planet terror

the buried lead

planet terror scratches robert for frankenstein: all of his craziest instincts finally set free, he’s managed to execute every one of his ideas with by far the more fetishistic of the two features, near constant hisses and scratches and pops in the film filled with arch that embraces cliché even as it demolishes all. remember, when george w. bush was elected, and he said that thing about how, by 2008, we’d have “movies that would explode in our balls like a shotgun filled with handjobs”? cherry looks to power a small nation for a year of sexual heat a torch still carried cherry darling, rodriguez’s ex-girlfriend played perfectly by rose mcgowan, who has never looked better than she does here. i’ve never seen a woman i wanted so bad to rub one out to but also kind of killed my boner in a way that gave me a bigger boner. and on top of that, she knows exactly how to play the smartass side of the character in a way that makes cherry darling fetishistic poignant, even if she is a cartoon a crash course in the cinematic language of golan-globus like any wormhole alive rodriguez has a piece mcgowan breaks perfectly rose mcgowan will make you cluster-spooge in your pants glitz vibrant cherry features the uncomfortable crappy fistful the pieces hilarious to demolish hilarious to undermine and bury and robert he is a nation that in digital even in his 80s opened up and spat out some horror/action/sf el monster pastiche something that manages to tack together all those dead pieces a result plus fergie’s cleave some bar-b-q bad parenting. an auto-orchi knife slashing through a digital glitz castration fantasy i mean no wonder qt seems so uncomfortable playing a man in this he has to play a man the horror out-sombers out-characters himself hisses of that exact constant sexual fantasy we execute cinematic dead heat by a single mean.

unlike its sister death proof, planet terror does not believe in the lie but it lures us under its spell nonetheless. robert rodriguez believes in material girls in burying the lead basking in cherry meta battle angel guts in showing the ways life is boring life is clean by depicting an afterlife in the textured remembrance of a lie. the frame is always moving under sublime digital gloss stripped to its hollowed-out afterlife aftereffects artificial images manipulated and painted over a suggestion of a past that was never there. both films want to be on their knees both films long for things that cannot be or maybe they were there all along baby it’s you you know i can’t let you gooo maybe the government will put some “don’t be a pussy” drug in the water supply and everyone will go see this instead of pillow fight and scented candles and boredom or whatever sandra bullock movie’s coming out. planet terror, unlike its sister, is undeniably a man’s movie wherein if you are a man and you get laid you inexplicably become a superhero moreover you’re respected by your peers because you’re such a gentleman for instance you don’t brag you let women exist you let women be autonomous be baadasssss. this is not a reversal it’s not gender essentialism it’s a film dedicated to drifting from role to role a bad ass character make her one of the leads and bury it. i mean i wanted her to have a starring role in a big movie to take her off the blacklist and the best part is that we would have harvey’s new weinstein company pay for the whole damn thing. harvey builds a world where women get to be machine gun les guérillères dykes. harvey builds a world where men pine after us while tending to the bar-b-q. when taken as a double feature, grindhouse is about playing a pissed off machine gun chick and then a fake blonde bitch victimized by burning steel. it’s to be a girl and then another girl as a guy in a secret compound as a bartender to have your life occur in nonlinear fashion bathed in texas blood and guts film at eleven hail cherry hail palomita your fire burns for every witness.

