In Kick Ass we have all the elements of a standard “super hero” journey. The voice over, the sad life in school, the lust after the school’s best looking chick, the bullies and the obsessive compulsive masturbation fantasies. Yep, all present. Geeks must truly have inherited the earth, and must be earning millions, for films to try so hard to show them in such a positive light. Then the first person dies and it is the only person in the film who doesn’t die violently. It is Kick Ass’s mother, who drops dead in the opening montage. Nothing is made of this and she sort of fades from view. Nothing changes for the “hero”.

My Spidey-sense started tingling at this point.

I watched an amazing film once by Japanese director auteur “Beat” Kitano, called Boiling Point, in which the main character was a looser. After being struck out at baseball, he heads to a toilet shack and sits down. From that point his life changes and leads rollercoaster-like into confrontation with local Yakuza, ensuing violence and things being blown up. It was only after one character went into battle wielding a pineapple that my senses told me that something was amiss. Sure enough, the film appears to end with a fade to black… and then suddenly shows the looser still sitting in the toilet, he flushes and runs out to meet with his comrades.

The whole film had been a fantasy.

Kick Ass is like that. I kept thinking that after the credits would be a moment where he would wake up and it would all be a dream. Or more like a nightmare.

Trying to take a stand against crime, but for some reason wearing a costume – not that he has a secret identity to protect – the hero immediately feels for the lack of martial arts lessons and gets stabbed and run over on his first attempt. This leaves him with the ability to withstand more pain and on his second attempt, saving a guy from a gang kicking, he manages to outlast his three opponents to win the conflict.

Admirable.

Less admirable is the horde of people just watching. Why did no one call the cops? Or help? No, they just record it and put it on YouTube. Suddenly, his super hero identity has fans, lots of fans. This brings him to the notice of lots of people. Meanwhile the local crime lord is tracking down who has stolen his drugs, which he is doing by cutting people’s fingers off and putting other people in industrial microwaves to explode. The real culprits are the other super heroes in the movie, psycho vigilantes Big Daddy and Hit Girl.

They are truly an amazing father and daughter team of psychopaths. Big Daddy is this century’s winner of the Most Inappropriate Father Award who is on a punisher-like killathon working through the ranks of the crime boss’s henchmen and he has taken his 11 year old daughter along for the ride. By using comics to manipulate her mind and teaching her how to kill he has turned her into Hit Girl.

And Hit Girl is cool.

One definition of coolness is this, “The making of something that is difficult look easy”. That is why wearing sunglasses makes you look cool; walking in the sun requires that you squint. Squinting is effort. Wearing sunglasses you make walking in the sun look easy, therefore they are cool. Hit Girl makes killing look easy. She effortlessly slices up a drug-den of aggressive and violent “bad people” and inavertedly rescues Kick Ass from another serious ass kicking. In another scene she displays some of the best CQB gun play I have ever seen in film. She employs gen-3 night vision, the Mozambique drill, strobe lights, CQC knife/gun holds, tac-reloads and even ‘search and asses’! That this is being performed by a little girl, too young to fancy, made my spider sense go into overdrive.

I finally snapped when Kick Ass not only got the girl he had been lying too for weeks, in the most unlikely way, but he fucks her in the parking lot of the comic book store. I had that moment where you pull out of the film and wake up.

And suddenly it was all clear.

This film, with all its knowing winks to other super hero franchises, it’s horrific depictions of murder (such as a horrible moment where Dexter Fletcher is squashed in a car crusher by Hit Girl – and you see it all), its casual depiction of goodies & baddies by virtue of their masks, the Tarantino-inspired music and everyone but the main characters having nothing to do, is a satire. But not of what you think.

In one scene, the background characters see, as we do, the torture of Kick Ass and Big Daddy on screen. They are rescued on camera by a furiously shooting Hit Girl who then – having not broken sweat – casually shoots out the camera. They then comment to each other in a reflection of the thoughts going through the audience, and what do they say?

“I think I am in love with her.”

“Dude she is like 11 or something.”

