The Grindhouse Phenomenon

When watching Grindhouse for the first time, I found myself asking one question and one question only: what the hell were Tarantino and Rodriguez smoking and where can I get some? Since then, I've seen it once more in theaters and I'd pay good money to be able to see it again, if only for the orgasmic rush of thrills, laughs, and intense entertainment that only Grindhouse can offer.

Grindhouse is, without a doubt, the most original film to come along in years. A love letter to the old slasher and exploitation flicks of the '70s, this film comes at you like a round of bullets or a speeding car and doesn't stop until you're in pieces all over the ground. Or maybe something a bit less morbid...

But no, this is Grindhouse! I've got a right to be morbid! The whole damn movie is morbid!

For those interested in going out for the Grindhouse experience, this is what's on offer: two feature-length films, Planet Terror and Death Proof, four fake (or maybe not...more on that later) trailers, and a slew of old "grindhouse"-style opticals and ads. To give away any more would be to ruin all the little suprises that await you.
















Both films included are simply outstanding in every right. Planet Terror is basically Dawn of the Dead...on crack. And heroin. And pot. And maybe some other shit, I dunno. It's easily the craziest, most over-the-top, endlessly gory flick to hit the cinema screens in decades. There are clichés aplenty here, and instead of trying to avoid them, Rodriguez embraces them like a mother hugging her only child and makes them feel brand-new once again. A word of warning: Planet Terror is not for the squeamish. When the blood starts spewing and the limbs start flying, the weak stomachs among us will be found out.
















Death Proof is Planet Terror's polar opposite. It's a slow, dialogue-heavy, character-driven thriller that only includes two action sequences. Personally, I loved just listening to these [mostly female] characters bullshit about guys and pop culture in a style that's so uniquely Tarantino, but for those who aren't up for it, just know that you'll be rewarded for your patience in the end. How, you ask? The answer is simple: the single greatest car chase ever to be put on film. Move over, Popeye Doyle, because Stuntman Mike's in town and he's gonna kick the living French Connection outta you.

And there's no way I can mention Stuntman Mike without giving props to Kurt Russell, who delivers one of the most memorable and most villainous performances of all-time. If he doesn't at least get a damn Oscar nomination, I'm suing. No, fuck that - I'm BOMBING. More on that at a later date...
















The four fake trailers I mentioned before are as thus: Machete (Robert Rodriguez), Werewolf Women of the S.S. (Rob Zombie), Don't (Edgar Wright), and Thanksgiving (Eli Roth) - all great trailers, each with a different sense of humor about them. After some thought, I finally decided that my favorite has gotta be Machete, a delightfully over-the-top piece by Rodriguez that probably best represents the style of the trailers these pay tribute to.

Grindhouse is just a great fucking movie any way you look at it, but the sad fact is that it's become quite the flop at the box office. Some blame the bad release date (two days before Easter Sunday). Some blame the violent nature of the film. But in these eyes, the reason for the poor ticket sales is simple: nobody wants to see a trashy-looking, over-stylized, three-hour-in-length homage to some old movies nobody's even heard of. No average moviegoer, anyway. You hear that?! You guys suck! Or not...yes.

However, Grindhouse has definitely generated a cult. The IMDb boards for the movie are constantly active, fan sites have been popping up, and there's merch all over the place. Both times I saw it, there was only a very light scattering of people in the theater, but it's almost appropriate that only a few people came out. These are the people who get the joke, the ones that Grindhouse actually means something to...like myself.


















Bottom line? Grindhouse is an experience not to be missed, and it's definitely one that I'll be calling a favorite. I've already got a poster, a shirt, and I'm working on getting the action figures currently available. Whenever the DVD hits (and it damn well better be a four-disc special limited collector's edition with special limited collector's edition packaging with a special limited collector's edition gold chain to wrap around it), I'll pick it up the first day. Grindhouse will live on in the hearts and minds of the fans until the end of time...two against the world, baby. Two against the world.

Or something a little less gay.

Whatever.

(BTW, if anyone's interested, all of the fake trailers can be found on YouTube.)

Webbed Wonder: Why Spider-Man Is the Greatest Comic Book Movie Series of All-Time

Like most, I found Spider-Man 3 a crushing disappointment. Also like most, I was chiefly frustrated by the fact that half the movie was the brilliance that we've come to expect from the series while the other half was, well, a bit of a tangled web. So it's a pretty good movie; I'd see it again, I may buy it on DVD (mainly with the intent of re-editing it with Will, plus the special features).

Rewatching the first two films in the series in the wake of this third installment, I've discovered that no matter how you slice it, the Spider-Man trilogy is still the greatest comic book movie series of all time.

