*Grindhouse*
Robert Rodriquez and Quentin Tarantino go digital on Hollywood
Due for release in April 2007, this ultra-violent feature gives us two movies for the price of one.
Robert Rodriquez, “Sin City” and the “Spy Kids” series, has teamed with Quentin Tarantino, “Pulp Fiction,” "Kill Bill, Parts I and II" to produce a digitally created flick. This may not sound so revolutionary, but it is. With High Definition on the rise, this means that over the next 3 to 4 years the some 6,000 movie theaters that exist in the United States today will have no choice to move into the HD market. This means individual movie theaters will download movies from satellite or broadband or receive HD disk tape, replacing the traditionally used expensive and fragile 35mm cellulite film stock on bulky reels.
With so much invested in the old camera system, Hollywood will most likely hold off this new wave as long as possible.
While this trend is still a few years away, Rodriquez and Tarantino are making their entrée with a bang, and a whole lotta blood. “Grindhouse” offers us two distinct features in one movie. In “Planet Terror,” Rodriquez’s contribution, a hot chick with a machine gun for a leg, fights a brain-melting virus. Of his production company in Austin Texas, Rodriquez boasts that filmmaking outside Hollywood is more creative, and removed from its corporate programming. He stands by “Grindhouse” to prove him right.
Quentin Tarantino fancies himself a ‘film purist,’ and he is. When he shoots a movie, it goes onto good old 35mm celluloid. On a bet that Rodriquez could digitally shoot in a style Tarantino loves: The ‘70’s, Tarantino took him up on that wager. Rodriquez used footage from “Sin City” and “Dusk Till Dawn,” purposely degrading images using digital effects that emulate the old 35mm film and camera system. So completely impressed, Tarantino set out with Rodriquez to make “Grindhouse.”
Tarantino’s ditty, “Death Proof,” is a slasher story, starring Kurt Russell as a crazed murderer with one mean car. A smattering of fake trailers, or movie previews holds the two features together. All this effort, in the hands of these two directors, “Grindhouse” proves out to be an incredibly violent movie. The filmmakers are both ardent devotees of a decade that gave us both great, and many D movies. Rodriquez and Tarantino love those D movies. They offer “Grindhouse” as a tribute and an appreciation to that genre.
The movie makes no apologies for the fact that it exploits ultra-violence, hot chicks and maniacal murderers. Indeed, ‘70’s exploitation movies do fit in a legitimate genre. That being the case, one must give these ‘devils’ their due.
