Grind Playin' Tricks on Me

The funniest, most spot-on observation I’ve read about Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’ trash-cinema double-bill Grindhouse came courtesy of Grady Hendrix in the online magazine Slate. Hendrix was noting how practically every article about the making of the film mentioned the regular screenings of old-school exploitation flicks that Tarantino apparently holds in his private cinema for his fellow directors. “Tarantino loves to brag about his working-class roots,” Hendrix remarks, “but his screening room sounds more like Marie Antoinette’s le Hameau de la Reine—where she and her friends played shepherdess—than a real grindhouse theater.”

Are there any real grindhouses anymore? The release of Grindhouse has prompted a flood of nostalgic newspaper articles lamenting the disappearance of old-school scuzzbucket movie palaces. And the reviewers who’ve liked Grindhouse praise it for the way it recreates a bygone moviegoing experience.

They’re especially amused by the way Tarantino and Rodriguez have intentionally dirtied up the look of their films. “Each of the features is missing a reel—the management apologizes for the inconvenience—and of course it’s the reel with the sex in it, which the projectionist probably stole for his own amusement,” writes A.O. Scott in The New York Times. “The prints are full of scratches, bad splices and busted sprocket holes, and the images are not always in focus.”

“The film stock is scratched, the soundtrack is full of pops, there are frames and whole reels missing,” says Slate’s Dana Stevens. “In short, no effort has been spared to make this feel like a long Sunday matinee at a dubiously safe movie house in 1973.”

And here’s David Fear in Time Out New York: “Both [Tarantino and Rodriguez] spare no expense ($53 million, but who’s counting?) in resurrecting a bargain-basement rush, complete with MIA reels and sputtering prints that look like they’ve been marinating in hobo urine.”

I find these reviews deeply puzzling. Where do these critics see their movies? Except for the missing reels, it seems to me like just about every film I’ve ever watched over the last few years, even in first-run theatres, has been plagued by scratched-up prints, soundtrack pops and projectionist errors. The night I went to see Grindhouse, the movie started 10 minutes late because of some kind of problem with the projector. The theatre lights kept turning randomly on and off throughout the coming attractions, and the screen went black entirely during the trailer for 1408. The screen was underlit. As for Grindhouse itself, like every film I’ve ever seen at the Regal Cinemas here in Key West, it was projected in such a way that the two far ends of the widescreen image were cut off, damaging the composition of several images and leaving off the final four or five letters in many of the names in the credits.

There was also about a three-minute stretch during Tarantino’s Death Proof where the picture was framed too low, so that a thin sliver of the bottom of the image was visible at the top of the screen. Now, that might have been an intentional “mistake” that Tarantino consciously incorporated into the print of the film, but I’ve seen this happen so many times—in Edmonton, the projectionists at the Garneau Theatre and the City Centre are especially inattentive to the framing of the image—that I couldn’t be sure. (I also kept hearing people talking throughout the movie. Their voices were tantalizingly unintelligible, and I couldn’t decide whether I was hearing actual people in the theatre or if Tarantino and Rodriguez were so committed to recreating the grindhouse experience that they actually added the sound of disgruntled patrons to the soundtrack.)

Is there any entertainment experience more miserable than moviegoing? I can’t think of another major American industry (with the possible exception of the fast food business) that routinely delivers its product to the public in as shoddy a condition as the movie business. You may not be taking your life in your hands when you go to the bathroom in a modern multiplex, the way you did back in the sleazy old days of Times Square, but it’s not as if these multiplexes are models of sanitation either—a couple of years ago, the floor of the men’s room at City Centre was routinely flooded, the toilets backed up with wadded-up tissue.

I’m sympathetic to the plight of movie exhibitors, who always get bullied out of their fair share of ticket revenue by the big studios and who must operate on increasingly razor-thin profit margins, but things are getting to the point where I often feel that I can’t tell what a movie is really “supposed” to look like until I watch it at home, correctly framed, brightly lit and free from scratches and glitches, on a pristine DVD.

Maybe that explains Grindhouse’s disappointing boxoffice take. We can watch crappy prints of crappy movies in crappy conditions every week at our local movie theatre—where’s the novelty in Grindhouse?

