Grindhouse consists of two films, which is a fact I'm telling you roughly six months after you learned it the first time. These are Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror and Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof. Death Proof stars Kurt Russell and a bunch of women billed as "The Girls," one of whom is a girl named Zoe Bell. Let's talk about her a moment, because she is a fucking badass.

The character of Zoe Bell, fearless stuntwoman who spends half the film gripping the hood of a speeding muscle car, is played by Zoe Bell, fearless stuntwoman who spends half the film gripping the hood of a speeding muscle car. This is actually what she does for a living. Put another way: when Vin Diesel says "Sorry, guys, this shit is a little too crazy for me," the person they call in to take his place has Zoe Bell's job title.

Zoe Bell. Hobbies include diving, track and field, and being completely fucking fearless.
Right: flailing on the hood of a speeding car as it's rammed at approximately five hundred miles an hour.
To reiterate, the high-speed ramming, complete with possibility of death, is actually happening.

Bell had been the stunt double for Lucy Lawless on Xena. Then she worked 16-hour days learning wu shu (in addition to the tae kwon do she already knew) doubling for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill. Remember that brutal fight scene that began the first movie, with all the ass-kickings and flying through glass? Yeah, that was her. The trailer fight in the second movie with Daryl Hannah? During a getting-shot stunt, she dislocated nine of the ten bones in her wrist and tore the ligaments; she called this injury not "horrible" or even "painful," but "pretty boring," because it meant she had to take a break from being set on fire and hit by cars.

Asked if there were any stunts she wouldn't do, Bell replied, "Not that I know of," then qualified: "I'd like to think I'd have the balls to say no to something if I thought it was going to kill me." Consider that for a moment. She's not concerned she'd be afraid of a stunt that would kill her. She's concerned that she's so much of a badass, she'd do it anyway. "...If I'm working on something, being scared is beside the point. I do the task that's been put in front of me," Bell also said, the "task" in question being something that makes action stars shit themselves and go shudder in their trailers.

Unfortunately, all good things must come to an end; Ms. Bell has to move on to something that sounds asinine directed by the duo behind Crank, and I have to stop reiterating how awesome I think she is and go back to talking about Grindhouse.

To make what is already a terribly long story as short as possible: Bell is far more likable than anything about Rodriguez's pedestrian zombie extravaganza. Planet Terror makes you go "ewww lol brains haha" and Death Proof makes you go "Well, now I feel awful." Planet Terror is a regular action movie, albeit gory and brazenly stupid, that's merely shot like it's the '70s; Death Proof is an actual '70s movie.

ZOMG SPOILERS

The final stunt sequence in Death Proof is probably as tense a sequence as I can ever remember. Tarantino has just spent an interminable beginning-of-Reservoir Dogs-style shot introducing these girls so that we like them, and the last time he did that in this film, he killed them horribly. That's where the power in this little film comes from, despite all its absurdity--a relentless kind of violence, gory at times but more about emotional savagery than gore--and that's precisely what the best '70s films did.

Rodriguez, conversely, casts the audience-beloved Bruce Willis as a monster with a retarded backstory who looks cool half the time and repulsive the other half. He tries to make a heroic character out of a guy whose shtick is castrating people; heroism is not the first thing that comes to mind when I'm looking at testicles in a fucking jar, Rob. I understand that this was the more popular half of Grindhouse, but I just constantly find myself on the opposite side of whatever Rodriguez is doing, and I can't help it. I think I hate every single character he's ever created, with the possible exception of Banderas in Four Rooms. He came into a project intended to recreate cheap '70s cinema, and he made an expensive movie that wasn't like '70s cinema.

I'm going to close with a (yet again) spoiler-filled example of what I'm talking about. There's a typical convention of who gets killed and who doesn't in horror/suspense films. Both directors violate it for explotation-style effect. Tarantino kills his entire cast of female main characters halfway through the film. Because it's been almost nothing but dialogue and characterization up to this point, we know these people pretty well, so it's a pretty drastic thing to do. Rodriguez's characters are all gross or weird, so he just kills a kid. It's the kind of cheap, easy substitute for feeling that I've grown to expect from him.

I don't hate the guy. I respect that he made a movie for no money once--even if I didn't actually like the movie--but he's better at children's action/adventure movies than at this stuff. Maybe he can prove me wrong; it looks like he's got Machete coming out later this year. Maybe he make a '70s film without shooting a regular film and then going back with computers to make it look like he shot a '70s film in the first place.

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