Not a single word about Kick Ass and Big Daddy being brutally tortured, beaten to near death and Big Daddy being set on fire. They don’t care about that. Just like we don’t when we are watching. We already know what is going to happen, Kick Ass must survive, Big Daddy must die, but we don’t care at all. All we care about is how fucking cool Hit Girl is.

Yep, this film is a dark satire; It is a satire of us.

We film-watching idiots who sit through this stuff because it is cool, the comic reading fantasists living only on the internet. The porn watching, hentai viewing, YouTube nation that loves ultra-violence. The grosser Kick Ass was, the more the audience giggled and sighed like we were in a “feely” from A Brave New World.

The film is actually asking us, “Is this really what you will put up with?” Do we really want to apologise for an 11 year old shown slicing people up with a cute grin because it is a “cool” movie? Are we really going to accept whatever is thrown into our eyes and ears and make arguments that it is OK because we are completely desensitised to it all? Have we not played games with similar moments? Watched worse things on the net? Do we “care” about anything?

No, because this film kicks ass.

90% of the audience missed the point, missed that joke was on them, that they are the losers sitting around watching super hero movies rather than living a “real life”. Today I glanced through the comic in the bookshop and in the original version of Kick Ass, Big Daddy is eventually shown to be a liar and not an ex-cop with a grudge. A real nutter fantasist ruining his daughter by making her into Hit Girl. Also, Kick Ass doesn’t get the girl. And why? Because he is pathetic and had nothing to offer her.

That would have been a more satisfying ending than Hollywood’s version that hides the real target of the film’s satire. So, yes, Kick Ass handed me a stick and I have drawn my line. It was not where I was expecting to draw it on walking out of the film, but it is where I want it.

Kick Ass – do not want.

6/10

Regards,

Basho

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)

The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) is a classic science fiction movie from the 1950’s.  A top example of what I call, “Theremin Sci-Fi,” (A Theremin is the instrument that makes that spooky flying-saucer sound) they are usually categorised as having a high drama or what-if storyline combined with some sort of cautionary element.  Consider the excellent “Forbidden Planet,” which contained a very strong message about mucking around with ultra tech, “with great power comes great responsibility”.  Most “Theremin Sci-Fi,” are in some way to do with the cold war, such as “Them!” or the equally excellent, “Invasion of the Body Snatchers.”  The cold war elements focus around the loss of individuality of the citizen as they are engulfed into a alien collective; ideal material for the capitalist versus communist dilemma.  TDTESS is often taken as a primarily cold-war film and was indeed marketed that way.

In fact it is nothing of the sort. It is direct allegory of the life of Jesus.

The Jesus figure is Klaatu who has come to our planet to give us a warning about our dabbling with nuclear power.  He is the perfect diplomat peace-monger, a man who has no anger, no rage and a kindly character.  All the violence in his society (or the group of planets he represents) is contained within GORT; the massive 7 foot tall killer police robot he brought with him, who is entirely indestructible.  GORT represents God as his power is such that, “He could destroy the Earth”.

Best not get him riled then!

Gort and Klaatu leave with a message for the faithful.

The ‘priests’ of the story are the world’s scientists who have just been waiting for something like this to happen. In the story Klaatu hides amongst the humans calling himself “Carpenter,” professes to belief in “the Great Spirit”, eventually gets shot, dies and is resurrected by GORT.  He then ascends to space leaving a message behind in the hands of the scientists.  As the screenwriter Edmund North said,

“It was my private little joke…I had originally hoped that the Christ comparison would be subliminal”.^[7]

It is this allegorical telling of the Jesus-tale (which after all is timeless) that elevates the film to the level of masterpiece.  While the special effects are not that special anymore and the cinematography has been suppased, the acting and (more importantly) the story-writing is consummate.  It earns a very high 8 out of 10.

You can watch the entire film online here : http://www.veoh.com/

or here is the trailer:

So what the hell happened in the remake?

