Earth Day 2007 equals Grindhouse
Sunday, April 22, 2007
So, we were thinking about playing tennis or going for a hike, you know, to recognize that today is Earth Day and all . . . but then the sky clouded up and it started sprinkling.
Which pretty much gave us no recourse but to spend 3 1/2 hours in Regal Santiam 11 watching Grindhouse. And what a four hours it was. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have initiated quite a revival of seedy exploitation movie culture, including hilarious fake trailers and ads in-between and preceding their two films.
Since I was in amniotic fluid for much of 1978, I can’t say whether this double feature replicated the grindhouse theatergoing experience of the 1970s or not, but it was certainly a blast to watch. On Earth Day, no less. Rose McGowan killing zombies with her machine-gun leg will, I think, really advance the debate about human-induced global warming to the next level.
I don’t bother watching very many movies in the theaters, but this was one (two) I didn’t want to miss. In fact, I wrote a little 15-word review of Grindhouse and added it to Filmometer. You may be mildly interested to know that An Inconvenient Truth and about 700 other films have also been reviewed there.
I am also reminded of the redrawn world maps from the Daily Mail’s “How the world really shapes up” article from last month. In their computer-generated cartograms, the globe has been redrawn with each country’s size proportionate to its strengths, or weaknesses, in a whole series of categories. The United States is obese in toy consumption and military spending. Africa is bloated when HIV prevalence is mapped. Oh, the Western world.
Hmm . . . maybe we should all charter some private jets in order to most hypocritically participate in our Earth Day activities.
By the way, the image I chose to accompany this post is from an Earth Day 2006 installation in Panama City by photographer Gustavo Araujo. I probably don’t need to explain what it means, but just in case you were out watching Grindhouse too . . . it was part of a protest about people who play ostrich in the face of environmental degradation.
Now, let’s all return back to the Earth exploitation film known as, how you say, “our lives.”
“I’m going to eat your brains and gain your knowledge!”