Movie Chat: The Tripper

The Tripper

My wife was away last weekend, so I took the opportunity to have a movie watching marathon. I went out to the theater to see Beowulf and Michael Clayton and watched The Invisible, Exiled, Hostel, Hostel Part II, L'Iceberg, Mr. Brooks, and The Tripper on DVD. Out of all of them, the movie I'm most interested in talking about is The Tripper.

So, The Tripper is David Arquette's homage to Z-grade exploitation movies: part sub-Friday the 13th slasher flick, part psychedelic freak-out a la Psych Out or The Trip (duh). It's a designer cult movie, like Planet Terror or The Devil's Rejects: it's transgressions of good taste and the rules of good filmmaking are all calculated.

Arquette really nails the feel of these movies, but I couldn't help wondering exactly what kind of achievement that is. How impressive is it to purposefully make a really bad movie? More importantly, how enjoyable is it to watch a movie that's trying to replicate that really bad movie experience?

My answer to both questions is: sort of.

(1) What Arquette pulls is sort of impressive. For one thing, he manages to achieve a consistent style and tone. For another, he gets lots of little details right: the awkward editing during the action sequences is awkward in exactly the right z-movie manner, as if each shot is always a few frames short of what it should be. Or the way the location seems like it was chosen because it's on land that one of the filmmaker's relatives owned and not because it really makes all that much sense in terms of the story.

And though the whole thing is, of course, tongue-in-cheek, the wink-wink, nudge-nudge stuff is, as these things go, subtle. The sense that what you're watching isn't a real bad movie mostly come from some of the actors giving believable, low key performances (Lukas Haas). Luckily, a lot of the actors give appropriately lousy performances to make up for that (Paul Ruebens).

Still: is this an example of a filmmaker realizing some kind of "artistic" vision or more an example of a filmmaker making a virtue of necessity? That is: if you don't have any hope of making a good movie, try your hardest to make a bad one instead.

(2) I thought that the movie was only sort of enjoyable to watch.

I started comparing this to Grindhouse:

Death Proof took a z-movie idea and filtered it through what I would consider an almost European art film sensibility (i.e, the overly talky scenes, the repetition, etc.). That is: it doesn't function like a z-movie at all, really. It helps to have some knowledge of z-movies to pick up on its references and to appreciate the way it plays its variation on the crazy macho killer theme, but, to me, watching it felt more like watching an art house movie* - more late-David Cronenberg than early-David Cronenberg.

The Tripper, though, functions and feels just like a z-movie. On its surface, it really does look like the kind of movie you might find on MST3K.

Planet Terror was a mash-up of every crazy z-movie trope, but it was kind of a mess: it was all high points and it also went out of its way to let you know how funny it thought its jokes were.

In some ways, The Tripper is a better film: lower keyed, better paced, with more consistency of style and tone. It's a better recreation of genuine z-movies. But as bad as I thought Planet Terror was, it served its function of getting the audience revved up. The problem with The Tripper is that it ends up being uninteresting in the same way that a lot of actual z-movies are uninteresting. What can be fun about watching z-movies is that every once in a while something completely, accidentally cool/gonzo/ridiculous/beautiful/amazing/hilarious happens. But it's not as much fun (for me at least) when these things are done on purpose, especially since The Tripper doesn't really give me anything else (i.e. interesting characters, elaborate set pieces, etc.). So, while Planet Terror is, I think, not as thoughtfully made, The Tripper calls into question the whole idea of "thoughtfulness" when it comes to making a z-movie pastiche.

*This may be why this movie wasn't really a hit with audiences.

No posts: just links

I've got nothing to post here tonight, so here are some links:

Sean was disappointed with Grindhouse (I'll leave a comment there when he gets them working).

There's also more Tarantino chat between me and Steve in the comments section of my Grindhouse post.

Michael Blowhard has another excellent post up about lit-fic: must reading for anyone interested in arts & culture stuff.

Michael also linked to this very neat interview with Donald Westlake and John Banville.

Hopefully, I'll be back tomorrow with something a little more substantial of my own.

Movie Chat: Grindhouse

Grindhouse

The movie might be playing to "near empty theaters" someplace, but I saw it last Saturday in a full (though not sold out) theater in New York City. And everyone seemed to have a good time - even the women in the audience (there were quite a few couples - although the guy next to me had to keep explaining all the B-movie references to his girlfriend she seemed to be enjoying herself as much as he was).

I had a good time, too. I can see why it didn't make money, though: it's an oddball movie and though the studio was supposed to have spent $30M in marketing, no one involved there seemed to really get exactly how oddball it is. If Harvey Weinstein thought that Grindhouse could ever have been a straightforward teen horror hit (like Disturbia), then he really needs to see more movies.

And how exactly did they spend that $30M? I'm not super hooked into the "coming attractions" scene (I don't seek out trailers on the internet, for example), but I do kinda/sorta pay attention to this stuff and I don't recall seeing anything about Grindhouse (i.e., no TV ads, not as part of the coming attractions when I saw 300 and Zodiac). I guess I saw a poster and a couple of displays, but it seems like $30M should buy a bit more.

