Review of Grindhouse (2007) by Keng. — 16 May 2007

There seems to be a lot of disagreement among the critics and others as to who made the better movie, Rodriguez or Tarantino, but the fact is, neither one did a good job. Rodriguez got so carried away with the idea of making a "bad" movie, that he actually wound up with a bad movie, rather than a clever, funny imitation of that type of "bad" movie.

His movie is a mess, and the fact that it was an intentional mess, is not enough to make it work. On the other hand Tarantino really didn't seem that interested in this project. He seemed much more interested in doing his version of a chick flick, with all the non-stop gab (much of it uninteresting, no matter how much the critics drool over it) that seems to go on forever.

The action just seems to be tacked on to fullfill his obligation to the project. Between the 2, I'd say Rodriguez did the better job, simply because he was more into the spirit of the project. But the only thing in the movie that was done well, well the previews.

I also wasn't impressed with the intentionally shabby feel of the films, for 2 reasons. One is that I gotta think it's not hard to capture that feel. The other reason is that much of the charm of the old shabbily done films they are copying is that those films weren't done shabbily on purpose.

By being shabby on purpose they are cutting the charm out of it. They are trying to capture an effect that you really can't, at least not intentionally.