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)

Firstly, it gets some things very right indeed.  The alien spaceship is mysterious.  It is, in fact, not clearly a spaceship at all, rather a giant globe of light.  I like that a lot.  Secondly, the casting of Keanu Reeves as Klaatu is a masterstroke.  His wooden delivery – he can act well, just not speak and emote – is perfect for his character as it is not used to human flesh.  However, everything else is atrocious.

Primary of these is that there is an annoying American kid with problems to work out.  This staple of the genre has ruined many otherwise good science fiction movies, such as War of the Worlds, or AI.  Here the child’s relationship with his step-mother is used as a plot device to show “human emotion” to Klaatu and get him to save us.

Klaatu in this film is very different.  He is not such a peace envoy from outer space, and he certainly is no Jesus.  Rather he is more like an agent of “Special Circumstances”.  His entire performance is aloof to the extreme, and yet he has apparently been given the power to decide the fate of mankind all on his own.  Thinking about it, the shape and style of the ship is also very Culture-like.

A different kind of “Special”

The writers of this film sat down and went through their old film collection, ripping the themes off one by one.  At first we have the “wildfire” scenario from The Andromeda Strain, which is used to collect all the smart people together to sort out a major threat to the planet.  This idea is all well and good in theory, but the collective only have 76 minutes to react!  How bloody smart do they think they are?  What are they supposed to be doing in this time?

The next theme to be rampantly ripped is the military jumping-the-shark and being all knee-jerk about the visitor.  I want to send a message to my leaders, “If a being is able to fly here from another planet in a big space-bubble and land without blowing anything up, THEN HE IS AN OUTSIDE CONTEXT PROBLEM AND FIGHTING WILL JUST DOOM US ALL!”

Don’t drill into the 27 foot tall super-robot!

Historically speaking, as the movie’s Defence Secretary claims, OCP’s have led to the destruction of the weaker civilisation.  Actually, what dooms the so called weaker race is lack of communication.  Take Cortez’s landing in Aztec territory.  This is the classic OCP as Cortez was from Europe and had guns, etc.  Right?  Wrong!  Cortez had 500 men with him.  The Aztec’s had an army of 5,000.  What doomed them was the presumption about Cortez that led to them letting him into the mainland.  If they had actually talked to him straight away, they would have learned exactly what sort of threat he actually was and simply bashed his head in.  By fearing him to be a god they paralysed themselves into pattern behavioural thinking.  By the time he was amongst them he had a large army due to bargains struck with tribes on the way and it was too late.

OCP’s need talk first.  Guns are to be considered useless.  Of course, talk requires the realisation of this fact and the dropping of patterned thinking.

In other words: Fear breeds assumption and assumption is the mother of all fuckups.

When the Wildfire call really goes out, I hope that I get a knock on my door as what they really need in these occasions is a Philosopher.  Someone who thinks outside the box without his brain hurting.  An example of a film that realises this is Jurassic Park, where the Jeff Goldblum‘s character is exactly that, albeit with a more funky name like “Chaos Engineer” or something.

The next thing that gets ripped off is the message Klaatu has for us.  His message is not one of warning, his message is one of “die”.  He is not here to judge mankind, the intro to the film makes it clear that the aliens have been watching for many years.  Rather he has come here to throw the switch.  You see, the aliens don’t rate mankind over the other animals.  I do mean other animals, as animal we are, and it is only our arrogance that calls us separate.  You know, for a species to survive into space in the way Klaatu’s has, and for the “group of planets” to have formed into a single governed entity (and they must be governed – as otherwise they would have no need of GORT to police them) then they would have had to develop diplomacy just as much as they have astronavigation.  For such a group to send one unarmed guy down to us who lands “nearby” the UN (why not just land right there?), but is helpless for directions and transport to the meeting, is simply stupid.  The original Klaatu was a smart guy, and clearly a simple citizen of the collective.  It was GORT who represented the diplomacy; the diplomacy of the iron hand in the velvet glove.  Klaatu just was.  In this version Klaatu can save us if he wants to, and much of the film is about swaying this judgement, but then the movie takes that away from him by GW ordering the US military to attack GORT.  Pissing off super-beings, created or not, is never a good idea.  GORT made no threats at all until attacked.  He is just sitting there.  There is absolutely no reason to attack him!  NONE!  Why the hell are they trying to drill into him?

