First: Grindhouse, another unpleasant jerk-off from Quentin Tarantino. Critic David Edelstein in NY Mag almost came in his pants. Well, I have not seen the movie and I will never see it, just as I refused to see Kill Bill one and two. The last Tarantino movie I saw was the inexplicable Jackie Brown, I think the only movie in which I actually felt valuable time slipping inexorably and infuriatingly away from me, a movie where I couldn't find a redeeming quality, hard as I tried. An exercise in uselessness. After that, I swore him off for good, and unless he comes out one day with a Jane Austen adaptation, I ain't going to his movies. The day I went to see Hoax, they actually had to put on a disclaimer in the box office telling people that the condition Grindhouse was in: burnt around the edges, scratched, out of focus, etc, was actually ON PURPOSE, so they wouldn't come back to the box office screaming for their money back.
Well, precisely that is what infuriates me about master idiot savant Tarantino, $56 million wasted on recreating trash. It's not that I don't have a sense of humor, it's that it galls me to see someone who wastes his meager talent on shit and he does it on purpose, because even though decades have elapsed since Pulp Fiction, his only movie that is worth seeing, he is bent on remaining as puerile, immature and committed to shock pornography as possible. It is tiresome. There is no question Tarantino is an accomplished filmmaker, but I hate his deliberately stupid frame of reference. I hate the reverse snobbery of fetishizing utter pieces of crap. It's all posturing with very little substance, if any. Empty, deliberately stupid style.
Don't get me started on Rose McGowan sporting an automatic submachine gun for a leg in Robert Rodriguez's installment. I do not wish to sound like Andrea Dworkin, and I am not a feminist (in fact, one show I hate that I haven't seen is the Feminist Art expo at the Brooklyn Museum. I know it sucks and you know it too, but that is fodder for another rant), but the sight of that woman with a firearm as a leg actually repulses me. And it may be all the tongue in cheek you want, but it is disgusting and offensive and if someone has not understood what feminists mean when they object to the denigrating objectification of women, well I guess this is a great example.
Two: talking about things that disgust me: that exhibition of Bodies that subjected us to outdoor posters everywhere of people who seemed to have been skinned alive. I refused to see it because the posters grossed me out completely, and I'm not squeamish. But I think it is terrible disrespect for these people, who all seem to be Chinese for some reason, to be used as embalmed mannequins, supposedly in the name of science (more like prurient entertainment). And if I'm not mistaken, there was some controversy about the provenance of the bodies. When someone dies, unless they say so in their will, leave their body alone and at peace, don't you think? Imagine someone took one of your departed and showed them naked, and without their skin in a museum. Yuck. I've always thought that this exhibit is exploitative and pornographic. And no, I haven't seen it.
Three:
I was hoping to see Kevin Spacey in A Moon for the Misbegotten. I'm not a fan of O'Neill. He's such a windbag. But I've seen Spacey doing it, and he is great. So Ben Brantley of the NYT is unhappy because Spacey supposedly speeds through the production, giving it I bet some much needed LIFE. Well, it probably is a very good thing than instead of having to sit through a ponderous, longwinded evening, there is lightness of heart. Now that I know it comes in at less than three hours, I want to see it more.
You are all welcome to disabuse me of any notions expressed in this article, by the way.
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