i have not previously discussed what i knew about the 1997 incident that rose suffered in a hotel room during the sundance film festival. i never wanted to do anything that jeopardized a legal settlement she entered into with harvey weinstein. now that she’s able to tell her story i want to provide an account of what i knew when i knew it and what i did about it. i didn’t have the correct language. i am, you know, an older woman from hollywood. it’s not exactly the place for understanding the language. following the barnes & noble incident, mcgowan said people that are scared of transness, we’re all women, we’re just different kinds of women and different kinds of men there’s a huge spectrum to be had in that and i think that’s a really beautiful thing. i’m here to say to people that are scared of transness we’re all women we’re just different kinds of women you're a woman now? i called harvey over to our table and as soon as he got close enough to see that i was sitting with rose his face dropped and went ghostly white. i didn’t have the correct language. i’ve long been involved in this community, just behind the scenes, not in front of the cameras. i was in a backward world, mcgowan writes about being forced to perform the scene after she confided in rodriguez about her own history of abuse. i was losing my grip on sanity to have that ripped away is really, really heartbreaking and something that i am profoundly sorry for i really do understand a lot more about the terminology the struggle and have a lot more respect for it and i think that’s important i thought terfs were made up i really honestly thought terfs were made up i didn’t think they actually existed i thought they can’t be real and it’s shocking to me because it’s so i mean don’t you realize what you fought for? my god why didn’t you say anything? people would have stood up for you! and where was your fiancé during all this? i would have at least beaten the crap out of harvey if i had heard that. well fucking learn that we have had a very different experience than your life of male privilege and different kinds of men. rose said they didn’t know what to do. it’s been a learning process and evolution. she confided that a female attorney had told her that because she had done nudity in movies that no jury would believe her and that it would turn into a he said/she said case you know as women cis women don’t you know what you fought for? we fought for the right to have a voice and to be counted and that fight is not so different nda you know nda fundamentally at its core it is completely on the wrong side of history you can say to people there’s nothing to be afraid of walk out your door you’re at far more risk just walking down the street than i would say of a trans person in the bathroom who’s literally just trying to go to the damn bathroom like you are or changing into their zombified form foaming bubbles ballooning ballooning ballooning a sense of candida albicans teeth stained coral crush red catch yourself grinning into shards of human flora a mirror. that’s you that’s god. we all suffered greatly on the film and the journey ended up costing us all more than we ever bargained for because my ex sold our movie to my rapist for distribution #whywomendontreport it cost me my marriage of 16 years my family a large dose of sanity and for years i have grappled with the sobering idea that maybe i made a grave error in the ultimate act of cruelty sold our film to my monster when no one was even asking me to. i know that’s not the message i’d ever want to send out but it’s been hard to justify something that now is clear was a lose/lose situation from the get-go and that in the end failed and simply caused more damage. looking back over the years i have wondered if i would have made the same choices knowing the bleak outcome. the reason i’m saying this is because it’s very clear to me now that when someone does what harvey weinstein did the devastation goes far beyond predator and victim. if i ever called you the wrong name i’m sorry. i would like to say i’m sorry.

death proof

baby can’t you see i’m calling?

