experiencing life at the less ritzy end of the red carpet, writes Stephanie Bunbury from Cannes.
WHAT'S GONE WRONG for Quentin Tarantino? The longstanding king of cult movies, once seen to have a Midas touch, was in Cannes this week with his latest film, Death Proof.
A critical and commercial failure in the United States, where it started life as half of a double bill called Grindhouse, Death Proof arrived in Cannes revamped, lengthened and looking for the sort of it never came.
Rodriguez, director of the El Mariachi movies and the Spy Kids series, as a homage to '70s exploitation pictures that would feature hot babes, souped-up cars, absurd weaponry and plenty of built-in snaps and crackles, just like they had in the old days.
A grindhouse, apparently, was the kind of cinema Australians would call a fleapit.
What Tarantino and Rodriguez wanted to do was until the '70s, with cardboard cut-out characters and plenty of exploitative violence, albeit exploitation with an ironic twist.
In Rodriguez's film, Planet Terror, the heroine's leg Death Proof stars Kurt Russell, who brings a genuinely There were also fake trailers, including a bloody one by Eli Roth, director of the Hostel series, featuring a girl, a trampoline and an upthrust knife. The project cost about $US100 million ($A122 million): no small beer, given the cheapness of the films they were imitating.
Nobody - or almost nobody - went. The holiday box-office take was a paltry $US12 million and the average audience, according to the industry figures, was 14 people. It was a bad blow for the Weinstein brothers, the former Miramax bosses who had recently producers.
They were expecting a sure-fire hit that would set their new venture, the Weinstein Company, squarely at the top of the indie chart.
and Australian releases; the problem, Harvey Weinstein said, was that they had failed to educate audiences on what to expect. They don't plan to make that mistake again, although trade experts say will be a legal hell.
We may yet see Grindhouse as Which brings us to Cannes, scene of the great relaunch. Pulp Fiction won the Cannes Film Festival's top prize, the Palme D'Or, in 1994; 10 years later, Tarantino served as chairman muse Uma Thurman as a sword-wielding revenge killer, was shown out of competition.
That year, he also took the opportunity to host several another of his passions - at the Venice Film Festival.
It is an cook pasta.
disappointment. Sure, there had been whoops of glee from the crowd as two competing cars crunched down the blacktop, in the manner of Duel; yes, they clapped when the car full of nubile young the evil serial killer down the length of the state highway.
As Peter Bradshaw said in The Guardian, "there is a basic But how many films can Tarantino make about other films, especially very bad ones? It wasn't that the festival audiences torrents of tomato sauce. The problem was that the film rang so very hollow.
Even on the internet, movie nerd Tarantino's natural heartland, finally lost his mojo. It seems hard to imagine. This is Tarantino who, through films such as Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill, created a wave of ironic designer violence that brought young people back to the cinemas in their droves.
This have saved whole genres and revived whole careers.
Take John Travolta who, all but forgotten, became a star again Grier, rescued from obscurity through her starring role in Jackie Brown. Much quoted and much copied, Tarantino's Little Green Bag, for example, is as immediately It may be that a Tarantino backlash was inevitable, especially as his cinematic passions became increasingly arcane.
Actor Naveen Andrews, despite starring in Planet Terror, said he never "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.
"
What the Tarantino generation tends to forget, however, is that his early films were not hits either. Reservoir Dogs was launched at the Sundance Film Festival, but on domestic release made less than $US3 million. Pulp Fiction, buoyed by its rapturous reception in Cannes in 1994, went on to become a huge critical and commercial hit worldwide, winning an Oscar for the screenplay, written by Tarantino with Roger Avary, the following year.
Jackie Brown, released in 1997, suffered third-film office. Then six years went by until Kill Bill, a four-hour film released, much to critics' chagrin, in two parts. The next year, 2005, Empire magazine named him icon of the decade.
But while there are plenty of Tarantino fans, he has always had detractors, both for his work - too modish by half, according to some - and his cocky personal style.
The backlash, if there is one, probably began when he appeared on stage in Wait Until Dark with Marisa Tomei in 1998. He Critics, irritated by his hubris as much as his terrible performance, took the opportunity to rip him apart; later, he said 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. He may not be death-proof, but it will take more than a volley of critical brickbats on the Riviera to kill Quentin.
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