28.3.11

Movie Review

I made myself a little stupider today and puttered through Planet Terror.  I've avoided it because it seemed like it touched on too many of my movie fetishes in too knowing (wink, wink, nod, nod.) a way, essentially killing the joke.

Clocking in at just over an hour and a half the film is fairly gruelling and this is not counting that it unapologetically removes twenty minutes from itself just to get to the good stuff.  It's a long running complaint that I have with Robert Rodriguez's films.  There's literally too much.  While this could be considered something positive if you wanted to chill out in front of the TV and say "Holy shit, look at that!" every five minutes but after your thirty-sencond "Holy shit" moment, you can't help but get burned out an somewhat fed up by the third of seven head explosions.

Don't get me wrong, excess to make a point is a strategy/ technique which I enjoy but excess for the sake of it in this way is more indicative of a) someone needing an editor or b) someone needing to save some ideas for a sequel.

The inclusion of a watered down hipster version of The Dead Kennedy's Too Drunk to Fuck, a song about excess, sums up the movie.

Yet I enjoyed the dickens out of the film and would happily watch it 4 more times in ever increasing states of intoxication.  Maybe this has more to do with the day I've had but Mr. Rodriguez and his ability to utterly miss the point of what kind of a movie he was making made something so spectacularly stupid that, like the zombie plague it depicts, is highly contagious.

This is the trailer and yes, the heroine uses yoga to dodge a missile:

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