jane dark's sugarhigh!

"no"

Of all the films that end in horror, only this can compare to Dirty Mary Crazy Larry: a ten-minute short about a person being forced to return to work by the very union reps and friends she believed had promised something else entirely. A French short (here with annoying German subtitles), it's called in English, Return to Work at the Wonder Factory, 10 June '68.

grindhouse

It's not clear that Grindhouse's duo of Planet Terror and Death Proof is a better double-feature than, say, a pairing of Slither and Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! — each of which is a fine representative of the genres parodied herein, the zombie plague apocalypse and the psychopathic war of the sexes on a lost highway.

That's not to insult this current Rodriguez/Tarantino beast, which is largely delightful and gross and over-the-top, and has as significant flaws only a couple: at a local level, the latter feature suffers from Too Much Banter, which would be less of a problem if Tarantino's banter was as sharp as it was last millennium. But it ain't, and will never be again. At a global level, it's dull the way this package arrives essentially critic-proofed, having way overdosed on ironic self-awareness and being a bit heavily committed to making sure we know they know how any response besides Aww yeah! Fuck yeah! is likely to sound — a defensiveness which makes the whole thing feel a little waterlogged. Fine; a fair trade for all the good stuff, and the even better bad stuff. We only mean to suggest, by mentioning Slither and FPKK, that the ludicrous genre films these films celebrate, recapitulate, and spoof, are themselves a) really good too, b) equally self-aware and sometimes in funnier, cannier ways, with even more awesome exaggerations, and c) still being made.

So why does it somehow seem more pleasing to see this than the aforementioned Slither/ FPKK double-feature might be? The answer must be: Because we'll never know. That pair would be as anachronistic as the pointedly anachronistic gestures of Grindhouse, filled with Seventies flavor and Fords and filmstock and fonts, and decomposed to look that old — until some character pulls out their QWERTY smartphone, or mentions Osama bin Laden. Why not just keep us in the Seventies, in the dearly-departed era when "grindhouses" still existed in Times Square and elsewhere, still showed sleaze-gene double-features? Because for Grindhouse-the-Event to work, have to think of now too: of how, in this present moment that's finely gestured toward, the very thing we're enjoying no longer exists — is itself an anachronism. But as we suggested above, fun pieces of genre sleaze can still be had. They still exist. It's total pretense that what's being brought back is a kind of movie, rather than a kind of movie-going. The "thing we're enjoying that no longer exists" isn't movies like this; it's the form of the double-feature itself. The added value of these films is added value, a household economy of time and dollars in relation to going to the movies that has indeed passed away.

They'll make it back on DVD. Fourfold, we estimate.

13) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
12) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
11) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
10) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
9) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
8) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
7) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
6) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
5) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
4) Grindhouse (Fake trailers, muscle cars, and a wrecker named Killdozer)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)

blades of glory

...so the argument for gay marriage turns out to be that, as necessary, the pitcher and catcher (in this case quite literally) can switch places — the utilitarian claim that trumps any idealist hokum about differences in "nature" (as signified by the unnatural pair of incestuous siblings, the ambiguously named Stranz and Fairchild Van Waldenberg).

12) Smokin' Aces (nothing)
11) Factory Girl (wasn't Smokin' Aces)
10) Dreamgirls (the club sets; Eddie Murphy's Marvin Gaye skullcap)
9) Avenue Montaigne (the one brief image of the young Dani)
8) Notes on a Scandal (Bill Nighy dancing)
7) Blades of Glory (ambient Ferrellage)
6) Alpha Dog (Justin Timberlake in general)
5) Shooter (Mark Wahlberg dressed as a frickin' yeti for the final showdown; Ned Beatty's career-long conversion into Buford T. Justice)
4) Backstage (Isild LeBesco's facial physiognomy; plausibility of such drecky pop being huge in France)
3) The Host (brief familial hallucination of feeding the lost child; Kang-ho Song's facial expressions)
2) Children of Men (blood on the lens for long tracking shot; Clive Owen's slumped shoulders)
1) Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish Winona Ryder; Harold & the Purple Crayon riff; title better in English)