Day 159: "Would you mind taking your clothes off for the camera?"

I completely hit the "random" button tonight, and the Fickle Finger of Fate chose the 2010 documentary: American Grindhouse.  I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.  It doesn't go as deep into the grindhouse culture or even the history as deeply as i would have liked, but it was still funformative (if edutainment is a word, I can claim funformative).  Think of American Grindhouse as a magazine article on the subject rather than a text book.  It covers the history of exploitation films all the way back to Thomas Edison, but in a very cursory and glossed-over way.  As John Landis said in the movie, "...five minutes after they discovered the camera, someone was getting exploited in front of it."  The interviews just seem to be an opportunity for the interviewees to come up with clever tag lines.  The filmmakers interview many of the exploitation directors, as well as the directors of today who were inspired by these movies.  I was disappointed to see that they missed out on the poster boy of the modern grindhouse genre: Quentin Tarantino.

This was a really fun look back at the exploitation genre, I wish they had gone just a bit deeper though.  I wanted a college course on this and got a high school summer workshop.  It was very well made and never really got dull or preachy about the morality of the whole thing, although a view from the other side might have been cool.  A lot of fun and worth the 81 minutes you'll invest in it.  I found it highly ironic that I wanted more depth from a genre of film notorious for how shallow it could be.  Hehehe.  Not for the kids though, as you may have guessed, lots of boobs, blood and bad language.  7.75/10.

See you tomorrow, and GO WATCH A MOVIE!!