Death Proof

Tarantino’s got his fixations. Pretty feet. Women with a specific kind of beauty. Bodies arranged just so. And conversations that keep circling back to fucking with no narrative reason, just the impulse leaking out. Death Proof is two hours of girls talking about sex and chasms and sugar-free Red Bull. Without his name on it, I would have walked out asking for my money back.

The plot doesn’t exist. It’s just average women having the kind of conversations that go nowhere, and that emptiness should kill the whole thing. But he’s put it together so deliberately that the thinness becomes the point. The music is right, the style is locked in, there are editing smash cuts and continuity errors that read as intentional. The cars feel right. Everything is shameless and shameless works.

His films become cult before anyone sees them. Death Proof is the proof—a movie that would be nothing on its own becomes something just because of how he’s arranged it, because he’s so openly lusting after what’s on screen, because he can make style and bad taste feel necessary.

Still waiting on Kill Bill 3. But the promise is getting old.