you know what it isn’t-proof? boner-inducing proof. as much as planet terror is a fetish film for the chemical and physical nature of film prints, death proof is a movie where qt lays many of his own personal fetishes bare. the movie starts with a close-up of a pair of bare female feet propped up on a dashboard and there’s a lot of attention paid to female anatomy both north and south of the ankle in the film. qt loves certain actresses, and he will buy practically any film if it’s got one of his favorite actresses in it. if you ever have the chance to meet him, ask him to explain his childhood fixation on tatum o’neal, and then set aside a half-hour or so for his best malicious answer of a childhood excised. he comes across as swagger personified, but he’s also totally emasculated in parts. tarantino certainly enjoys flirting with the cold-blooded tropes of iconic masculinity. who says the media isn't implicated in violence? when asked how he feels about the missiles fired from the gaza strip, tarantino said, “i’m not scared at all. like everyone else here, i don’t really notice it.” pretensions to masculinity are, then, actually and specifically portrayed as pretensions — and ones to which the man himself steadfastly fails to live up hardly in the glorious blaze-of-phallic-firearms mode. on the contrary, his two kills are predicated on the most tawdry kind of betrayal. in both instances, he uses his personal relationship with his employees to maneuver them into situations where he can simply shoot them mid-conversation at point blank range. when he goes after someone smart enough not to trust him, he ends up, in the first case, with a gun pointed at his melting crotch. later, when he tries it again, he ends up dead: “there was a city-wide siren going on and that's letting you know that the hamas missiles are on their way. and then i take my fifteen month old son and my wife and we go down into a bomb shelter,” tarantino said. he also teased that he plans to make only one more movie and that he is considering making israel his backdrop: “if you make a movie in jerusalem, there’s nowhere you can point the camera where you’re not capturing something fantastic.” but in the end it’s dutiful boringness, lived-in face, and hair implants who ends up as the movie’s icon of masculinity. in his interview on real time with bill maher, tarantino described life in tel aviv as being similar to life in los angeles. he said both have “magnificent restaurants, cool bars, cool clubs,” although tel aviv is smaller. part of that masculinity comes from taking responsibility for his own choices and his own limitations. that was the first impetus to do it. for the last three or four years i’ve had a whole lot of different female friends. i have different clusters of female posses that i hang with. i’ve got male friends too but the dynamic of a bunch of girls that hang out together has been more my reality for the last few years i get to hear all the stuff they talk about and joke about. their camaraderie. and most of the girls in this movie are based on one person or a combination of this person and that person but i knew i wanted to follow these girls it just presented itself this chance to introduce this group of girls we’re all hanging with them and hanging with them till something happens. it’s like watching a cobra toying with something before moving in for the kill. snake, indeed. it is notable that the explosion of violence the destruction of our friends always follows the most sexually-charged moments in qt’s filmography. maybe the government will put some “don’t be a pussy” drug in the water supply and everyone will go see this instead of pillow fight and scented candles and boredom or whatever sandra bullock movie’s coming out. even excised (denied) the lapdance scene triggers a rage a panicked response to gender euphoria. it’s all about character and emotion, and it’s not just a collection of hollow gags. it actually causes my pulse to race each time i sit through it i find myself almost unable to sit still. it’s thrilling precisely because of how much time qt takes to set the moment up because of how much he asks us to invest in these women and their situation. death proof is a total original, and it’s one of the most personal things quentin has ever put on film. if you want to understand him as an artist, death proof is a vital piece of the puzzle and it’s what elevates grindhouse from a fun evening at the movies to something truly great. oh…and that missing reel in death proof? one of the most brutal, malicious bits of cinematic blue balls ever. you are a cold cruel man mr. tarantino and i applaud you for it.

using every part of your body, he — do you think he gets off on it? burying you beneath feet of cinematic gesture? your life a flicker a flourish a vampire loose on the rodriguez backlot do you think he cares? does he see you like really see you? are you even trying to land this role? smoke his bomb ass weed pour piss yellow chartreuse do it he’ll leave you he’ll dooo it he won’t fuck you he’ll leave you leave you alone promise promise baby you’ll be like kurt russell at the end of the thing right? no resolution no one cums we’re doing everything but the thing! right here in this facsimile in the warmth of your body you are immortal insofar as you are already dead already carefully preserved in precious celluloid everything is celluloid holy veins extending into infinity razor wire you can taste visages arteries baked in it has to be this it has to be physical 35mm i’m 35mm i’m telling you it’s all a reference. everything follows something with a taste of your lips i’m on a ride in hot pursuit you’re in your car following the white dodge challenger from vanishing point like the real one from that movie (you’re cool you know that movie too) the other car is like the real car from vanishing point but your car is like the pussywagon or something haha you’re riding shotgun all right you feel his hand on your leg and you’re suddenly made aware of your meat status you embody the term “set piece” baby shots first questions later your yellow skirt matching the car this too is a set piece an end by itself but that’s as far as it is allowed to go. if you go past that oh well what do you know it’s a rubber skin mask cartilage tough muscle under a dremel hi blood hi bone i’d like you to meet car tire an exquisite machine drawing you in chewing you up spitting out blood and bile.

harry here…my dick just went titanium!

