![]() ![]() Again, in comic-book tradition, there are a couple of strong but only broadly defined characters – Sex Machine and his codpiece gun, and Frost the almost inevitable ’Nam veteran – and they’re delivered with such verve you really want them to survive. Clearly, from Cheech Marin’s introductory monologue (as a character not without reason credited as ‘Chet Pussy’), alcohol is not the only thing for sale at the bar, and when Salma Hayek, no less, steps out to seduce and mesmerise both the patrons and the audience as Santanica Pandemonium, things get incredibly insane and demonic incredibly quickly. A bar and truck stop seemingly in the middle of nowhere, with a lawless, frontier feel and the gaudiness of Vegas. Welcome to the Titty Twister, everybody, let’s play our game.Īgain, everything about the Titty Twister is comic-book writ large on the screen. Jacob is a man already at a crossroads in his life, but one who’s taking the path of least resistance. Seth, if not Richie, is capable of redemption, but has yet to be presented with an opportunity to deserve it. Jacob is a man of God who has lost his way. Richie is a violent, hallucinating deviant, Seth a reasonably intelligent bank robber both hampered and sustained by his love for his brother. The Geckos are brothers who have nothing but each other and the money they’ve stolen. But really, what we find is that everything that’s come before this point is really just character-building. When the Geckos run into the Fuller family, led by Jacob, a pastor who’s lost if not his faith in God, then at least his love for Him after losing his wife, Seth employs a standard ‘using the innocents to get across the border in a motor home,’ and as far as the Geckos’ story is concerned, it could end there, just as they pull up to the delightfully named Titty Twister bar and truck stop. As the Geckos walk away, the place blows up and neither of them turn to look at it – they’re too busy talking about keeping a low profile.Ībsolutely classic Tarantino scripting, the dark comedy just bursting from the screen. When things get insanely out of control, Seth, played by a hungry-for-challenges George Clooney, shows himself to be the relative rationalist of the pair, using the strategy of a Roman general to blow the place to the ground. You can’t really get more Tarantino than the opening sequence – conversation between a convenience store clerk and a local Texas ranger which seems like practically nothing, but reveals a crime elsewhere, only to explode into urgency the minute the ranger goes to the bathroom, as it transpires the violent Gecko brothers are actually in the store, holding hostages, and commanding the clerk’s performance. It’s a dark explosion of joie de vivre that should on no account work (and according to many critics, on no account does), but it’s got legions of devotees who embrace its genre-busting madness and go with it for the sheer enjoyment of the visions on the screen and the work of a truly exceptional cast. ![]() From Dusk Till Dawn feels initially like two movies cut and shunted together for no reason other than the idea that it would be cool to fill the screen with vampires all of a sudden. Combining a bunch of Tarantino ‘tells’ -professionally and personally violent characters who still manage to be incredibly cool dark, dark comedy dialogue that swings from everyday gibberish to eminently quotable, and a thoroughly kickass soundtrack – with some Rodriquez trademarks, like vivid imagery and a Tex-Mex setting, it has all the potential it could possibly wish for in terms of being a hip, cool, gangsters-making-it-across-the-border comedy drama.Īnd then it goes absolutely, unrepentantly, in fact joyously bananas. Getting the two of them together can only be a recipe for coolness, probably with casual, probably sickly funny ultraviolence thrown in.įrom Dusk Till Dawn was their first major collaboration, Tarantino writing the screenplay from a story by Robert Kurtzman, and starring as Richie Gecko, with Rodriquez directing. Let’s not talk about Spy Kids shall we, it really doesn’t help our argument). Robert Rodriquez, a friend and frequent collaborator of Tarantino’s, is no stranger to slick, hip, cool as fuck moviemaking either (Sin City, Planet Terror etc. And despite being a really, really heavy-duty geek, he has an instinctive gift for creating movie experiences that are cool as a barrel full of arctic fucks. He has a talent for balancing stylised highfalutin’ language and naturalistic ‘nothing’ dialogue in the service of characterisation. Tarantino has a vision that means most of his movies look like perfectly translated action comic-books. What sets him apart from most filmmakers though is that every single skill he does have is turned up waaaay the fuck past eleven. Quentin Tarantino really has only a handful of skills. ![]()
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