I woke up around 10:30 this morning still feeling tired, but I decided that I should probably get up if I was going to accomplish any of the things I had planned.
Of course, I did spend a fair amount of time sitting around doing nothing in particular for a while, so it was nearly 1 PM by the time I ventured out into the world.
First order of business was to hit up the comic shop. Due to the holidays, new comics hadn’t been available since the week before Christmas, so I had two weeks’ worth of books stacked up and waiting for me.
After that it was on to finally get the haircut that I’d been putting off for weeks.
Once I got to the barbershop, though, I wanted to postpone it once again, as the place was filled to overflowing with parents bringing in their broods for assorted trimmings.
I think that the owners’ children, who are always huddled off in a corner watching TV, coloring, and playing video games all day, were glad to have the company, but I could have done with a little less noise, and a bit less of a wait.
While I was waiting there was some lady who was attempting to reward her kids for being remarkably good and sitting amazingly still while getting their hair cut with some candy from one of the gumball machine-style candy dispensers. She was digging through her pockets in the vain pursuit of a quarter as I sat there playing Bubble Breaker on my phone. As she wasn’t able to find one, I dug in my pocket, pulled out a quarter, and said, “Ma’am? Here you go,” thus accomplishing my good deed for the year.
I’m glad I got that out of the way early.
After finally getting my turn, I decided that I really wasn’t that inclined to gas up and go grocery shopping, as I wasn’t actually in desperate need to do either, so I decided to just grab a sandwich from Quiznos and head home.
Thinking that I could have half for lunch and the other half for supper, I bought a large sub. That plan fell apart as soon as I got home and scarfed down the first half, which led inexorably to doing the same with the second half.
I guess I’ll find something around the house to eat for supper.
Eventually, after doing some more sitting around and doing nothing in particular, I decided to take a nap, but I wasn’t especially successful, getting in maybe 15 minutes’ worth of napping out of an hour’s worth of lying in the bed.
And now here I am writing this.
I didn’t do a whole lot yesterday. I worked from home, as I did for pretty much most of the week, and at some point near the end of the day, noting that I had pretty much nothing to drink except Coke I ventured out to Super Target to get some green tea and Vitamin Water. I picked up a couple of snacks as well, which is why I didn’t really need to go grocery shopping today.
And of course realizing that today the place would be even more crowded than it was yesterday afternoon did a lot to dissuade me from heading over there.
The most noteworthy thing I did yesterday was finally getting around to watching the Grindhouse movies Planet Terror and Death Proof.
Planet Terror, a zombie movie, was okay, but Death Proof was just boring.
My primary complaint about both movies is that the whole grindhouse style is meant to be sleazy, cheap, and exploitative, with lots of sex, nudity, and over-the-top violence. They both delivered on the violence (and accompanying gore), but they were a little too slick to be considered sleazy or cheap – I think that’s a result of them trying to make intentionally sleazy, cheap-looking movies – and neither one delivered in the sex and nudity categories.
In Planet Terror we had Rose McGowan playing a classic Hollywood trope: the stripper who doesn’t strip. While they tried to get around this by explaining that she was not a stripper, but rather a Go Go Dancer, it still brought to mind some words of wisdom found at What Would Tyler Durden Do? There’s a word to describe strippers who don’t take off their clothes. That word is “fired.”
Of course, one could hardly expect Rose McGowan to appear nude in a film, as she’s the shy retiring flower who wore a fishnet dress and a G-string to an award ceremony (link NSFW).
She does have a sex scene, but is artfully posed throughout so as to prevent us from seeing too much. After all, you wouldn’t want gratuitous nudity in a grindhouse movie.
I think the primary cause of the non-nudity with McGowan is that during the filming of the movie writer-director Robert Rodriguez began having an affair with her. So his approach was to show her off in skimpy outfits as if to say, “Yes, this is the hot young piece I’m leaving the mother of my children for,” but to avoid showing off too much of her.
I’m not intending to pronounce judgment on Rodriguez or McGowan for what happened between them. People cheat, there are two sides to every story, love conquers all, blah blah blah. I honestly don’t give a shit about any of that. My point didn’t have anything to do with making any judgments about the nature of their relationship; it just seemed to me that there was clear evidence of their personal relationship having an impact on the movie.
My other problem with Planet Terror was that there was some lesbian sub-text, but no lesbian text, which is always a negative in my book. If anything, I want to see lesbian super-text.
As for Death Proof, the Tarantino contribution, all of the T&A was fully-clothed T&A, and there was pretty much nothing in the way of sexual content.
That alone isn’t what made it boring, though. A lot of people apparently love Tarantino’s dialogue, though evidently no one loves it as much as Tarantino does.
Seriously, it seemed as though the movie had originally been intended to have a run time of about an hour and a half, and then Tarantino said, “Hmm…you know what this needs? Another half an hour of people sitting around talking about this movie I loved as a kid but that no one else has ever heard of,” and some yes man said, “Brilliant! You’ve done it again, sir,” instead of punching him in his giant head and saying, “Don’t be stupid.”
(I’ve long believed that any sort of creative endeavor needs to have someone filling the role of Head Puncher. It’s like an anti-sycophant, someone who will speak truth to power. And punch power in the head.)
Death Proof consisted almost entirely of people sitting around engaging in incredibly unlikely dialogue that included the obligatory references to all the obscure pop cultural trivial dancing around in Tarantino’s massive melon for long, long, long stretches at a time, briefly interspersed with some images of women being killed in a horrific fashion.
I don’t want to read too much into it, but it seems revelatory that he would spend as little time as possible actually showcasing the female form, but then be sure to include lingering, lovingly-crafted shots of women being killed in an incredibly grisly manner. In fact, we get multiple POV shots of the moment of death so that we can see, in detail, exactly how each woman buys the farm.
I’m just saying, while Rodriguez focused just as much (arguably even more, though that’s simply a function of the fact that stuff actually happened in his movie) on the violence part he did at least give a nod to the sex part of sex and violence, whereas Tarantino…
Well, whatever. I just personally tend to favor the sex part of sex and violence, to the point that, you know, maybe we can just leave the violence part out entirely.
And I’m not trying to rag on Tarantino; I’ve enjoyed much of his work.
Just not Death Proof.
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