a-ridin' on a sin wagon

[intertribal]

heh, I should be asleep by now. 

I don't know if I would actually want to see this movie - maybe once, and maybe rented, since I don't think I have any friends who are as degenerate as I am - but I think it's a really cool idea on the part of directors Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, and I rather agree with the NY Times review of Grindhouse:

"It’s a great car chase, but it’s also a metaphor. “Grindhouse,” soaked in bloody nostalgia for the cheesy, disreputable pleasures of an older form of movie entertainment, can also be seen as a passionate protest against the present state of the entertainment industry. Those Detroit relics, modified with loving care in someone’s garage or backyard, may waste gas and burn oil, but they seem to have an individuality — a soul — that the homogeneous new vehicles, with their G.P.S. and their cruise control, their computer chips and their air bags, can never hope to match.

And “Grindhouse” argues, with more enthusiasm than coherence, for the integrity of a certain kind of old movie. Not the stuff that finds its way into the Classics section of the video store, but the kind that the guys behind the counter are always talking about: cheap, nasty slasher films, sleazy sexploitation pictures, gimcrack sci-fi epics starring people you never heard of. Just about anything, in short, with the right combination of topless women, gory, pointless violence and inspired amateurism. Also car chases."

I have a certain love for this this kind of movie - grotesque and violent and much more ugly than beautiful.  They usually don't get very good reviews and get only a cult following, but hey.  I think it's the reason I liked Sin City so much - the message of that movie is not exactly the Dao, and the acting isn't exactly Oscar-worthy - but the grotesqueness of it, that's what I love, when deadly little Miho is chopping people in half with those flying spikes of hers.  Still, that Rodriguez work is much more stylized than I would prefer.  What's a good example of this kind of movie?  The best I can think of are the bad sci-fi movies that I watch and laugh at and enjoy, the old low-budget ones, Pumpkinhead.  I think a similar sort of tone in more modern form is found in Candyman.  I could seriously build a thesis out of watching movies like Last House on the Left, Cannibal Holocaust, the Guinea Pig series.  Never seen any of them but I find shock exploitation movies very intriguing, and I have a reasonably strong stomach when it comes to movie violence (ghosts are a different matter).  The Japanese had a similar and simultaneous phase in the '70s called chambara films - anti-hero samurai movies like Lone Wolf and Cub and Lady Snowblood (which I want to see just because the great "Asian extreme cinema" review site Snowblood Apple professes to take its name from it). 

It may make little sense that I like Sin City and not A Clockwork Orange, say (I just posted on that subject).  But to me, it does make sense.  Sin City does not once claim that something like rape, say, is okay.  When the "heroes" (and the villains are really so awful in Sin City that people who sympathize with them have problems of their own) commit their spectacular violence, it's always in response to an immediate threat to themselves or their friends and lovers, or as retribution for some sadistic murder that really was committed in cold blood.  I feel that the hipster type of ultra-violence, to borrow the Clockwork phrase, is too stylish and too sympathetic to the bad guys, who are too hip, the movie itself too indulgent in victimization.  Grindhouse cinema is almost always focused on basically sympathetic, good people who have to pick up a machine gun or a machete in order to get payback for something they should definitely get payback for, or to fend off flesh-eating zombies.  There's no plot to these movies, and little character development.  Good is borderline good, and bad is horrid, not the cuter, more tender "bad boy".  There's no aestheticized pretension of looking into the villain's heads.  And for as long as I can remember, the idea of a delicate little go-go dancer like Rose McGowan picking up a gun and shooting bad guys has been so, so very tantalizing.  As in, i want to be that.  It doesn't have to be pretty.  I'll don a machine gun leg if I lose my real one in a car accident.  But I'll tell you this - I may be a good girl, but I will survive a zombie attack. 

also, yeah, I've taken to bolding important parts of quotes and lyrics.  Ok, time for bed now.  I have work at noon tomorrow, and it's very late.