else would think to name one of the German-born Basterds Hugo Stiglitz, after a prominent mexploitation actor, and then shatter the film's flow just to give him a stylized backstory complete with narration (from Samuel L. Jackson, no less)? Funny but sincere, beautiful in its grotesqueness, Basterds is one of the finest films of recent years, and proof that Tarantino is at his best when he pays tribute not to genres, but cinema as a whole.

[Ed. Note: Additional, in-depth thoughts can be found in a follow-up post here.]

True Romance

I've mentioned the sad Weinstein spiral elsewhere, but certain films remind me of what a potent force they used to be. When they headed Miramax, they displayed a formidable ability to pluck the hottest unproven talent from the Sundance pool, pair them up with established heavy-hitters, then sit back and let the magic happen. Perhaps the greatest example of this is Good Will Hunting, in which then-unknowns Ben Affleck and Matt Damon (who'd both had acting work but nothing to launch them) wrote and acted under the direction of indie legend Gus Van Sant to great effect and critical acclaim. My personal favorite, however, the closest meeting of the minds, came when Quentin Tarantino, hot off the success of Reservoir Dogs, sold a script to hyperkinetic madman Tony Scott. It was a match made in B-movie heaven.

True Romance, Tarantino's take on romantic comedy, received positive, if muted, response upon its release: critics praised its visceral style and unrelenting bizzaro love tale, but criticized it for the same reasons. Scott and Tarantino later put out a director's cut infinitesimally longer, with only a few scenes placed back in or lengthened just long enough to show more blood, but the added schlock actually fleshes out the picture a bit, giving more time to minor characters (all of whom are played by some mighy familiar faces). What you're left with is a film by two craftsmen perfect for each other, yet just different enough to temper the weaknesses of the other.

Tarantino's dialogue overflows as it flies from the mouth of Clarence Worley (Christian Slater), an Elvis obsessive who is on his way to the art-house theater for a kung-fu marathon on his birthday at the start of the film. He tries to chat up a chick in a bar into coming with him, but she declines. Clarence takes it in stride, and he appears only slightly fazes by the rejection. Then firecracker named Alabama (Patricia Arquette) sits next to him in the theater and asks him to catch her up. Soon, they're sharing pie in a diner and they go back to his place. Alabama runs out afterward, and she admits that she's a call girl (not a prostitute, she says) hired by his boss to show the introvert a good time. Clarence continues to prove an unflappable character, and even admits he figured it was all too good to be true. A twist: Alabama falls for this dope's sweetness, and they quickly elope.

OK, so it's a bit weird, but there's nothing that different from Pretty Woman, albeit knocked down a number of rungs on the social ladder. Then it all goes mad. Clarence tracks down Alabama's pimp, Drexyl, to inform him that Alabama will no longer be in his employ, which naturally ends in violence. Now on the run carrying a sack full of Drexyl's uncut cocaine, Clarence and Alabama try to unload the drugs to provide them with enough money to get away while staying ahead of both the cops and the mafia who funneled their drugs through the pimp.

Slater and Arquette, not normally scene-stealers, prove entirely capable of carrying this film, as you believe their warped but (as the title says) true love. The sweet, milquetoast Clarence can turn on a dime and become a truly intimidating character when someone threatens his beloved, while Alabama, sadly under-developed even in the longer cut, also has a darker side that bubbles to the surface without feeling forced. Both give the finest performances of their careers, and I can't see anyone else pulling their roles off half as well.

Aiding the two is a non-stop cavalcade of fantastic supporting appearances from stars both established and rising. Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper appear in a scene as a mob boss torturing Clarence's father, and their conversation, dubbed "the Sicilian scene" is Tarantino's second best chunk of dialogue following Jules' final speech to "Ringo" in Pulp Fiction. Tarantino received some (possibly justified) flak for what was perceived as unnecessary racist exchanges in Pulp Fiction (i.e. "Dead N-word storage"), but in this scene the writer displays a remarkably sly grasp of racism and how people can be driven by it. Clifford knows that the mobster bases his identity on his Italian heritage, and he also knows that he cannot withstand the torture and will unwilling divulge his son's location. So, he uses his final moments to regale Cocccotti with Sicily's history, specifically that the Moors (Africans) invaded Italy hundreds of years ago and "they changed the bloodline forever." The scene gently crescendoes until Clifford sardonically says that the Sicilians are "part eggplant." Coccotti laughs and engages in the usual "gedda look at this kid" mafioso cheek-pinching before suddenly pulling his gun and shooting Cliff dead. "I haven't killed anybody," Walken hisses, "since 1984." Never does this scene insist upon itself or play its hand too soon, and only at the end do we realize that this was Cliff's plan all along.

