Review of From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) by David U — 29 Aug 2011

I'm Figuring Quentin Tarantino Was Adopted.

I have seen the end of this movie like six times. This right here was the first time I'd ever actually seen the beginning. You know how it goes--your roommate really likes a movie and sits down to watch it on a regular basis, but somehow, she never says, "Hey, let's watch this movie I really like together." I knew her but wasn't yet hanging out with her when the movie came out in the theatre, so I didn't see it then. (Though we did see [i]Bordello of Blood[/i], also very much her sort of movie.) She was a big Tarantino junkie, which I've never been; I think I've seen [i]Reservoir Dogs[/i] once, and that was almost certainly with her. It just never worked out, is I guess what I'm saying, and she and I haven't seen one another in about ten years. But you know, one of the advantages of streaming video is that I can say, "Hey, I'll watch that movie I never got around to now," and there it is. Sometimes.

George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino, improbably enough, play brothers--Seth and Richard Gecko, respectively. (More on this anon.) Richie has busted Seth out of prison, and they've killed a whole lot of people on their way to Mexico, where a friend of Seth's will set them up in a place where the cops won't get them. And by "they," I mean Richie. Seth is really quite frustrated by the whole thing. They encounter the Fuller family and their RV and hijack them. Jacob Fuller (Harvey Keitel) is a Baptist minister who has walked away from the ministry in uneven faith after the death of his wife. He bought the RV and is taking his daughter, Kate (Juliette Lewis), and adopted son, Scott (Ernest Liu), on a trip to Mexico in the hopes of coming to terms with his loss. Unfortunately, what he gets instead is the Gecko brothers. He is to drive them to a bar called the Titty Twister, where the Geckos' new life will begin. Alas for all, things do not go according to plan. If only Carlos (Cheech Marin) had visited the bar first . . . .

There is some discussion over on IMDB about the prospect of having seen the movie without knowing about the twist, and obviously, I didn't get to do that. Because I started watching pretty much where the twist came in. But before then, it's just a standard run-of-the-mill Tarantino/Rodriguez flick. And to be honest, it's not all that much different after, except that what they're fighting isn't exactly the minions of Marcellus Wallace. There are a lot of scantily-clad women, topped off by Salma Hayek dancing with a snake. (Apparently, she went into therapy for two months beforehand, because she was deathly afraid of the things.) There's even two sequences which show that Joss Whedon is not the only [i]auteur[/i] out there with a foot fetish. And then we look into how strong Jacob's faith really is and what he'll do to protect his children. And how much Seth will do for his brother.

About that brother thing. Look, I'm not buying it. I know I'm just supposed to look at how probable it is in the movie, but I know what George Clooney's family is really like. His dad is a talented writer; I have one of his books about film, as it happens. His Aunt Rosemary was a talented singer and not a bad actress. His cousin, Miguel Ferrer, is highly underrated, and I guess Miguel's brother Rafael is a voice actor. George Clooney is also intelligent and eloquent. And, in something they don't cover up in the movie, gorgeous. (No, they could--just ask Charlize Theron!) But okay, ignore the offscreen stuff. Even within the movie, Seth got the intelligence and the sanity, though there wasn't much of that latter to go 'round, it seems. Given a choice between prison and Richie, I'd take prison any time. In fact, one of the most satisfying moments in modern cinema is the one where Seth punches Richie right in the face. I'm jealous of George Clooney for many things, but getting to punch Quentin Tarantino in the face may top the list.

I have managed to get this far in the review without mentioning the "v-word." Let us say that this movie doesn't just share roots with Tarantino's beloved grindhouse flicks. It also goes back to a root of the fear of sexuality and loss of control that existed before there was sparkly skin. Indeed, though I'm not sure it's intended to be, Salma's dance with the snake is extremely Freudian. Snakes symbolize a lot of things, and Salma's garb to me calls to mind that of an Aztec goddess. (This, given the last shot of the movie, is almost certainly deliberate.) Which means she is the one in control. I haven't bothered with the other two movies in this little series, and I don't plan to--and it isn't just because they are, by all accounts, [i]very[/i] bad. It's more to do with the fact that what interests me isn't the staking and shooting and so forth. I want to know the history of that bar in the middle of nowhere and how long that beautiful woman has been dancing there, and nobody's going to tell me.