A few days ago, I noticed 2007's Death Proof was on Amazon Prime and I couldn't resist watching it again. I think it's been at least six or seven years since the last time I watched and, damn, has it aged well. Quentin Tarantino's most explicit ode to '70s exploitation films, it's really a blend of slasher films, revenge films, and car chase films, pulling some of the best qualities of all three together with Tarantino's singular voice.
Tarantino's movies have always given one the bracing sensation of seeing something the various scolds would insist you neither should see nor want to see. And I don't just mean moral scolds but also the voices that insist stories need to be structured a certain way to please an audience.
And I know a lot of audiences complained about how much dialogue is in this movie. There's no accounting for taste. I see this movie and I think it's glorious how these people sit around and talk with Tarantino's dialogue which is so brilliantly a mixture of the colloquial and poetic. The seemingly aimless quality of it is of course not actually aimless--little plot important things are embedded everywhere, like how Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) never drinks alcohol at the bar (but has a bottle of whiskey later), how Kim (Tracy Thoms) carries a pistol. But a lot of it is just plain character building for the sake of character building. Abernathy (Rosario Dawson) may be the most tightly wound of her group of friends or it may simply be an aspect of her personality exacerbated by their tendency to see her that way. It's easy to sympathise with her exasperation when the other three ladies don't seem to side with her on the issue of the guy who slept with another woman on Abernathy's birthday.
There's also the subtle arranging of morally interpretable chips in the first half. What does it mean that Jungle Julia (Sydney Tamiia Poitier) may have beat up Pam (Rose McGowan) in high school? Should it mean something that Butterfly (Vanessa Ferlito) decided to give Stuntman Mike a lapdance, despite having been so wary of him?
I always found it curious that Tarantino gave so many of his own opinions to the villain. But that's normal for Tarantino--there's no villain in a Tarantino movie that doesn't have a few genuinely charismatic qualities--and very often they're possessed of insight. There are exceptions, like the villains in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, an especially interesting movie to contemplate in connexion with Death Proof.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood can almost be taken as an inversion of Death Proof. The old school Hollywood stuntman becomes the hero instead of the villain, and the gang of violent pretty girls become the villains instead of the heroes. I thought of this when Jungle Julia calls Rose McGowan's character a "dirty hippie", furthering my suspicion that Margaret Qualley's performance as Pussycat in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was influenced by McGowan's recent behaviour.
There are so many lovely little visual ideas in Death Proof too. I love the moment when Jungle Julia is trying to talk to someone on her cell phone and the jukebox next to her can be seen slowly but surely loading a new record. I love the closeups on Kurt Russell chowing down on Mexican food while the harmonica section of Pacific Gas And Electric's "Staggolee" plays on the soundtrack.
I can say all that and I still haven't mentioned the wonderful Zoe Bell, who translates her real life charm perfectly into a fictionalised version of herself, or the phenomenal car chase that occupies the last half hour of the film. It's hard to believe one film can have so much.
Death Proof is available on Amazon Prime.
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