Grindhouse streaming

I listen to a lot of podcasts where they tell us in advance the movie they're going to talk about in the coming weeks so you can watch it to get more out of the discussion. ("A lot" might be a stretch. I have two main movie podcasts and then others that sometimes involve movies.) 

With new releases, you might be seeing those movies anyway, especially if you like to keep up on what's current. But you likely were not planning to watch the old movie they're planning to talk about, unless they prompt you to do it.

I don't usually, but on Friday, as I was about to listen to a podcast that discussed Robert Rodriguez' From Dusk Till Dawn, I decided it had been a long time since my last viewing, and why not watch it tonight?

Actually it took a long time for my first viewing of From Dusk Till Dawn, so long that when I finally saw it at the start of 2013, it prompted me to write only my second in my nascent "I finally saw" series, which gets periodic entries and has had another 18 in the dozen years since then. Rewatching movies you didn't see until 17 years after they came out means that those movies have entered into your group of personal favorites, though I suppose it takes the second viewing to confirm that.

My second viewing was about as positive as my first, though it might not have been if I'd listened to the podcast first. On The Next Picture Show, where the four hosts are generally inclined toward politeness, they each came in with a different variation on how it didn't hold up very well. So I guess I'm glad that wasn't in my head as I watched it.

Yes there are some icky things in there. For example, it's quite a choice to have one of the two main characters you're following -- played by Quentin Tarantino, who also wrote the script -- rape and kill the woman they've taken as hostage, in such a grisly fashion that you only see flashes of it. Though the film steers this clear of being completely lurid and prurient, in the following sense: This hostage is not some beautiful young girl, but a middle-aged woman, indicating perhaps that Richie Gecko has more screws loose than to just be written off as a deviant psychopath who craves young flesh. (Which he also does with the Juliette Lewis character, though fortunately, that has no similar outcome.) The movie is not tawdry with its choice of victim, and what it confronts us with is in that way more complicated. 

Anyway, I'm here today not to give the movie a full analysis, since I likely talked about what makes the movie a ton of fun (a lot of things) and what gives me pause (a few, one of which I've already touched on) in this post when I first wrote about it. I'm here for two observations and they are both variations on the title of this post.

So one use of the term "Grindhouse" is an intentional callback to the "film" -- actually separated out into two films when subsequently available -- that Rodriguez and Tarantino made in 2007. Rodriguez' Planet Terror and Tarantino's Death Proof were originally mashed together as a single film called Grindhouse, which is still how I have this listed in my movie lists, though they are two different stories with two different casts, divided from one another by fake trailers -- most of which have also resulted in their own movies.

In the same way that Grindhouse was divided between Tarantino and Rodriguez, so is From Dusk Till Dawn, though I don't remember really considering that until this viewing (and until they made reference to it on the podcast). Although the two halves of FDTD are not of equal length, it does take a suspiciously long amount of time to get to the Titty Twister in Mexico, a lot longer than you would expect given that this is going to be main thrust of the film, ostensibly. The Tarantino portion, the dialogue-heavy first half that features more traditionally Tarantino content about violent men on the run, gets about the first 40 minutes, while the Rodriguez' portion, where we start getting exploding vampires and other practical effects, run for more or less the last hour.

On the podcast they debated which half they actually preferred, and I don't know that I myself have an answer to that because I like the whole thing. But it did make me realize that this was essentially a dry run at a jointly divided project that would have a more intentional incarnation in Grindhouse. (Where, for the record, I do like the Rodriguez half better. I've only seen each that one time, which means I haven't ever given Death Proof a second chance, but I vibed better with Planet Terror back then and I suspect I still would -- even though obviously Tarantino's is the career I vastly prefer.)

The second use of the term "Grindhouse" indicates more the style of B movie and its projection, not the movie Grindhouse.

You may recall that the film itself is meant to look really shitty in that movie, full of cigarettes burns (the type that used to mark the changing of reels) and other attempts to make the physical film look like it's been damaged and gone through the ringer. Like it was sitting around in some dusty theater where people might have stepped on it, torn it, or poured coffee on it. Or more likely, beer.

Well, I got a little of that effect watching From Dusk Till Dawn, through no fault of the film itself.

I have an occasional problem with streaming on Stan, and I thought it was something that had been fixed when I went through all that testing and contacting of customer support earlier this year, trying to diagnose and resolve an issue with the image quality. (It turns out it was something having to do with the HDMI port I was using on our TV, though I still haven't figured out why that should have been the case.) The problem I thought was resolved at that time was the tendency of the stream to double back one second, then skip forward a second, bringing the dialogue momentarily out of sync, and creating an overall irritating viewing experience. This partially derailed my most recent viewing of The Crow, timed to the release of the Crow remake last year.

This phenomenon was back with FDTD. I don't know why. The HDMI port should not have anything to do with this, as it would seem to be an internet speed issue of some sort, though I wasn't willing to rule out Stan just being an inferior product. 

But this time it did not bother me, because I made it part of the experience. It was like I was watching the same sort of compromised celluloid that they showed in the grindhouse theaters, suited to the outrageous subject matter of this movie.

That aesthetic used by Rodriguez and Tarantino in 2007 was designed to throw us back to an era that was well and truly gone. But that was even before streaming and before shooting on actual celluloid became a thing of the past. Eighteen years later, when everything is digitally projected and most of us no longer have a problem with buffering, it was fun, for a moment, to be reminded of a time when everything was still a bit rough around the edges, kind of like From Dusk Till Dawn itself.

