“I steal from every movie ever made”

Just finished watching the first half of the Grindhouse set (collaboration between Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino), ‘Death Proof’ by Quentin Tarantino. Fucking brilliant. As much as I can’t handle gore and guts, Tarantino’s flicks have always been an exception to this for me - possibly because the violence is always spectacularly no-holds-barred, uncompromised and in-your-face, which stands out today when Western cinematics (not knowing much about current film trends in other regions) seem to favour highly stylized, half computerized action.

I still remember seeing my first Tarantino film…well okay, not quite since it was Natural Born Killers and Tarantino wrote the original script, while it was directed by Oliver Stone and underwent such drastic changes to the storyline that Tarantino disassociated himself with the project…but nonetheless, it definitely had quite an effect on me. Plus, it introduced me to a band that I now adore, called the Cowboy Junkies (the track in the movie was Sweet Jane, very oddly paired with the scene it appeared in, but I still love the song very much!), and that can only be seen as a good thing.

I followed that with Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, From Dusk till Dawn, Kill Bill (both 1 and 2), Sin City (okay, so this is a Rodriguez film and Tarantino only did one scene) and now Death Proof, and each one has only increased my adoration and respect for this amazing writer/director in leaps and bounds. About as unpretentious as you can get, he embraces cinematic history, genre cliches and even cheesy dialogue as influences to his style, and uses bits and pieces of everything combined to create his very own unique flavour of storytelling - a filmmaker who is one of the few alive today who truly deserves his title as an auteur.

“CGI for car stunts doesn’t make any sense to me—how is that supposed to be impressive? [...] I don’t think there have been any good car chases since I started making films in ‘92—to me, the last terrific car chase was in Terminator 2. And Final Destination 2 had a magnificent car action piece. In between that, not a lot. Every time a stunt happens, there’s twelve cameras and they use every angle for Avid editing, but I don’t feel it in my stomach. It’s just action.”

And of course, being the music person that I am, the fact that Death Proof had ‘Chick Habit’ by April March (which I first heard in “But I’m a Cheerleader!”) over the final credits - much love!