First, before we get to the actual movies, I'll get the comparisons to other series out of the way. The closest competition Spidey currently has is the X-Men series, as in they both have two fantastic films followed by a heavily disappointing yet entertaining third entry. However, each of the Spider-Man movies annihilates its X-Men equivalent, and judging X-Men: The Last Stand against Spider-Man 3 reveals that I've perhaps overrated its merits.

After X-Men, it seems that Superman would offer Spider-Man the fiercest competition, though it had a much steeper drop-off in quality after its first two excellent installments. Superman IV: The Quest for Peace may get the most negative press of the series, but for my money, Superman III, which was basically a poorly-conceived comedic vehicle for Richard Pryor with occasional cameo appearances from the Man of Steel, is by far the worst. Plus, if we're counting it, Superman Returns was an overlong bore with no zip and no zing that actually made me fall asleep in the cinema.

And then there's the original Batman quartet, where Tim Burton turned Bruce Wayne into a gothic James Bond and Joel Schumacher basically revived the old Adam West series with a special extended episode in Batman & Robin (though I will ashamedly admit Batman Forever is my favorite of the bunch, what with its tongue-in-cheek lunacy and one hell of a brilliantly campy performance from Jim Carrey as the Riddler). Speaking of Adam West, again, if we're counting it, the 1966 camp trash of his Batman feature just does further disservice to the series' standing.

Let's not count out Bats, though. Because currently, the series that has the best chance of becoming the successor to Spidey's throne is Christopher Nolan's revamped Batman series, filming its second installment, The Dark Knight, as we blog. It's the first live-action adaptation of the character to do justice to the source material (the Bruce Timm animated series and films started getting it right back in '92), and it's fantastically dark and rich stuff. With the recent news that Maggie Gyllenhaal is replacing Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes, things just keep getting rosier.

I'm not even going to bother getting into idiotic trifles like Fantastic Four or Catwoman.



After all of this babble, let's actually talk Spider-Man. I've been a comic book fan in general and a Spidey devotee in particular for my entire life, so I had a lot of expectations for his 2002 debut film (though, like most of the aforementioned series, there was an earlier debut, in this case a terrible 1973 TV film, The Amazing Spider-Man, which served as the pilot for an equally terrible primetime series). It met each one without exception. I had been one of those hardcore nerds decrying the news that Peter Parker wasn't going to be strapping on his webshooters, that the webs would be organic; but after I saw the finished product, I was left asking, "Why hasn't it always been like that?" (In fairness to the comics, they finally caught up some time last year.)

The film is bright and colorful, with director Sam Raimi perfectly blending comic book camp with modern action movie sensibilities and, most importantly, Raimi focuses on character development. The first half of the film is the origin story, taking 1962's Amazing Fantasy #15 and expanding it (while borrowing plenty of riffs from Brian Michael Bendis' brilliant 21st century updated comic book series Ultimate Spider-Man), with the second half being the action-y, thriller-y stuff. Upon rewatching, the origin bits are actually better than the action bits, though it's all great, especially the magnificent final battle between Spider-Man and the Green Goblin.

Now I might start to become a little overanalytical, and I wanna get this out of the way first: Spider-Man is in no way political; that's X-Men's job. But it would be foolish to overlook the American flag that Spidey leaps off of at the film's very end; it was added, of course, after the tragic events of 9/11, when the film's release date was pushed back from November 2001 to May 2002. (Interesting sidenote: The film's original teaser, debuting in early 2001, featured Spidey webbing a helicopter between the Twin Towers.) The American flag became a staple of the series, and is probably its most ridiculed element. Most find it to be cheesy and sentimental, and say that it supports the character and its world as Republican ideology. Well, they're wrong.

Spider-Man shows that, yes, fighting the good fight is possible--even necessary--but there's no winning or losing. Peter's foes can turn out to be good people in bad situations (in fact, that's often the case), and Peter never faces a clear moral victory. Also, notice that every time someone boasts or gloats in the movie, they get into serious shit, most notably Peter when he arrogantly lets a thief rob the wrestling promoter who fails to pay him, and the crook ends up capping Uncle Ben. So, basically: America, fight back. But don't gloat and don't lose track of the fact that war is an ugly, ugly thing and should never be celebrated.



Okay, so now that I've just politicized a movie that was never ever meant to be politicized, let's move on to Spider-Man 2, which largely eschews the comic book camp and has softer, more restrained colors (though it still has great camp and great color; if you've seen it, you know what I mean). I recently had a conversation with an IMDb user on the Spider-Man 3 boards in which they mentioned that Spider-Man felt like a "fun" movie, whereas Spider-Man 2 felt like an "Oscar" movie. I guess I agree to some extent, in that the relationships that the first film built up--specifically the complex emotional ties between Peter, MJ, and Harry--are given weight in the second. To again tread into political waters lightly, the American flag at the end is much smaller and is only in the corner of the frame, perhaps showing that Raimi has realized that he can play games, but games with substance are much more fun to play.