Breaking up the pair

Quentin Tarantino just can't seem to keep things simple when it comes to whether his movies are parts, or wholes.

First it was Kill Bill. He wrote such a long script and had so much good material -- at least, according to him -- that he had to divide the movie in two. Kill Bill Vol 1. came out in October of 2003, then Kill Bill Vol. 2 followed six months later.

While this was a little ungainly, it was manageable. The films had two distinct release dates and were quite clearly two different movies. Even the tone was markedly different between the two volumes. Steven Soderbergh used the same trick again last year with Che.

But then Grindhouse came along to really muck things up. Grindhouse was always completely up front about the fact that Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez each directed one half of the material in this intentionally z-grade celebration of exploitation movies, while providing secondary input on each other's work. It was a double feature, to be sure. In fact, fake movie trailers, directed by some of the directors' disciples/colleagues, provided a buffer in the middle. But unlike most double features, it wasn't possible to see one movie by itself, at least not in American theaters. For a single admission price you got both movies, plus all the fake trailers, at least one of which actually proceeded the first feature. Together they made one "film" called Grindhouse.

I was very comfortable with this, and I enjoyed the "movie" overall. I vastly preferred Planet Terror, the Rodriguez zombie movie that kicked things off, to Tarantino's Death Proof, a car fetishist's fantasy about a murderous stunt man. Planet Terror put Death Proof on its back and carried it, translating to a fun three hours at the theater.

But things got a little fuzzy when the Siamese twins were surgically separated. For both the international and DVD releases of Grindhouse, one "film" became two, and Grindhouse itself sort of ceased to exist. I understand this was done for a number of reasons: 1) Most foreign countries don't understand the "grindhouse" concept (as if most regular Americans do); 2) Most foreign countries don't have the double feature tradition (this I didn't know); 3) The three-hour-plus running time was considered a box office deterrent and would further hamper sales on DVD; 4) Tarantino wanted his film to qualify for international film festivals as an independent entity (though I can no longer find verification of this rumor I heard at the time). Tarantino's film also received an additional 27 minutes of footage. I think Planet Terror was largely unchanged.

For most everyone, this amicable divorce was probably well and dandy. But for a person like me, who likes things in neat little boxes and doesn't know how to cope with changes to the very classification of a piece of art, it was troubling. I ranked Grindhouse as one movie on all my lists, and I have since refused to adjust that ranking on any of them. And I'd have liked that to be the end of it.

Except it has come up again, which is why I'm writing about it today, in case you're wondering.

When I first started with Flickchart, it classified Grindhouse as one film, the way it was originally released, the way I preferred it to be classified. In fact, I remember getting a little thrill that they had endorsed my perspective on the subject.

But a few days ago, I first noticed Death Proof come up for a separate ranking. Then Planet Terror. The administrators of the Flickchart website must have reevaluated their own stance on the issue. Instead of ranking a film I did not acknowledge to be a film, I exited the program and went back in.

The strange thing is that when these films come up for duels, I am in the midst of ranking only films that Flickchart knows I've seen. Surely, I've seen both of these "films," but never did I officially accept either of them onto the list. They just started coming up. Which leads me to believe that the site's programmers have determined that Death Proof and Planet Terror should be included in this category by default, since anyone who has seen Grindhouse has necessarily also seen Death Proof and Planet Terror.

I might have been forced to accept this new classification if they had just removed Grindhouse from the list. But they didn't. I can still find Grindhouse as a "film" in their database. In fact, for me, it's been in 63 separate duels, 55.56% of which it has won. Meanwhile, both Planet Terror and Death Proof are still officially listed as unseen films -- even though they are coming up for duel. When you go to their home pages, the link that says "Add to my Flickchart" is live.

So now I'm confronted with a situation where instead of one film, instead of two films, Grindhouse actually constitutes three separate films that I have supposedly seen. I can't say for sure that Grindhouse is still coming up randomly for further duels, but I believe it is.

Quite simply, I don't know what to do.

Death Proof came up again today, and I liked the other film better. Without thinking about it too much, I dropped my objection to ranking Death Proof and impulsively gave the win to the other film. This meant now that Death Proof had officially been added to my rankings, that it had been ranked exactly one time. Not knowing what to do, I removed it. But I feel like it will come up again. I feel like this issue needs to have some kind of resolution I can live with.

So what would you do, dear readers? Would you remove Grindhouse and banish it from existence, so you could rank the two films separately going forward? And if so, what about all those duels Grindhouse has already won/lost? What happens to them, to those rankings?

Or would you continue to work around having to rank Planet Terror and Death Proof? Continue to quit the program -- or really, just click to some other part of the site -- every time it comes up?

Or would you leave all three of them, on the theory that they really are three distinct viewing experiences with three distinct qualities? Keeping in mind that this could result in duels between them, where I would have to choose Planet Terror over Grindhouse because the inclusion of Death Proof hurts Grindhouse, or choose Grindhouse over Death Proof because the inclusion of Planet Terror helps Grindhouse?

I depend on you to help me see things clearly, dear reader. No pressure. Just keep in mind that my lists -- even my very understanding of how to classify my world -- hang on your response.