The next thing that is ripped is the nanotech cloud.

Nanites end-of-the-world.  It won’t be fun!

The Grey-Goo end of human civilisation scenario is well known to those who love sci-fi, but if you haven’t heard of it, it goes like this:

Ecophagy is a scenario involving molecular nanotechnology gone awry. In this situation (called the grey goo scenario) out-of-control self-replicating nanorobots consume entire ecosystems, resulting in global ecophagy. “Perhaps the earliest-recognized and best-known danger of molecular nanotechnology is the risk that self-replicating nanorobots capable of functioning autonomously in the natural environment could quickly convert that natural environment (e.g., “biomass”) into replicas of themselves (e.g., “nanomass”) on a global basis, a scenario usually referred to as the “grey goo problem” but perhaps more properly termed “global ecophagy”.”

It is a brilliant idea and ripe pickings for sci-fi.  However, the fundamental point of nanites, is that you can’t see them.  They don’t look like locusts.  I suppose this was a veiled biblical reference, but since the rest of the film has none, I don’t think it very effective.

By far the worst part of the film is the ending.  GORT is destroying humanity the hard way and in the final moments before the end Klaatu learns what it is to be human.  Empathy comes a bit late, but it comes.

You know, the idea that aliens taking on human form suddenly have all the rush and blood-pumping life of human existence to deal with and that this makes them feel like us is flawed in the extreme.  That feeling, that empathy with other humans, is an act of nurturing from when we were young.  Its like saying, “eveyone has a mum”.  Those feelings, the shared commonality of them, is to do with the fact we all love our mum’s.  Any alien suddenly thrust inside a human body would not feel that nurtured reaction when he see’s someone cry and someone hug them.

Love, in other words, is nurtured not biological.

Several great films have discussed this issue such as Blade Runner, which has the Semi-Robot Nexus 6′ learn human emotion through nurturing each other over their 5 year life-span.

Who is Klaatu nurturing with?

Give us a cuddle

Judging by Keanu’s flat delivery, no one.  The only person with any idea about what to do to convince Klaatu to save us is John Cleese, who strangely turns up as a mathematical scientist.  He tells Jennifer Connelly exactly how to deal with Klaatu, “You must convince him with yourself” (nod is as good as a wink to a bind bat).  I remember thinking he meant for her to have sex with him, which is not such a bad idea.

Actually, I suspect that if she had simply given him a blowjob then the whole film would have been over in a minute or quicker.

Pity.

Then in the end, where is “The Message?”  He is supposed to leave us with a message!  You know, this one.

GHaaa!

The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) scores a 5.  It is essentially rubbish.

Regards,

Basho

Trailer:

Keanu talks about the film:

Cesca and I sat in the heat of the Mumbai movie theatre around the corner from the Victoria Station – that defining landmark at the centre of the city – and waited for the film to start.  All around us were packed in hundreds of the Mumbai crowd.  I scanned their faces.  The film was in English with no subtitles, other than those found in the international edition, so most of the audience were those more educated types who understand English very well.  None-the-less, I was sure that all over the city a large variety of people packed in to cinemas and movie houses to see this film and its greatest star.

The city of Mumbai itself.

We had wandered around this blend of rich textures and smells, that passes for a modern enlightened city, for two days now and I still found it hard to get a handle on.  Millions live here of all financial levels, seemingly divided by success and yet managing to live together.  To some this is a dangerous cocktail that after a few days has you tearing your hair out, but I’m from another city alike this one; London; and I know how to stop a city from getting to you.

Or at least I thought I did.

The film features scenes of the harshest looking kinds; shanty towns, rubbish dumps, concrete jungles, disgusting garbage and kids begging on the streets.  It is a testament to the film’s quality and reality that the young beggars all look exactly like the little fellow that was yanking on my arm only a few hours earlier, asking for a dollar.

