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Death Proof" as The Best Chase and the Most Available Home Video Ever Made.
True Tarantino connoisseurs we
waiting for this one to come: intriguing idea of double feature and the Emperor''s emploi (fr. type) - 70s, worked miracles in the minds of Tarantinologysts. I am using this term here, because one who loves the Emperor and his works can by no means be called that vulgar and mediocre "fan". Every one of his constant audience is either a Tarantino connoisseur or a Tarantinologyst. I''ve been waiting all those months with a sinking heart, and the movie I got was a bit different from what I expected.
First, Cutie is always
talking about "real" thing in his movies, he''s got obsession with the reality in the movieworld, which is mesmeric by the very definition and can never be "real", even the truest story told by the truest non-fiction director is still very far from that "reality", it is just a small piece of it, moreover, a tiny little piece seen from the viewpoint of a particular person. Viewpoint. The very word says it all – how many points are there in the Infinite Universe we live? So, there are as many realities then. But in this movie I can tell for sure that Tarantino succeeded in the impossible, - finally he''s made a very "
REAL" movie. He made alright – one of REAL boring days of REAL boring people, hanging out at a REAL boring poky hole of a place. Even the Master himself as Warren looked so boring there, seemed tired and indifferent person who was fed up with his being on the edge of nowhere without any possibility of breaking loose.
They all are so REALLY boring and trivial that you can almost find them in your address book. May be, that''s not bad, you know. Tarantino made some anthropologic field work, showing us some of the day-to-day life of No-Man''s-Land aborigines. That''s valuable too, who can argue?
The worst part is that the best part of the 1st period is the crash scene – I''ve watched it 19 times by now, and that''s not the end.
For the 2nd period I can say that it''s nice for some Home Video. You know those people with a pet or with a new born child, don’t you? It seems that the only thing they are capable of talking is their precious favorite – how he/she eats, how he crawls, how smart he is for his age, and how EVERYBODY admits there is something special about him, if you are at their place, they start to feed you with their Home Video specials of his days. If you ask me, - I hate Home Video specials. The same was here: what we''ve been shown was those actresses'' actual days, actual conversations and anecdotes. Fine for the Home Video, but for the big screen – sounds like a bad idea to me, bad idea that won''t cover the budget.
I liked the dialogues actually, but, please, I couldn''t "be liking" them for 50 minutes in a row. In his previous works he followed the formula: "blah-blah-blah-
bam-
bam-blah-b lah-blah-
bam-
bam-blah-blah-blah…andso on", in this movie as well as in his inglorious Kill Bill vol.2 he followed this: "blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-
bam-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-bam".Not good.
Here the chase was the organic part of the story, with all that crazy adrenalin rush that strikes you from the screen straight into the bloodstream.
Not only the idea of chase, but also the quality of the stunts strike you "immediately". The stunts are as perfect as everything He touches. He makes it so because the movies to him are love of his life. He talks about his movies in technical terms, in theoretical way. For other directors the movies are mostly the means of delivering their ideas, simply the means, they start to describe the importance of the story to you, telling how hard was the life of this or that character. While He starts with the technical term every time – "slasher, gives you the whole background of that stream, almost giving you a lecture, than – the correlation of his work and the classics of that steam. He is a double PhD in the movies, and no one is like him.
The stunts are close to the best ever made to me.
What is also nice, the Emperor is very attentive to the details: he took a black female as Kim''s stunt double, also Rosario Dawson was in the car even when she wasn''t in the shot. The letter struck me even more – I always hated that about the movies – lies. They are lying to us all the time. They talk with the space making us think that there is somebody in the room, they show us people fighting and talking, and later we know that the actors never even met on the set (Sin City). I want the actors to be there even when they are not in the shot, because the characters are there: other people don''t disappear from the car when one of them is talking.
For the first time in history moviemakers tried not to lie, no wander it was the Emperor of the movies who started it.