Walken and Hopper aren't the only memorable side-players, however; no, True Romance, as with Tarantino's best work, is ultimately an ensemble piece. Gary Oldman pours all of his off-kilter magnetism into Drexyl, the dreadlocked, gold-toothed pimp with such golden lines as "It ain't white boy day, is it?" Years before Tony Soprano thrust him into the spotlight, James Gandolfini plays a ruthless mob thug who "interrogates" Alabama, while Brad Pitt, still an actor of little note, absolutely walks away with the picture as the stoner roommate of Clarence's actor friend Dick (Michael Rapaport). His delivery of the line "Don't condescend to me, man" is as memorable as anything else he's ever done.

These loopy, minutiae-obsessed characters are kept interesting because Scott makes sure to throw in some gloriously overdone violence every now and then to keep people from getting to talky. Likewise, Tarantino's loquaciousness and attention to character gives the film actual roots that tether Scott's frantic style to some form of reality (though you could hardly call anything that happens in the film "realistic"). The various shootouts are all grisly and visceral, but the also carry some emotional weight thanks not only to the writing but Hans Zimmer's ethereal, subtly haunting score. His compositions are airy and light, as if recorded on wind chimes, and they have a disturbing tranquility when played over the shocking violence that underscores both the warped fairy tale nature of the screenplay as well as the general demented state of the action.

I read that someone recently re-edited the film to follow Tarantino's script, which offered up a more fleshed-out Alabama, a larger part for Samuel L. Jackson's virtually non-existent cameo and a non-linear narrative structured like Pulp Fiction. While the idea of seeing a more defined Alabama intrigues me, I highly doubt that the cut, which uses deleted scenes with noticeably less post-production refinement, will improve upon this. Though unquestionably a better filmmaker, Tarantino benefits somewhat from another hand guiding his project, and a slew of brief but commanding appearances, bolstered by the impressive performances from its leads, makes True Romance the most bewilderingly touching gonzo romance ever filmed.

Reservoir Dogs

Written and Directed by: Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino's directorial debut caused quite a stir back in 1991. It, along with Richard Linklater's Slacker, paved the way with the independent film explosion in the mid-90s on the shoulders of films like Clerks and Tarantino's hit follow-up Pulp Fiction. Upon release, Reservoir Dogs established the former video store clerk as a bold new talent who had probably the most extensive knowledge of film of any director since Godard and used that knowledge to fill his films with endless references and quotations that fans could pour over for weeks. Yet for all the praise that was heaped on this film and all the people who still list it among their favorites, I never really connected with Reservoir Dogs.

The film is told out of sequence and mostly in flashback following a botched diamond heist leaves a six-man crew in disarray. Mr. Brown (Tarantino) is dead, Mr. Blue (Eddie Bunker) is missing, and Mr. Orange is bleeding like a stuck pig. Meanwhile Mr. White (Harvey Keitel) and Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi) fret over how they can get Orange to a hospital without the cops getting him, and the two come to the conclusion that someone in their midst is a rat.

Seems simple, right? Well it is. No matter how complicated the out of sequence editing makes the film seem, the fact is the plot gets summed up in about 2-3 minutes of dialogue. Even before a flashback reveals the undercover cop in their midst you can easily guess who it is. Yet the film ultimately succeeds despite this shortcoming thanks to Tarantino's justly lauded gift for dialogue.

The opening diner conversation that ranges from a critical analysis of Madonna to a debate on tipping remains one of the hallmarks of Tarantino's career. It tells you a lot about the characters and sets the stage for meaty, hilarious dialogues to come. From there we cut to the aftermath of the failed heist. This first act stands as the high point of the film, in which the events of the robbery are only alluded to in the dialogue, which the actors deliver at a frenzied pace without ever losing themselves.

Then we have to watch all this play out. Imagine if The Third Man's Harry Lime was not a person but the entire story, constantly mentioned and alluded to, then suddenly thrust onto the screen. This can work for a person, but not a plot. These flashbacks kill the momentum of the present timeline, in which the crazed Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen) tortures a captured police officer in order to get the name of the rat.

The infamous ear scene might be Tarantino's most defining. Ask the average person to name a scene after Quentin Tarantino, and they're likely to name this one. Madsen's hulking shuffle to the beat of "Stuck in the Middle With You" as he moves in to slice the ear of the hapless cop horrifies even as you laugh in amazement at how outrageous Tarantino can be. The writer-director would cause a similar sensation (albeit much more intense) in the Zed sequence of Pulp Fiction.

And that's where the flashbacks kill everything. After this shocking, landmark scene that leaves us on the edge of our seats, we have to go through an extended flashback of Tim Roth's mission to infiltrate the crime ring, working out a cover story to get leader Joe (Lawrence Tierney) to trust him. We already know Roth's character is the cop, and frankly I don't care if he wormed his way into a well-organized band of thieves with a well-told story about how he carried marijuana for a friend. Honestly, it just raises questions about the level of secrecy and planning Joe claims to utilize.