Not since Children of God, the film that told the story of Rio, has a film so nailed the sense of a city.  For while Slumdog Millionaire is a fictional story, it has a real smell of truth about it.  Make no bones, this is a movie that isn’t afraid to make your stomach turn and your heart break.

The story is simple enough; a young man is doing very well on the Indian version of “Who wants to be a millionaire?”  The police however know that he is a simple boy from the rough part of town; a slumdog; and shouldn’t be able to answer such hard questions correctly.  They arrest him for cheating and, after torturing him mercilessly, take him through his questions as he explains how his past enabled him to simply know the answers.

His past is relived by us in colourful, horrible, smart, loving, flashbacks that are full of loss, life, hate, pain, tears and the inevitability that a slumdog is inherently a nobody.  The final question changes from “will he win the million?” to “will he win the love of the girl?”

Of course there is a girl involved.  I did say that the story was simple.  There is even a dance number at the end, over the credits.

Slumdog Millionaire showed me more of the soul of Mumbai than I had gleaned in my two days visiting the city as a tourist. It showed me the underbelly; the necessity of crime to survive in a place that can be so grim and yet, somehow, so beautiful.  In the end the story is perfect for Mumbai, the home of Bollywood, in that it is a romantic love story and thankfully a really good one.

We both loved the film immensely, the acting is uniformly great and the romance believable and so recommend it whole heartedly.  8.

Regards,

Basho

Many will say that Iron Man is a very simple story. That the plot is essentially simple to spot. That the characters are all thin and obvious and the action is split very firmly along action genre standards. This, they will lament, is a film with a firm beginning, a plodding middle and a traditionally rambunctious end.  Just like every other comic book project found in the cinema these days.  Iron Man, they will claim, is a TV series episode with nine times the budget.  Yet another slice of nothing.

Others, of a more literary bent, may even point put that summer blockbusters are ten a penny these days and thus Iron Man is simply the next in the line of the decayed fetuses torn from the womb of Marvel’s back-catalogue, which is being repeatedly corpse-humped until all our childhood memories have been force fed back to us in lurid CGI. An imaginative morsel that can never compare to the gigantic spectacles our minds evoked back when we were young.

All those people are idiots.

Of course it’s shallow.

Of course it’s characters are paper thin.

Of course the plot-twists are simple to spot.

Of course there is a thumping sound track.

Of course the action is over the top.

It’s a comic book!

Capturing the Zeitgeist is a hard business these days. If you are designing a project that is going to try and present “near-future” tech, what with the time the project will take to produce and the ever quickening pace of consumer technology, you are presented with a fine balancing act. Push too far forwards and you will come off like an episode of Guyver. Hold back too hard and the audience will likely have better tech in their iPhones.  Many approaches have been attempted to pull off convincing sci-fi and not all have been successful.

For every Star Wars, which cleverly made everything broken-down and old (Thus the tag line of Episode IV is “A long Time ago in a Galaxy far far away” even though the ships all fly faster than light), you get a Tomorrow Never Dies (that execrable invisible car!). Iron man balances this tricky equation almost to perfection. So while the suit is amazing it is amazing in the ‘concept car’ sense. The movements and technology on display are just far enough ahead to make you go “wow”, but not too far ahead that you don’t believe it.

That is not the only problem that must have faced the writers of this story. More pressing is how could they inject a human touch into a big Iron Suit which has a blank looking mask? How could they inject enough character into the design so that we identify with it? For this they rely on the body movements of the arms and legs with little touches like the Stark’s hands clenching in anger causing an actual reaction in the suits mechanisms. Such as weapons slowly sliding into view or powering up.

In this way the emotion of the wearer is passed across. It is quite subtle and yet adds a lot to the action scenes and is a testament to the quality of 3d CGI in 2008.

