Movie buffs often lose sight of this, but most people don’t know what’s going on in the cinema at any given moment. The public may be aware of a big, well-publicized film that everyone knows about, and they may have a vague notion of “that new movie with what’s his name in it,” but for them films are consumer items, used then disposed of.

This was brought home to me after seeing a screening of Grindhouse on Tuesday night and then running into someone and telling them excitedly that I just came from the film, only to have my auditor say, “What film is that?” They’d never heard of it. They weren’t aware, in fact, of any of the films opening the following Friday, nor of those that had opened in the previous weeks. The last movie this person had heard of opened last summer.

This incident rang an alarm bell. Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez, and the Weinstein Company are betting that there is a form of waking nostalgia for an era and type of filmmaking that is otherwise viewed as maudit by arbiters of official culture. I wonder, however, how big the market is for such a film beyond the sort of cultists who crowd into auditoria at the ComicCon. The filmmakers haven’t help their cause by calling the resultant work, a faux double bill with trailers for non-existant (yet) films and various teasers, Grindhouse, which is misleading. Eddie Muller’s book on the subject makes it clear that the term refers to theaters specializing in softcore exploitation erotica and taboo topics. The film might have been more accurately called Drive-In, except that perhaps that title might too closely evoke the film’s unlikely inspiration, Stanley Donen’s Movie Movie.

What will get lost in all the ballyhoo about the correctness of the term’s use, the length of the two movies together (after cuts, the film comes to about three hours and 10 minutes) as a marketing impediment, the level of its financial success, and whether or not Tarantino’s film represents a aesthetically regressive move is the actual nature of Tarantino’s achievement. What he has done is replicate in feel, look, and tone an actual drive in movie from the 1970s such as Swinging Cheerleaders. But the level of the mimicry doesn’t end just in its overexposed shots or the chick banter. Tarantino has gone on to conceive of a plot that is just as odd as some of the better more experimental ’70s drive in films. I’m thinking of films such as the explicitly acknowledged Vanishing Point as well as Two-Lane Blacktop, very odd narratives (and on a side note does anyone doubt that the reticent friendship between the two men in Two-Lane is echoed decades later in the equally if differently marvelous Way of the Gun?).

More about Death Proof in a moment. First there is Planet Terror, Robert Rodriguez’s homage to Italian zombie movies and John Carpenter. This is a fine film, typical of some of Rodriguez’s earlier films such as The Faculty, which is multi-character driven suspense tales set at a rapid pace. Rodriguez does this sort of thing well, and though the film has funny parts it is not a parody or a satire on the genre, it is basically a straight zombie film. One feels like a curmudgeon for complaining that perhaps the film is set slightly below room temperature, that it could have enjoyed more sparkle and pizzazz. Planet Terror was mostly of interest to me because of Rose McGowan, whose remarkable face compels attention even when she isn’t the focus of the frame.

The fake trailers are also fun. Machete practically tells a whole story (one that sounds, oddly enough, a lot like Shooter). Werewolf Women of the SS looks exciting but there is a certain lack of clarity in the trailer. Don’t is funny, but only Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving really replicates a bad trailer for a bad movie, even down to the overuse of footage from just one or two scenes random scenes. The serial killer’s costume is subtly hilarious.

Death Proof is probably going to strike most unsympathetic viewers as too talky and weird. The movie appears split in half, chronically two separate attacks by a car-wielding serial killer. But in fact it is using a variation on the Psycho effect. The real story is the second half; the first half is distracted by following a small group of really offensive people on a wild goose chase.

That’s the other thing that unsympathetic viewers might find objectionable, that the group of three girls in the first half are mostly unpleasant. Sydney Tamiia Poitier as a careerist DJ is an unpleasant, self-absorbed, bossy “mean girl,” while Jordan Ladd’s character is a non-entity, a personality free follower. Only Vanessa Ferlito, set up as the “final girl,” has allure.

It’s not that Tarantino gets these people wrong. On the contrary, he develops a whole world around them in just some 20 minutes. Their later interactions with and comments about Rose McGowan’s Pam, and vice versa, says a lot about the high school culture they all emerged from. But then the movie makes an abrupt plot turn; like the characters in Crash, the film’s serial killer has a thing for car wrecks. And then we have to compose ourselves and learn the dynamics of a whole new quartet of women.

But notice how different they are. As my colleague Kim Morgan has pointed out, Tarantino has laid out really precise differences between the two groups of women. In a sense, because of their hedonism and haughtiness, the first group deserved to die. Whereas the first group of girls were all about fucking hypergamously, to advance their careers or to get high or to sate their hedonism, the second group are professionals (two stunt women, a make up girl, and an actress) but mostly on a humbler tier, and their on set romances are realistic and comic (the actress’s boyfriend, a Rock lookalike, likes to watch her pee). These are nicer, more engaging women, and we don’t want to see them die.

The point of the narrative thread is to get stunt woman Zoe in a death match with serial killer Stunt Man Mike. And it is one terrific car chase sequence. One of the best I’ve ever seen anyway. There are camera angles used here that you haven’t seen in a “car” scene since, say, Blowup, which, unpredictably, sets the gold standard on how to shoot a car in motion. Part of its power is that the car chase sequence is clearly mostly real and you admire its “redemption of physical reality.” This sequence is the “payoff” to average viewers for “enduring” all the talk. If Death Proof were a Roger Corman film, the rest of the movie would be window dressing built around this chase scene.

But also note just how weird are all the things that have happened in this film, the strange way characters are introduced, the long seemingly pointless sequences. Note how close it is to a movie like Swinging Cheerleaders, and yet so far from it. When drive in movies were odd, it was because they were made in a hurry, or had budgetary problems, or because they were made by incompetent people, but occasionally it was because an occasional filmmaker, like a Larry Cohen, was using the relative

It should also be pointed out, because people might not notice this facet too amid all the hubbub, that Tarantino pulls a Soderbergh and acts as his own DP. This makes the framing and color tones of the shots doubly interesting. I doubt if he is going to be interview by American Cinematographer over this, so I’m guess that it is because he was having a hard time, or anticipated having a hard time explaining to a photographer just what he wanted in his film. You will also notice that the look of the film changes subtly between its first and second halves, the second part being more intentionally “polished,” another clue that the second group of girls is privileged by the filmmaker as worthy of life. In one shot, a Woody Allen Hannah and her Sisters shot set in a diner, you can see Stunt Man Mike in the background, at the counter eating something, but otherwise his presence is not indicated.

We’re probably going to get four DVDs out of this movie. A quick and dirty release this fall, with just one extra, a video interview with RR and Tarantino (and have you noticed how absent Rodriguez is from the publicity build up?), followed by a two disc special edition, and then each film sold on its own, perhaps with even more different extras, and with luck the full lapdance scene (there are two shots from the sequence in the second trailer). I welcome them all.

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