Moviegoer Diary: Death Proof, Eyes Wide Shut

DEATH PROOF

Plot in a Nutshell:
A serial-killing stuntman tangles with the wrong group of girls in Quentin Tarantino’s half of the Grindhouse double feature.

Thoughts:
I guess I can count myself lucky for having caught Grindhouse during its original theatrical run, since now that its two halves have been expanded and divvied up into two separate DVD releases, it looks as though it might be a while before it gets seen in that form again. Going to see that three-hour extravaganza on opening night (having ducked out early from work) was an event in a way that watching a DVD—even an expanded director’s-cut edition—can never be.

That said, my reaction to Death Proof a second time around weren’t too different from my first one: it’s a movie whose structure and whose approach to the serial-killer genre are genuinely fresh and daring, but which is bogged down by some utterly tedious stretches of go-nowhere conversations.

In fact, I think this is the first film where Tarantino’s celebrated ear for dialogue, his gift for making scenes in which characters do little more than lounge around and shoot the shit dramatically interesting, fails him. That endless conversation in the diner where the second group of girls—Tracie Thoms, Zoe Bell, Rosario Dawson, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead—jaw on and on about car movies for so long that the camera has time to circle their table about a half-dozen times may be the worst scene Tarantino has ever shot. I wonder, actually, whether he cursed himself when he got into the editing room for insisting on doing it in a single take and leaving himself no way to pull all the dull sections out of it.

It’s also the first film where Tarantino’s off-the-wall casting instincts don’t pay off. It’s tremendously exciting to see real-life stuntwoman Zoe Bell strapped to the hood of that car during the film’s epic chase scene, but in those even lengthier dialogue scenes, she’s a bit of a stiff—her comic timing is shaky and she’s seems unsure of herself in front of the camera when she should be larger than life.

Nevertheless, the majority of the reviews of Death Proof that I read when it came out seemed to love Zoe Bell, and to find her group of girls much more appealing than the first group, which gets gruesomely massacred by Kurt Russell’s “Stuntman Mike” character at the film’s midpoint. I couldn’t disagree more! What’s so likable about that second group of girls? They go on a joyride with an unsuspecting man’s car; they leave their unsuspecting, very naïve friend behind at his shack as “collateral,” practically encouraging him to rape her while they’re gone; they do a dangerous, completely irresponsible stunt on a public highway; and they have no qualms about smashing up this car that they don’t even own in order to chase down a guy who’s pissed them off.

Sure, it’s great fun to watch them beat Kurt Russell’s ass (and Russell’s 180-degree turn from cocky badass to blubbering sissy is absolutely hilarious), but if I had to pick a group of girls to hang out with, I’d take the first group anytime, especially “Jungle Julia,” the queen-bee DJ played by Sydney Tamiia Poitier. I don’t know why Poitier hasn’t become a huge sex symbol as a result of this movie—according to the IMDb, her only post-Grindhouse credit is the recent TV reboot of Knight Rider. (More cars!)

I love the insouciant way she lounges around that Texas chili joint, showing off her long legs and swinging her long, dark hair around as she dances to the jukebox. She’s so sexy but also so completely in command of her own sexuality... it’s impossible to tell if she’s going to bed with a different man every night or if it’s so hard for her to find someone who measures up to her that she almost never sleeps with anybody. And Tarantino gives her the film’s most improbably beautiful private moment—the little scene where she sends a text-message to her boyfriend while the love theme from Brian De Palma’s Blow Out plays on the soundtrack. Damn you, Stuntman Mike, for taking her out of the movie!

RATING: 4/5


EYES WIDE SHUT

Plot in a Nutshell:
Stanley Kubrick’s 1999 swan song, about a doctor who goes on a dreamlike odyssey of sexual temptation after an argument with his wife.

Thoughts:
Here’s a nitpicky, completely minor thing that nevertheless has always bugged me and which I want to clear up. In Afterglow, his extended “last interview” with Pauline Kael, Francis Davis asks Kael what she thought of Eyes Wide Shut. He makes a big deal about criticizing the film’s prudishness, citing in particular Kubrick’s decision to show Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman making out in front of a mirror while Chris Isaak’s “They Did a Bad, Bad Thing” plays on the soundtrack. “But they’re married,” Davis says. “So how exactly are they doing a bad, bad thing by making love? Is Kubrick telling us that sex is dirty, even for married couples?”

Except, of course, Isaak is actually singing, “Baby did a bad, bad thing”—a reference to infidelity that’s perfectly in keeping with the rest of the film.

I guess I’m focusing on this tiny error in a book published more than five years ago because I don’t know if I have much to add to the critical discussion over Eyes Wide Shut. I’m not much of a Kubrick fan, although there’s something hypnotic about his movies that sucks me into even the ones I can’t stand, like A Clockwork Orange. I don’t think I’m alone in that. For instance, a few years ago, I was visiting my parents for Christmas, and one night I was in the TV room with my dad. He was flipping idly from channel to channel and stumbled across a station showing Eyes Wide Shut. Now, my dad isn’t any kind of movie buff—I don’t know if he could name a single Stanley Kubrick movie if you asked him—but something about the image on the screen made him linger. It wasn’t even one of the racy parts—just the bit near the end with Sydney Pollack and Tom Cruise and the pool table. (“Just knockin’ some balls around”—is Pollack awesome or what?) It’s a really long scene that doesn’t even have much internal logic or make much dramaturgical sense, and yet there’s something about the filmmaking that holds your attention. I can’t figure it out—it’s like Kubrick stumbled on some weird, alchemical combination of long takes and stylized, slowly recited dialogue that puts every moviegoer into a lava-lamp trance.

There’s something about Eyes Wide Shut’s deadpan ridiculousness—as implacable as the expression on the mask Tom Cruise wears to that crazy orgy—that I found much more appealing watching it on DVD for the first time since it came out. (Disappointingly, my DVD was the much-reviled censored version, with cloaked figures CGI-ed over top of the more explicit images in the orgy sequence. But since Cruise never gets any action in this movie either, if anything, this touch helped me identify with his character even more.)

By the way, Nicole Kidman is amazing in this movie. She has a couple of shaky moments in her big marijuana-fueled monologue—although I fault Kubrick’s direction more than her performance—but she’s really great at straddling this line between the flesh-and-blood woman who we see sitting on the toilet, applying deodorant to her underarms, and being a mommy to her seven-year-old daughter, and this mysterious, sensuous, goddessy creature with thoughts and desires we men can only guess at. And I adore everything she does in that opening party scene, especially the bit where she excuses herself from Cruise to powder her nose, turns down a corridor, grabs a glass of champagne from a tray, and drinks it all down in one gulp with an expression on her face that seems to say, “Wow, I’m going to need a lot more of those to get through this night.” I hadn’t appreciated her performance at all the first time through—I suspect I may have been distracted by how smashing she looks in that see-through undershirt she wears while telling Cruise about her sexual fantasies.

I feel guilty about how much space I’ve devoted in this entry to ogling actresses—especially after listening to a recent Show Me Your Titles podcast in which Cathy De La Cruz and Erin Donovan talked about how annoying it is to see male movie reviewers drooling over some sexy movie star and calling it criticism. Seeing beautiful men and women on display is one of the great pleasures of moviegoing, but De La Cruz and Donovan have a point—when a reviewer carries it too far, he’s done a bad, bad thing. Maybe I’ve crossed the line, but I hope the ghost of Pauline will forgive me.

RATING: 4/5