For all non-action scenes you have an excellent cast who all know their jobs. Much will be made of Robert Downey Jr as Stark, and I will get to him in a moment, but I want to give big props’ to an excellent Jeff Bridges who plays the Villain very convincingly. His amazing beard and some clever film angles that enhance his physical size and presence are so effective that he steals almost every scene he is in. Gwyneth Paltrow is also every bit her part. I.E. office-girl-sexy and yet unobtainable. In this character they again have made something that most of us are more than familiar with.  It sounds easy to do but actually she has a lot of underacting to perform here. She has to give up space to the hero.

The hero is Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark.

Casting is a difficult job. The wrong casting can ruin the flow of a film. Think of the clunky acting of Katie Holmes in Batman Begins. Think of Hayden Christensen in Episode II/III. Robert Downey Jr as Tony Stark is an inspired choice. He has the un-fakable look of a man who has been to the edge. A man who could quite believably create an empire large enough to support the development of Iron Man. His delivery of the lines are all pitch perfect (two strong gins perfect). He is always cool and relaxed but underneath he is still wired. This is not something you can fake.  Look at actors in The Matrix Revolutions try to act cool but fail.

Stark’s legend is based on that of Howard Hughes and this lesson has been updated to the 2000′s with Stark living the “perfect” life.  Comic hero’s are all about repressed wish fulfillment fantasies and the director of this movie knew that from the beginning.  He presents Stark as a “magnificent bastard”.  Someone larger than life who is living the American Dream life of babes, toys, booze and all the money you can stick in your ears.  He then simply redirects that energy into becoming a hero.  This transformation is FAR more convincing than cheaper fare such as Jumper or even Spiderman (which I couldn’t stand).

Stark is every inch a genius playboy. That genius is awoken to save his life and like any obsessive the subsequent improved suit designs are his search for redemption through the pursuit of perfection (Howard Hughes to a T).  This is all very close to the comic book and no real liberties have been taken with the story even where that leads to plot-lite.  It is all much more convincing than Fantastic 4 or even X-Men.  Maybe it’s that I can believe in a suit whereas superpowers leave me cold.  Stark has a superpower of course: his intelligence, but that is on the inside and doesn’t require a spandex jumpsuit with underpants on the outside.

Watching Iron Man is an exercise in reliving one’s childhood. It is fun and exciting in equal measure, however it is definitely a film to watch on the big screen. I found it to be an excellent movie and I had great fun watching it. It is also a very welcome start to this year’s promising lineup.  There’s a new Indy, a New Batman and, to kick 2008 off, a very good comic adaptation in Iron Man.

I give it 8/10

Basho

For that we should all be eternally glad.

Deathproof is another movie from QT that speaks of his private obsessions. Sure the obvious things like cars and violence, any reviewer can spot those, but also deeper things that are really apart of his psyche. This man has a fucking amazing DVD collection; that’s all I am saying. If the sum of a man’s ideas and inspirations are to be found on those golden shelves, QT’s shelf is fucking vast. Anyway, actually I am talking of something a little deeper.

I am talking women.

To watch this movie I made the standard QT arrangements. Firstly, I drank the best part of a bottle of wine. Good wine, but nothing that you would serve to your granny. Second, I turned the volume way up and the lights way low. Like Jesus said, “Play it loud”.

Many people read immense volumes into QT’s work. even the post modernist idiots got hold of Pulp Fiction and spent ages chopping its concepts into finer and finer chunks until they, as usual, lost themselves somewhere on the road. You know what, I think pretty much everything QT has done since has been a reaction to that shit. Although the riffs are still there as like other QT films there are angles, tracing shots, scenes and dialogue that are copies, I mean homages, from other films. This is his trademark. In Kill Bill he riffed the Sonny Chiba films, Bruce Lee, Kung Fu movies of the 70′s and manga, amongst many others.

In this movie he is assured enough that for the first 30 minutes he is mainly riffing himself. The ring tone from kill Bill (my brother has that tone), the juke box solo moments, the two Texas cops (also from Kill Bill – great come backs guys) and especially the women. But I will come back to them.