Anyway, the movie itself:

First, Planet Terror and Death Proof are really different kinds of movies. Rodriguez and Tarantino take very different approaches to this little exercise. Planet Terror is a pastiche of sub-Romero 1970s horror walking dead flicks.

Visually - in terms of the photography, the design, and the effects - Rodriguez gets it just about perfect. Narratively, there's a little bit too much going on (even with the benefit of a "Missing Reel", the movie is ten minutes too long): in The Crazies, for example, there are really only two plot threads, Planet Terror has two major one plus a bunch of subplots. One of the things that I love about genuine Z-movies is that the filmmakers tried to wring a lot out of very little, but the poverty of the production (not to mention their ideas) usually showed through anyway. Rodriguez obviously wanted to cram everything he loves about this kind of movie into Planet Terror, which is understandable, but undercuts the movie's effectiveness.

Something else I noticed:

Some of the actors seem to "get" how to play this kind of material. Michael Biehn, Jeff Fahey, (surprisingly?) Marley Shelton, and, especially, Josh Brolin. That is: their performances give the impression of professionals doing a job, not giving their all, but giving just enough to put the material over.

But others in the cast - Freddy Rodriguez, Rose McGowan, Naveen Andrews, and (surprisingly) Bruce Willis - can't help winking at us, turning in consciously ironic performances. (Andrews does the best, because at least he's precise with his campiness).

I can't help but think that Biehn, Fahey, and Brolin learned this by living it: years of taking roles to pay the bills, artistic excellence be damned. This is one of the more interesting phenomena in movies: they require so many people to make that even on a labor of love, there will probably be some folks who just see it as another job.

Adding these two problems together - too much going on and half the cast letting us know they're in on the joke, too - makes Planet Terror, ultimately, just a little bit disappointing. Of course, hardly any of Rodriguez's movies have been afflicted by both restraint and coherence, but this is another case where I wish someone was there to tell him, "Don't".

Oh - something else about Planet Terror: I read one review of the movie where the gist was that Rodriguez and Tarantino need to put away childish things (i.e., stop making movies about the junk culture they've grown up) and grow up (i.e., start making serious movies that don't have anything to do with kung-fu or zombies). Well, personally, I prefer an unrepentant genre movie like Planet Terror to something like Pan's Labyrinth a genre movie that also wants to make you think "serious" thoughts and feels "seriously" unpleasant.

So, I liked Planet Terror, but, perhaps, more importantly, it set the mood for Death Proof. Michael Newman suggested that the better movie should go first, but, in this case, Death Proof works better coming after Planet Terror.

I don't want to talk too much about Death Proof, since the surprising ways it tweaks its genre are a big part of its fun (I think I'll end up writing a long essay on it at some point though). However, I will say that unlike Planet Terror, this isn't pastiche: it's a real movie and it's genuinely it's own thing. It's probably closest to Reservoir Dogs in that, depending on how you look at it, it's either a B-movie with an art-house sensibility or an art-house movie with a B-movie sensibility. But it's much more relaxed than that movie - for maybe the first time, Tarantino doesn't seem like he's trying to prove anything. This makes it feel almost like a masterclass on how to combine a genre exercise with "personal" filmmaking (hopefully Eli Roth took notes and even Neil Marshall, a favorite of mine, could learn a thing or two).

I also liked the fake trailers: too bad this was a flop, I would have paid to see Grindhouse 2 with a Werewolf Women of the SS and Thanksgiving double feature. (I guess I'll have to make do with Rob Zombie's Halloween remake: the real preview looked pretty interesting).

zigzigger on Grindhouse

I liked Michael Z. Newman's post on Harvey Weinstein's disappointment over Grindhouse's performance at the box office. All of the reasons he gives for the movie's poor showing make more sense to me than the Hollywood Conventional Wisdom. Personally, I think the marketers should have played up the "two-for-the-price-of-one" element a bit more: I didn't know that Grindhouse is made up of two feature-length movies, I thought they were both around fifty minutes each (more like Sin City), and I'm enough of a cheapskate that that makes a difference. (My ignorance probably has something to do with reading The Hollywood Reporter every day, but never going anywhere near site like Ain't It Cool).

The gist of a lot of Mike's post is that the actual audience for this kind of movie (a "postmodern pastiche" "horror anthology") really isn't that big. Tarantino and Rodriguez have been able to infuse their geek-love for midnight movies into films that have found a fairly wide audience. But I think that something like Death Proof, which looks like schlock horror is going to be less appealing than Sin City which looks like a super-stylish noir or Kill Bill which looks like a super-sexy action movie.

Anyway, I'm still looking forward to seeing Grindhouse (probably this Saturday afternoon). I've been in a very pro-Tarantino phase the last few months (my attitude towards his movies has varied fairly wildly over the years) and I actually am a fan of schlock horror movies.

I also agree with something in the comments section of Michael's post: Will Ferrell in his underwear is always funny.