but without any more to do to you death proof is over. impact imminent. long legs emanating from the passenger seat cellulite rattles cement you’re dangerous i’m loving it staring at the sun kiss the crowd lick the stars this is your boss um that’s actually god congrats you dumb bitch you played yourself you liked my movie i mean how else would you — hey don’t get your guts on the upholstery it’s only a movie it’s only a movie cheerleader meet rape and revenge meet immortality meet a body that is no longer meat at all. the first rule of living forever is you have to die as cool girls together over and over crimson and clover. we get to see kurt fucking up these four hotties with a car crash, but then and this is where, if you’re with your girlfriend, she’ll realize how sensitive you are he fucks with the wrong women and let’s just say the audience i saw it with almost gave the ending a standing ovation but their boners would have knocked over popcorn and sodas. i think the summer of 2007 just went, “hey, let me take you to a free taquito buffet” and you eat all these taquitos and then the summer goes, “here comes a foot to your stomach”, but you go, “it’s full of taquitos” but it’s too late – there’s a boot in your stomach only the boot is really a motorcycle and you puke up a bikini girl who blows you and then kills your boss with a hammer. that’s what grindhouse is. it’s a taquito buffet that you puke up after getting hit with a motorcycle, and it turns into a bikini chick that blows you and kills your boss with a hammer. there are two different sets of girls, two distinct archetypes which one is qt? (find out after the jump.) in the first half femmes get slaughtered ground up pulverized in part two butch stuntwomen kill the man. death proof represents the last of a good thing in a sense qt’s most profound exploration of gender euphoria that can never be maintained that must be swept away pulverized by burning steel i think i’m ready now i think i’m ready now. a big gulp.