Also mentioned in the mainstream media is the film grain, the rough cuts, the damage to the movie stock. This is all over the place until the moment happens. I don’t want to give it away, but that moment left my jaw on the fucking floor. A shock the like I haven’t seen in years.

Well done sir! Well done.

After that the film clears up. Maybe he ran out of old stock, maybe the reason is simple, but I would like to think it is on purpose. If for nothing else to get clear shots on some of the most amazing women in cinema.

Ah, the women: QT’s true obsession and one all men share. The casting of the ladies in this film is inspired. QT is a big fan of ‘real women’ because ‘real women’ are strong and beautiful, playful, curvaceous, sensual and amazing. It is the true and abiding love of women that drives this film. I could not fail to notice the amazing curves of Vanessa Ferlito (who I last saw being shot in Jack Bauer’s arms in 24) were cast for a very real reason. My mind was taken back to the speech in Pulp Fiction, where the very attractive Maria de Medeiros spoke of what is sexy in a women; the pot belly. This was all there in the way Vanessa dressed, this was all women.

That, of course, added to the shock. It is all the more shocking to get to know someone and then see what happens to them directly after.

Watching QT’s previous movies it was clear that he was in love with his star; Uma. Maybe platonically, but love none the less. Here he gives us a smorgasbord of what he thinks is the ideal women. in the second act, we have the very cute and sassy Tracie Thoms, together with one of the most beautiful women to grace Hollywood in many years; Rosario Dawson and he even tops the delights of her facial acting by casting the brilliant Zoe Bell as herself. Zoe was the stunt double for Uma in Kill Bill and here her blue eyes sparkle most brilliantly as she is, finally, in the cameras eye rather than under a wig. He role, character and performance owes much to her own personality and is all the better for it.

Stunt women are sexy. Any women with that amount of physical confidence is sexy.

With that overloaded amount of ‘girl power’ on screen he had to cast a man’s man as contrast. Kurt Russell is a man’s man’s man.

His roles and career have been some of the highlights of my life’s film-watching. Here he is let loose large on screen as Stuntman Mike. The enjoyment of seeing Mr Russell play a baddy is second to none and his larger than life character balances the strength of the girls. He is a stone cold killer, getting-off on murder, the hunt and the kill. However, being this is QT, he is also bloody cool. Vincent Vega cool.

So much for the casting, what about the story? What story? The story is very simple; a killer stalks girls for some unknown reason. He has a fantastically stupidly over the top US muscle car. He stalks a group, but then picks on some stunt women by mistake who kick the shit out him.

To say that I give nothing away in that synopses shows that this films story is entirely irrelevant as was the point of the Grind House homage:

Exploitation film is a type of film that eschews the expense of quality productions in favour of making films inexpensively, attracting viewers by exciting their more prurient interests. Exploitation films rely heavily on the lurid advertising of their content rather than the intrinsic quality of the film.

Exploitation films may feature forbidden sex, wanton violence, drug use, nudity, freaks, gore, monsters, destruction, rebellion and mayhem. Such films have existed since the earliest days of moviemaking, but they were popularised in the 1960s with the general relaxing of cinematic taboos in the U.S. and Europe. Since the 1990s, this genre has also received attention from academic circles, where it is sometimes called paracinema.

What QT was doing was trying to make a GrindHouse film with an insiders edge to it. One that we would get. One that would add a layer to the otherwise straightforward’s chaos of the story.

He made it. But, It is a fan boy movie sure enough and while I would hold my hand up at at that label : I am much more of a movie fan in general and not limited to violence.

QT is lost on those who aren’t.

I was very worried before I saw this movie. Sure I liked all his other films, but I missed 90% of Grind House cinema (I’m too young at 30) and so I was thinking that finally he had made a movie that I wouldn’t ‘get’. Not a bit of it. I loved Death Proof and recommend it to anyone who loves spotting the riffs in QT’s movies; as well as anyone who loved Pulp Fiction.

8 out of 10 and a good 8 at that. Warning: one scene of unimaginable shock and horror.