Nevertheless, this is an entertaining film, if for no other reason than it introduced Tarantino's dialogue to the world. Indeed, the conversations in this film remain his most naturalistic. Some people maintain that Tarantino's dialogue works because it's how people actually speak, but I think by the time a vapid, self-absorbed DJ makes a Zatoichi reference we've moved somewhat away from reality. His dialogue remains inherently fascinating and brilliant, but this, along with about half of Pulp Fiction, remain his only work with dialogue that sounds like it could come from people. It's a fun enough movie, and I continue to rewatch it even now, but I'd much rather see any of Tarantino's other films on a rainy day. Except maybe Death Proof. Let's not get carried away.

Grindhouse

For whatever reason, I never caught "Grindhouse" in theaters. Perhaps it's my aversion to horror (read: childlike whimpering fear), or maybe just the fact that it bombed so quickly, but even when it hit a dollar theater my buddies couldn't convince me to go to a midnight showing (I am not sitting through a three hour movie starting at midnight). At any rate, when the individual DVDs came out I picked them up and was stunned: Rodriguez and Tarantino made a completely hilarious romp through the films of their childhood, ones I had never even heard of. Yet it didn't matter; their enthusiasm for the glorified detritus of the 70s was infectious.

Unfortunately, in their individual director's cuts, both films were noticeably bloated, crammed with so many in-jokes that only they would get that it got bogged down in nerdiness. They went so far out of their way to tribute the look, feel, and general (lack of) quality that, after a viewing or two, it became a chore to watch them. But now Netflix is offering the theatrical cut of "Grindhouse" in its "Instant Watch" queue, so I finally got a chance to see what I really missed. Turns out, I missed one of the best movies of 2007 and one of the single most fun movies ever made.

Of course, it opens with Robert Rodriguez's "Planet Terror," inarguably the more visceral and fun of the two. The plot seems simple (some sort of gas turns people into zombie-like things), but he adds layers of asinine backstory to make it seem deeper, just like a crap Grindhouse film. The hero is the mysterious Wray, and no one respects him until they learn he's "El Wray," at which point he's treated like a god. Dakota is leaving her husband for a woman. Cherry and Wray have a history. The hilarious reveal about Muldoon's contribution to the War on Terror.

These little threads make the movie more interesting, but really it just comes down to shooting zombies. Shooting zombies with pistols, shooting zombies with shotguns, shooting zombies with assault rifle legs; if it shuffles, it's getting shot. And really, that's what the movie's good for; it offers not even an ounce of depth, but then why would it? You get some funny lines and a nonstop series of explosions. The theatrical cut of "Planet Terror" doesn't change too wildly; there's a bit less gore and a few scenes are shorter. "Death Proof," on the other hand is a revelation.

When I compared the two separate films I found "Death Proof" to be the better entry because there was at least some story, but the version I saw was so endlessly drawn out on the uninteresting conversations of the first half that I can barely watch it after two viewings. But here, Tarantino reins it in; the conversations between the vapid, first set of girls are still boring and oddly devoid of wit, but he cuts out a great deal of their incessant prattling. Now I only had to wait 25-30 minutes for something interesting to happen rather than nearly an hour.

Many cite "Planet Terror" as the superior film, but in this trimmed version, "Death Proof" reigns triumphant. Apart from the fact that this shortened version is actually funny, DP wins (if I may be so simple) solely on the basis of Kurt Russell's Stuntman Mike. One of the oddest, darkly funniest, and genuinely intimidating villains I've seen, Stuntman Mike makes not just DP but "Grindhouse."

Turns out Mike's been spying on these ladies all night and, after quickly crushing his hapless passenger's skull against the dash with a well-applied brake, he sets off into the night to more or less slash them with his car. A borderline stupid concept, Tarantino makes it work, mainly thanks to Russell's acting. When Mike first speaks he seems like such an amicable fellow: he doesn't drink, doesn't do drugs, and offers a ride home (though admittedly he's offering the ride to a drunk, hot chick so maybe that's not so noble).

But Russell turns on a dime when he actually converses with the ladies he's been stalking all night. When they interrupt him or insult him, Russell's face changes ever so slightly, and suddenly a bottomless well of contempt springs from his eyes. You can tell here that he's going to do something bad.

Of course, the movie really picks up in the wake of the first set of girls. The most explanation we get for why this happened is that maybe Mike is a pervert who gets off on killing with his car, but there's no way to prove he did anything, so once he heals from his cuts and bruises he's free to go. When flash-forward to a new set of ladies, a group working on some movie. There's two stuntwomen, a makeup lady, and an actress, all out for a day off chatting over lunch and oh yeah test driving the car from "Vanishing Point."

The ending 20-minute car chash is just about the best thing Tarantino has ever filmed. Unlike seemingly every other car chase these days, he shows us what's going on. The man famed for his quick-cutting actually bothers to follow these cars. It's a ballet of metal and rubber, starting horrifying and thrilling, then turning the tables on Mike in hilarious and no less exhilarting fashion.

Complete with the fake trailers, "Grindhouse" is a pure romp, one that greatly exceeds the sum of its parts. Separate, the two films are certainly fun, but together the flaws of both cancel each other out; if you didn't get the chance to watch this in theaters, go to Netflix now, even if you aren't a member; it's worth the fee.