But it's the relationships that are core to both the Spider-Man comics and movies, that are its biggest assets. Peter Parker is a real person, not a musclebound hero saving the day and getting the girl but a bespectacled loser (just like me) who, by time he gets the girl, has fucking earned it. And this is what makes Spider-Man 2 the single best comic book film ever made, its relationships and its character and its action scenes that are important and not throwaways (God, that sequence on the train never gets old, plus it has emotional resonance). It's like a damned Shakesepearean opera.



Which is why Spider-Man 3 is so disappointing. All of the relationships get fitting conclusions (because even though three more films have already been confirmed by Sony, this could possibly be the last one with the original crew in tow), and they're some great conclusions, it's just that the journey getting to them feels incomplete and underwhelming. MJ starts acting like a bitch (to be fair, she got unnecessarily bitchy in the second as well), Harry has a sudden character shift that would've been believable in moderation but here is just insanely over-the-top, and Peter acts naive, but not in the charming normal guy way Tobey Maguire honed so perfectly in the first two. Perhaps most disappointing is Peter's trip to the dark side via the black symbiote, in which he only does two frightening things and then dances the rest of the time. Yes, dances. And unsuccessfully hits on chicks. Venom is my favorite of Spidey's famous foes (gotta kick in some of Stan Lee's awesome alliteration), but his portrayal onscreen is only mildly rousing, though he does get the film's best line, which was actually improvised by actor Topher Grace (I'm not going to ruin it). Also, I'm not saying that the first two were subtle, but they had a certain deftness the third is lacking. I'll just put it this way: The American flag at the end is fucking HUGE. Sam Raimi's visual sense is also starting to flag; the glorious quirks he created in his gloriously gory cult Evil Dead trilogy and which gave the first two Spider-Man films much of their spark is largely missing. I'll just pose this question to uber-hardcore fans, and they'll know what I mean: Was the Oldsmobile even in there?

Still, Spider-Man 3 is successful in that it introduces a great villain, Sandman, played to perfection by Thomas Haden Church, and that it ties together all of the movies' recurring themes and motifs: Men who are monsters through choice and men who are monsters through fate, "With great power comes great responsibility," putting love above all, and of course, the visual cues of the famous upside-down kiss and many others that will be instantly familiar to fans (not to mention the obligatory hilarious Bruce Campbell cameo).

These are emotional, powerful movies that just happen to have great action setpieces and nifty whiz-bang special effects. There are two moments that make me cry in the first, a plethora of moments that give me goosebumps in the second, and even the third has moments that made me genuinely well up.

And that's why Spider-Man is the greatest comic book movie series of all time. Savvy?

(By the way, check out this awesome series of Marvel/DC parodies of those Mac/PC commercials).

Catch and Release

Hmmm, my first post on the blog. Let's hope it's not something wordy, over-analytical, and pretentious...no, no, this is not the New York Times. Moving on...

Anyway, I'm the tran -- er, Will and I thought I'd kick off the posting with my thoughts on a recent release, Susannah Grant's Catch and Release.

From the trailers, one might think that this is a typical romantic comedy, but I came to find that there's a lot more to it. Centered around the aftermath of one man's death, this film allows us ample time getting to know the main characters of the play that was his life - his fiancée (Jennifer Garner) and his closest friends (Timothy Olyphant, Sam Jaeger, Kevin Smith). We've got several scenes here that are simply the other characters reminiscing about the man, all of which is definitely very good and very heartfelt material. The main caveat, however, comes in the form of a subplot concerning the relationship between Garner and Olyphant. Olyphant is definitely a good actor, most notably in Doug Liman's underrated Go, but here he's just a jackass (and seems to be aware of it) and their relationship - especially the beginnings of it - is wholly unbelievable. Their scenes alone together were fairly dreadful. One thing that surprised me here was Juliette Lewis, who has a good (and appropriately limited) role as a woman who claims to be the mother of the departed's son. All that said, the absolute top reason to see this film is Kevin Smith, who is nothing short of fantastic. Anyone who's ever seen one of his Q&A sessions or even a short interview will be familiar with the man's crude, talkative style and he brings all of that to his character here. In fact, he definitely deserves some recognition for this come Oscar time. Overall, Catch and Release is a case of the pros outweighing the cons. With some minor reworking, it could've been better, but as it is, it's a nice, sweet, often touching movie that anyone (even the guys) should dig.

Final Grade: B