Has the schlock movie master lost his mojo? Stephanie Bunbury finds out.
WHAT'S gone wrong for Quentin Tarantino?
The longstanding king of cult movies, who will screen his new film Death Proof at the Cannes Film Festival tonight, was once seen to have a Midas touch. It was Tarantino, through films such as Reservoir the cinemas in their droves.
He has saved whole careers: John Travolta, all but forgotten, copied, his films have contributed images and phrases to popular robbers walking in slow motion towards the camera, for example, is as immediately recognisable as anything in cinema history.
Death Proof, however, has been such a resounding failure in the United States that even on the internet, his natural heartland, movie nerds are suggesting the master has lost his mojo.
B-movie double features of the 1950s. A grindhouse was the kind of feature in period style, right down to the scratches in the film, sandwiched together.
The characters are cardboard cut-outs and the violence gleefully exploitative, albeit with an ironic twist.
Rodriguez, whose hits include the El Mariachi series, Sin City and the Spy Kids films, made a film called zombies and sprouts a machine gun in its place. Death Proof features Kurt Russell as Stuntman Mike, who follows young women in his car and rams their vehicles until they're dead.
Both are, intentionally, sheer schlock. People hated them.
Grindhouse opened over the Easter weekend in the US, making a paltry $US12 million over the holiday.
The average audience was 14 people. It was a bad blow for Bob and Harvey Weinstein, the former Miramax bosses who had recently severed their links with Disney and backed the film as independent producers. The brothers were expecting a hit that would launch their new venture, the Weinstein Company, at the top of the indie film market.
The rescue operation has involved separating the films, which will be shown individually in Europe and Australia. Europe is large and loyal European audiences.
Death Proof will have its European premiere in Cannes in a recut, revamped version; it is the closest thing a film could have to a second chance.
Tarantino is a kind of god in Cannes. Pulp Fiction won the festival's top prize, the Palme d'Or, in 1994; 10 years later, Kill Bill, was shown out of competition. He also hosted that had most inspired him.
of film while working as a video store assistant, becoming an expert on several then-unfashionable genres. Chinese action films are just one of his specialties. In September he will present a series of spaghetti westerns at the Venice Film Festival, the pasta.
Even in Europe, however, critics who have seen Death and several buckets of fake blood too far. "You watch it and just think, 'Oh, grow up'," the veteran British critic Derek Malcolm said in Cannes. "It's no more than a recreation of B-movies of the '50s - and not even the good ones.
The only good thing you can say about it is that the Rodriguez film is even worse."
Perhaps a Tarantino backlash was inevitable. There are only so many movies you can make about other movies, especially bad ones.
The British actor Naveen Andrews, despite starring in Planet "Obviously, Quentin and Rodriguez saw some kind of aesthetic in these kinds of films," he told The Guardian. "For the life of me, I was trying to grasp what it was. They were laughing like minute.
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knowing smirk and a thick frosting of scholarly film references, is now recognisable by a whole generation of cinematic nasties, most of them considerably less sophisticated. Back in 1992, the sight of Creek, dubbed "torture porn" by hostile critics, are taking violence to slick, new extremes. However, the big hit with young computer game.
films were not hits either. Reservoir Dogs was launched at the Sundance Film Festival, but made less than $US3 million on its domestic release. Pulp Fiction, buoyed by a rapturous reception at Cannes in 1994, became a huge critical and commercial hit worldwide.
Its screenplay, written by Tarantino and Roger Avary, won an Oscar the following year.
Jackie Brown, released in 1997, suffered the third-film well at the box office. Six years went by until Kill Bill, a four-hour film released, much to critics' chagrin, in two parts.
In 2005 Empire magazine named Tarantino icon of the decade. But while there are plenty of fans, he has always had detractors, both for his work and his cocky personal style.
The Tarantino backlash, if there is one, probably began when he 1998.
He used to describe himself as an actor who happened to make films. Critics, irritated by his hubris as much as his terrible performance, took the opportunity to rip him apart; later, he said he had "lost the acting bug". Now the world's film press, assembled in Cannes, can be heard telling each other that Tarantino, wunderkind of the '90s, has reached the end of the road with middle age.
That remains to be seen. Quentin Tarantino may not be death-proof, but it will take more than a volley of brickbats on the Riviera to kill him off.
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