Originally Posted by Seantn

I posted this in another thread, but since there are 20 Grindhouse threads, I figured i'd post it here as well:

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Harvey Weinstein told me this morning that he's "incredibly disappointed" with the half-than-expected $12 mil box office for Grindhouse. So much so, that he's considering abandoning the double feature as a single feature concept and re-releasing the movie around the U.S. "in a couple of weeks" as two separate feature-length movies with additional footage put in. That's what Harvey says The Weinstein Co. is already intending to do with the film's release in Europe: split it into two separate pics, Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof and Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror.

"Quentin's movie goes out first in competition at Cannes. He'll do an extensive 4 to 5 month tour. And the trailer will be all Quentin's," Weinstein told me about his European plans. "Then we'll release Robert's a couple of months later. By splitting it up, we're going to do a hell of a lot better internationally than we did here." Weinstein noted that, even in Grindhouse's TV deal with Starz Entertainment Group, it's been sold as two separate movies.

"Our deal with Encore is that they can play it any way they want." So this is why The Weinstein Co. is now deciding to suck it up and do in this country what it probably should have done all along. "First of all, I'm incredibly disappointed. We tried to do something new and obviously we didn't do it that well," Harvey told me today. "It's just a question of how is it going to hang in there. But we could split the movies in a couple of weeks. Make Tarantino's a full-length film, and Rodrqiguez's too.

"We'll be adding those 'two missing reels' that's talked about in the movie." (At one point in Grindhouse, a sex scene is interrupted because of "two missing reels".)

Weinstein pointed to several reasons why Grindhouse did so poorly in theaters over Easter weekend. "Our research showed the length kept people away. It was 3 hours and 12 minutes long. We originally intended to get it all in in 2 hours, 30 minutes. That would have been a better time. But the movies ran longer, the [fake] trailers ran longer, everything ran longer," Harvey told me. Weinstein also criticized his own marketing plan. "We didn't educate the South or Midwest. In the West and the East, the movie played well. It played well in strong urban settings. But we missed the boat on the Midwest and the South."

Originally Posted by hulka

...I hasten to wonder what criteria is being utilized in people's analysis of this double feature (particularly people who didn't enjoy the Grindhouse experience). Example: "Death Proof does not really work as a 'grindhouse' feature. As a result, it is a bad film." Assuming it fails at being a grindhouse film (and I stress the word "assuming"), does that mean it is a terrible film? Maybe it is a great film in its own right, regardless of whether or not it meets the requirements of grindhouse cinema...

Originally Posted by Slumbering Fist

Thats how I look at it. It does feel silly to say, "Death Proof, good movie-movie, bad grindhouse-movie." But they are selling the "grindhouse experience," so you have to judge it baseed on that. I dont think Death Proof fully commited to that experience. For long stretches during Death Proof, I felt like I was watching a Kevin Smith movie instead of a grindhouse movie. The tone, the situations, the characters, the convo, simply wasnt embracing the genre like I wanted.

For instance (and this is an extreme example), if a bunch of directors signed on to do a silent film project and one guy made a film with tons of talking and sound fx, then, regardless of having made a good movie, he failed at the actual project.

Originally Posted by Michael Allred

Ok so wait a second here folks. Let's chat about Stuntman Mike for a second.

Tarantino has never been a point A to point B storyteller so does "Death Proof" continue that? What I mean is, does the second half of the movie come *before* the first half chronologically?

I was thinking about this the other day. The first half he's a cold blooded psycho car killer with a "death proof" car that genuinely looked like he could survive a head on collision. In the second half his whole intention wasn't to kill but to mess around with the girls and his car? All he had for protection was a what....stuntman seatbelt? So could what have happened in the second half have turned his crazy (but not murderous) intentions into something more sinister in the first half? Was Tarantino just messing with the timeline yet again?

Originally Posted by Michael Allred

Ok so wait a second here folks. Let's chat about Stuntman Mike for a second.

Tarantino has never been a point A to point B storyteller so does "Death Proof" continue that? What I mean is, does the second half of the movie come *before* the first half chronologically?

I was thinking about this the other day. The first half he's a cold blooded psycho car killer with a "death proof" car that genuinely looked like he could survive a head on collision. In the second half his whole intention wasn't to kill but to mess around with the girls and his car? All he had for protection was a what....stuntman seatbelt? So could what have happened in the second half have turned his crazy (but not murderous) intentions into something more sinister in the first half? Was Tarantino just messing with the timeline yet again?

Originally Posted by RichC2

From what I can tell it makes more sense chronologically since, assuming these two features took place in the same world (which is suggested but I highly doubt), the area they were in during the first attack got overrun by zombies and thus the only part of the movie that doesn't take place in texas is the part w/ the stuntwomen.

Originally Posted by RichC2

The main difference here is you seemed to be looking for a Grindhouse sendup like Planet Terror instead of a Grindhouse tribute like Death Proof. The tone of Death Proof was way more in tune with the ones I've seen at least (on video, not in theaters).

Originally Posted by CliffStephenson

Went to the Friday 8PM showing at the Chinese in Hollywood. Completely sold out (that's almost 1500 seats) with a line that stretched down Hollywood Blvd and around the block like it was Star Wars or Titanic. Right before the show starts there's a bit of commotion in the back...
In has walked:
Quentin Tarantino
Robert Rodriguez
Eli Roth
Edgar Wright
Rose McGowen
Rosario Dawson
Marley Shelton
Mary Elizabeth Winsted
and probably a few others we didn't see, all to watch the movie. Eli Roth does a bit of introduction before the show and off we go. One of the 5 greatest cinema experiences of my life (a tall order). As others have said, Planet Terror is a consistently entertaining film. All of the trailers were great to a degree, but you definitely get the feeling that Zombie didn't have his tongue planted as firmly in his cheek as the others. "Don't" is brilliant. Death Proof is ten minutes of story wrapped around 75 minutes of film and I will reiterate that it has higher highs and lower lows. BUT, when that "The End" card hits at the end of Death Proof, it was like an explosion in the theater where people burst out of their seats and jumped up, arms in the air. I've never seen a reaction that matched this and can't deny that, despite being far talkier and a bit in love with itself, Death Proof absolutely works.

I want to see it again, but I fear nothing is going to match that initial experience.

Originally Posted by JoeyOhhhh

BTW, did anyone else notice Jack Burton's shirt from Big Trouble in Little China hanging up in the bar in the beginning of Death Proof?