This weekend, I finally finished grouting and caulking the kitchen tiles, and Matt and I installed our cute-as-a-button 18" dishwasher. It is perfectly functional! It doesn't leak! Clean dishes ahoy!
As a reward for our hard work, we saw
Grindhouse today. Beware of spoilers in the coming paragraphs.
I daresay
Grindhouse is the best thing I've seen in a long time. You know, I never used to like Tarentino all that much.
Pulp Fiction was a good movie, but the way everyone in my generation seemed to go apeshit over it was too much for me. Maybe I heard the soundtrack a little too often. Also, I fell asleep in the cinema during
Jackie Brown. However, the
Kill Bill movies and now this have given me a very deep-seated fondness for Tarentino.
I probably wouldn't have seen
Grindhouse at the cinema if I hadn't seen the trailer featuring Rose McGowan in
Planet Terror with an amputated limb and a giant fuck-off machine gun screwed into the stump. All the same, I sort of wish I hadn't seen the trailer, so the machine-gun-leg would have been a surprise. Oh, it was wonderful nevertheless. It was everything I could have hoped for and more. I suspended my disbelief with glee (she walks on a "prosthetic" a mere hours after having her leg bitten off; the gun in her leg appears to be triggered by telepathy; later, a Gatling installed in her leg fails to knock her off a horse). And there were enough surprises to keep me entertained, including Fergie from the Black-Eyed Peas, who loses her brain, snigger. And there were lots of zombies. I loved it. "If anyone comes to the door, I want you to shoot them. Just like in your video games."
A lot of people online are complaining about all the dialogue in
Deathproof. They're dumb. The dialogue was (a) good, and (b) riddled with in-jokes, which makes it even better. For instance, in one scene, four girls in the movie business are gossiping about who fucked whom on a set. They mention a stand-in for Darryl Hannah who fucked a director on his girlfriend's birthday.
One of the actors in the first half of the film was Darryl Hannah's stand-in in the
Kill Bill movies. I can't help but wonder if she fucked a director on his girlfriend's birthday, and how much more of the dialogue was an allusion.
There was something kind of heartwarming about seeing Zoe Bell kick arse. Something about the way she went after Kurt Russell with an iron pipe, hollering, "Where the fuck do you think you're going?" was so ... Australasian. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but there's something in Australian/New Zealand culture that causes people to react in just this way to certain situations. I was reminded of the time Jason and I were nearly mugged on New Year's Eve years ago. When a group of guys surrounded us and one of them snatched my bag, my first instinct wasn't, "Oh, shit, help!" but "Give me back my fucking bag," which I hollered at the would-be mugger while rushing at him, ready and willing to physically harm him, though he probably would have beat the shit out of me in a fight. He was surprised enough to throw the purse to another guy, who dropped it, and I snatched it back.
Also spotted: a XXXX beer neon sign. There was a thank-you to XXXX beer and VB in the credits. Weird.
CONCLUSION: This movie does not deserve to bomb. Go see it. It's awesome. I will probably even buy it on DVD.
Labels: House, movies