Smokin' Aces

Just about all of my experiences with drugs have been vicarious ones. I’ve written about this before, but I’ve had such violent reactions the measly two times I’ve tried marijuana that I’m afraid to imagine what LSD or cocaine might do to me.

So whenever I watch drug scenes in movies, I’m in no position to evaluate their accuracy. Still, it does seem to me that movies, which are so often described as having the texture and the logic of dreams, have done a surprisingly poor job of depicting altered states of consciousness. The movies have given us plenty of vivid scenes of people taking drugs, of course—from the casual, communal pot use of Dazed and Confused or The Big Lebowski to the weary, sepulchral tones of William S. Burroughs’ Tom the Priest saying “Bless you, my son” as Matt Dillon injects him with heroin in Drugstore Cowboy—but very few scenes that capture what the world looks like when you’re on drugs.

Most of the time these scenes are just laughable, as in 1967’s The Trip, where Roger Corman tries to simulate the effects of LSD using just some colored lights, a fog machine and a lot of improvised dialogue from Dennis Hopper. (It’s too bad, because the real-life scenes in The Trip are fantastic, especially when Bruce Dern is onscreen, gently guiding his buddy Peter Fonda through his first acid experience.) A lot of comedies make their drug sequences deliberately laughable—there’s a long, time-killing bit in Tenacious D in The Pick of Destiny, for instance, where Jack Black eats some magic mushrooms and hallucinates an extended adventure with Sasquatch (played, amusingly, by John C. Reilly).

Serious, successful drug scenes are much fewer in number. The best this-is-your-brain-on-pot sequence I can think of occurs in Jammin’ the Blues, a 1944 black-and-white short film by Gjon Mili that the distributors paired up with the jazz documentary A Great Day in Harlem when it played in theatres. Jammin’ is sort of a prototypical music video starring Lester Young, Harry Edison, Illinois Jacquet and a bunch of other great jazz musicians of the post-swing, pre-bebop era—never before or since has the sight of cigarette smoke curling into the air looked this gorgeous and seductive. The slightly slowed-down images of the musicians playing their instruments, the repeated shots of Young bowing his head, his porkpie hat shielding his face from the camera’s view, the shots of jitterbug dancers crossfading in and out... you begin to suspect that all that smoke is not as innocent as it appears.

I can only assume that Martin Scorsese drew on a great deal of personal experience when he put together that long, jittery, cocaine-fueled sequence near the end of GoodFellas where Ray Liotta drives all over town snorting coke, trying to unload a bag of handguns, making ziti for dinner (“Stir the sauce!” “I’m stirrin’ it!”), eluding the helicopters he thinks are tracking his every move and listening to Harry Nilsson’s “Jump Into the Fire” blaring on the car stereo. I love the way Scorsese captures the way Liotta has completely lost the ability to prioritize any of these tasks—making the ziti and getting that night’s shipment of coke ready for delivery seem equally urgent to him. I also love how absolutely terrible Liotta looks in this part of the movie; his face is so pale and clammy, he seems half-zombie, half-ghost—the don of the dead.

But my favorite movie drug scene is a great deal shorter and a great deal more mysterious: it’s that moment at the very end of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller where frontier madam Julie Christie, knowing that her almost-lover and business partner Warren Beatty has died in a wintry gunfight somewhere outside her window, retreats to her room with her opium pipe. This scene never fails to make me catch my breath: the disorienting close-up of Christie’s eye, vertical instead of horizontal, as she stares at a small jar made of some kind of stone or brownish marble, turning it over in her hand as if the solutions to all the riddles of the universe were contained within it, the whooshing of the wind outside the only noise on the soundtrack.

Come to think of it, there’s another great opium scene at the end of Once Upon a Time in America, Sergio Leone’s camera staring down at Robert De Niro’s tragic smile through some kind of semi-transparent canopy as he reclines on his mattress in a Chinatown opium den. Could it be that opium is the perfect cinematic drug? A substance that makes even the simplest thing in the world seem eminently watchable—and which transforms you into an ideal, completely receptive spectator? If only movie theatres would let you lie down completely flat, we might be onto something.