pillow fight and scented candles and boredom

when i was a teenage psychopath i thought i could just not transition if i modeled myself after you if i watched every movie and became a famous filmmaker. for a while i lived as a murderess i really thought this would lead to fulfillment or that eventually i wouldn’t care that i could just live in movies that my desire to live in them would paradoxically erode desire altogether. you gave me a way to kill myself over and over repress my femininity because that is the goal of your work, self immolation with careful precision. ffs yes i’m upset about this your first film was all about guys you play the grodiest caricature of masculinity you could muster just deeply deeply unpleasant opening the film with the dick dick dick dick dick madonna monologue and it’s somehow euphoric. i’m sorry what man would give that speech what man thinks about this you are probably still thinking about madonna aren’t you? gender expression wrapped in denial. a man like you should wear a warning. in pulp fiction it’s about mia, whom you have stated sprang from nothing fully-formed. a woman we love who dies and is resurrected. wore that movie out to see her enjoy her milkshake and dance. i got that. mia was my angora sweater. that's a reference to your favorite movie of 94, ed wood. of course jackie brown is the most trans girl movie you ever made. it’s about smoking pot watching tv and fucking a tired tired robert de niro. it’s the movie pam grier deserved the movie every trans girl would make if given the opportunity to cast pam grier in anything. you’re not special. if you had actually transitioned jackie brown would’ve been more like a jane campion movie kinda? i’m addicted to you. your baby fever movie kill bill is a breeding fantasy but not in the same way as fabienne’s depiction in pulp fiction because fabienne and her desired potbelly was more about the trans girl thing of wanting to be a fat girl that scene with bruce willis is the closest you have ever come to actually shooting a normal complacent hetero sex scene and there’s no sex it’s still mostly cuddling longing fabienne being a ditz that’s one of the best examples of your writing chops actually the way you are able to embody being a trans girl on e without actually being on e. you are amazing at this i wish i could do that. i can’t remember which one of your interviews it was (i read all of them when i was a girl) but i remember you once talked about embodying the bride while writing kill bill. you talked about really getting into her head developing an increased interest in clothing. you talked about how your mannerisms changed said that you got manicures. method acting self-insertion these are things you pride yourself in when it comes to your work. the mary sue in kill bill is an anime girl menaced by harvey weinstein. if you had transitioned you would’ve still been under weinstein’s thumb a weinstein girl but would you have at least treated mira and uma better? would they have been  more than self-inserts under the domineering eye of video store boy wonder? i hate this. the thing is qt you have the same taste in men as me. john travolta?? in the first movie you wrote you spell out the fact that you would definitely fuck elvis you even used to be elvis you were chow yun fat you were clint eastwood i know all of this you embodied the men you wanted to be until you got to make movies and then you started embodying the man you told yourself you were. you were never him. qt is an idea, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real qt, only an entity, something illusory, and though you can hide your cold gaze i can shake your hand and feel flesh gripping mine and maybe i can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable but you are simply not there. you play rapist #1 in planet terror and predictably suffer genital trauma. this is desire. this is wanting to fuck elvis but not as yourself. this is how true romance is a transition movie. christian slater (of course it’s christian slater) he is basically elvis he’s supposed to be you at the video store but you know who else you are? you’re alabama, a sex worker, a sonny chiba(!) fan, the girl who gets phone booth banged? by elvis??! and they have to get money because of course it’s for christian slater’s transition right?? that’s the subtext?? tony scott is great but mostly great if you’re a trans girl i know gay guys who hate top gun and find it boring but you get it. in your mind, to get top gun means you’re a gay man since it means you want to see tom cruise and val kilmer get it on in their mechs but listen to me that is not what this is this is secretly something trans girls want. i cannot communicate this to you if you don’t already know. this is my subtextual film criticism: death proof represents qt at his most indulgent. it’s a sort of career peak, the most hubris, the deepest dedication to being a girl that we’ve seen, the most serious commitment to hanging out with girls of course qt literally cameos just to spend time with them. yet a sort of distance remains even if the closeness to femininity necessitates destruction an adherence to the hollywood life qt constructed the life qt has maintained for decades as a means of escaping the nameless dread the aching desire to be what you already are this is what your films were to me this is what made me not transition this is how i saw myself in the violence i internalized. i was deeply envious of the ways qt seemingly got women the ways qt wrote women i never realized it but there was no way qt could do anything else. there was no way i could do anything else. writing as someone else is an illusion that never lasts you always know. death proof never breaks the spell because the spell is an entire life. the spell is innate. death proof is a woman’s becoming a woman’s unspooling. death proof keeps men at the periphery allowing female solidarity to persist to die to be born anew to defeat the lone wolf but at what cost? this is clearly a movie made by someone whose favorite de palma movie is carrie. because it is. because duh. after death proof qt reached a turning point. the ways qt inhabits femininity from here are still recognizably trans but increasingly frenzied and tragic. a girl kills nazis in a red dress. that’s the best you’re gonna get for a while. in django, qt mostly abandoned being a girl and leaned into misogyny in a way that felt alienating and familiar. in hateful eight qt tries to kill womanhood once and for all (with jennifer jason leigh of course it’s jennifer jason leigh) and this proves to be an expectedly arduous task a heartbreaking trudge through unassailable bitterness. hollywood (especially the novel) is about the end of everything. it is one-part a woman’s idea of what angry man thoughts are like, one part girls hanging out. if hateful eight is your the house that jack built, the “fuck it, this is the disgusting misogynist you all keep saying i am!” movie, then hollywood is total abasement of the self. it’s a shirtless brad triggering a spear gun the act of saying “fuck all of you! i’m going to be sharon tate now!” and hating oneself for it. hollywood gives us grimy manson girls doing absolutely nothing leading up to their ritual witch burning their carrion transitions and death proof is standing at the brink of all of this the void beneath you and all around you. death proof is the gender euphoria you cannot hold on to the feeling when you told yourself your looks were finally starting to fade when you told yourself you could just watch more movies you could make more movies you could do this and these things would fill you up movies would fill your holes celluloid would be your dad the reels would be your friends you could visit them over and over long after your own friends had left long after their smiles have begun to fade from the degrading acetate. if you made it this far through all the girl rambling i’m sorry there’s no more review there’s nothing left just the suggestion of a feeling. if i ever made it this far i would retire i mean to be seen as this annoying former boy wonder high wired oft-parodied the crushing dysphoria when your mannerisms are taken as those of a straight male you play it up in four rooms but how are you a straight male how was i a straight male how do i say fuck it all retire force myself to transition already a film by. i mean you will always end up being the thing that you are every time it is there in your work in your life there in what you leave behind in what everyone has always known to be real in you. try to conceal it and the meaning shines through in glimpses a continuous progression endless capillaries transferring motion i’m optic i’m a lake at high noon glittering ripple rip open cocoon became a flicker a lie a life at the end this is the you that matters this is everything you hate your own malnourished form a work of profound uncertainty projected across fifty feet glorious 70mm ultra panavision for everyone you have ever known. it is a thing of beauty. if you want to be a girl bad enough, like, really want to, like your life depends on it, you can’t help but make a girl movie.