My Movie Diary: Two Approaches To Genre Filmmaking

Normally, I review a spate of flicks in My Movie Diary. This week, however, I felt that two of the flicks I saw provided a great way to illustrate two distinct approachs to genre filmmaking. There’s the hipster, ironic approach favored by the likes of Quentin Tarantino and his ilk, in which the filmmaker makes a genre flick that wants to be something “more” than a mere car chase or horror movie. Filled with self-referential nods to their own hip taste in movies, these flicks want to give you the thrills of a genre flick while still maintaining a holier-than-thou attitude toward the material. Then there’s the straight-ahead genre embrace favored by directors like Paul W.S. Anderson and Justin Lin. Directors of this stripe realize that they’re making action-heavy popcorn flicks, but they don’t apologize for it. They revel in the freedom it gives them to push things past their normal, “realistic” limits. The following two reviews should make it clear which approach I personally favor. . .

Death Proof (2007) – I saw the short version of this back when it was released as half of Quentin Tarantino’s dopey Grindhouse project, along with Robert Rodriguez’ Planet Terror. After that flick’s theatrical release, the two directors went back and added scenes to each, padding them out so they could each be watched as full-length movies. Well, I wasn’t all that impressed with Death Proof when it was just over an hour long, and I can tell you that nothing has been gained by padding it out with an extra hour of incredibly tedious footage. The story, such as it is, follows two groups of sexy young women who are stalked by evil former stuntman Kurt Russell in his souped-up, “death proof” car. And while that could be the “plot” of a decent smash-em-up, Tarantino spends the vast bulk of the film showing these women engaged in the emptiest, most vacuous conversations imaginable.
Death Proof is Tarantino at his self-absorbed worst. While it pretends to be a throwback to low-budget 70’s car chase flicks, no real exploitation flick would dare start their film with over 30 minutes of utterly vapid and pointless dialogue scenes. Tarantino’s dialogue is as verbose as ever, but with none of the energy or crackle of his best (or even average) work. The endless conversations go nowhere, don’t advance the plot, nor do they illuminate any of the characters. There are, in fact, no characters here, just paper cutout stereotypes who all sound like the same person (Tarantino). Twenty-year-old Texas girls who do “Zatoichi” call outs? Not likely. QT is so in love with his own writing that he can’t edit himself whatsoever or even try to write dialogue that semi-accurately depicts human speech.
Tarantino seems to think that b-movies like this are somehow beneath him, and he’s slumming it by shooting this tongue-in-cheek pastiche. He name-checks classic car chase flicks like Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, but either doesn’t understand or doesn’t care about their sense of pacing. Until its’ horror movie turn about 50 minutes in, Death Proof moves at the glacial pace of a German art film. No actual low-budget genre filmmaker has the time or money to shoot endless, go-nowhere scenes of people hanging out. They know that they have to get to the action or their audience will tune out. Here, we get brief snatches of terror or action, but the bulk of the film consists of dull characters blathering what Tarantino imagines b-movie dialogue to sound like. Which is a lazy version of him, apparently. The final car chase is really quite well-done, but since all of the women here are treated as disposable plot devices without any distinguishing characteristics, there are no real stakes to any of it.
Which brings up another point: Death Proof seems to mainly exist as an excuse to objectify and brutalize its female characters. The whole first forty minutes are nothing but a boring set-up for a sleazy, uncomfortable lap dance scene between one of the victims and Russell. Tarantino invests more energy in the loving close-ups of the woman’s curves than he did in the whole script. He then (spoiler alert) dispatches every one of the female characters in a graphic and gory car crash, only to start over again a few years later with another set of interchangeable women. It’s pretty lame, and insulting to talented actresses like Rosario Dawson and Mary Elizabeth Winstead, who are forced to gamely try to inject humanity into these barely sketched outlines. Tarantino misses the mark wildly with Death Proof, managing to be boring, gross, sexist, and condescending in almost equal measure.

Resident Evil: Apocalypse (2004) (r) – The second installment in the Resident Evil saga picks up right where the first one left off: with Alice (Milla Jovavich) discovering that the zombie-causing T-virus has escaped the Hive and wrecked havoc in Raccoon City. As such, the first half of the film is the series’ closest brush with being a “typical” zombie flick, as Alice and others fight their way through hordes of the undead in a search for safety. There’s little sign of the oddball phantasmagoria of other entries in the franchise. About halfway through, though, the flick changes into what the series as a whole would evolve into: a crazy dive down a rabbit hole of corporate conspiracy, genetic engineering, zombies, monsters, and mayhem. As always, Jovavich is tasked with carrying most of the action, and she delivers another athletic, astonishingly physical performance. Say what you will about these Resident Evil flicks, but there’s no denying that Jovavich’s Alice is one of the most fearless, take-charge, ass-kicking women in film history.
Having watched Tarantino’s crappy Death Proof a few nights before, I was struck by the central difference between the films of Tarantino and Resident Evil‘s Paul W.S. Anderson (who writes and directs most of the RE films, but just wrote and produced Apocalypse). When hipsters like Tarantino make genre films, they do it with a jaded, ironic distance. Tarantino wants you to know that he’s more than just a genre filmmaker, and he’s making his films as “homages” to the original grindhouse flicks. Everything is done with a snide, looking-down-his-nose feel that diminishes any sense of fun that the films might have. He’s saying “serious” things here, even if it looks like just another subpar genre flick. Anderson, on the other hand, unapologetically celebrates the absurd fun he’s having. Resident Evil: Apocalypse is exactly the kind of film that the Grindhouse shorts claim to aspire to: an over-the-top action flick that features gorgeous women in mini-skirts killing zombies with rocket launchers. Anderson isn’t making an “ironic” statement here, though: he’s just making a goofy, fun movie. It’s the kind of movie where a character wanders off by himself, you say, “He’s gonna die,” and then he dies. The flick satisfies its audiences expectations without talking down to them or making them feel like the director is having a laugh at their expense.
Resident Evil: Apocalypse is hardly the best entry in the series, but it does deliver plenty of action, from zombie melees to battles with hell hounds. I did notice that the backstory about the creation of the T-virus that’s given here flatly contradicts the one that’s told in RE: The Final Chapter. I kind of feel that pointing out plot inconsistencies in the Resident Evil franchise is probably the first step toward a life spent rage-tweeting about how Kate Mulgrew is the best Star Trek captain, so I’m not going to dwell on it too much. The film is a prime example of a great genre filmmaker embracing what he does, rather than contemptuously sneering at it like Tarantino does all too often.

Popwell’s Movie Reviews: The Complete List