Saturday, August 18, 2007

Tarantino in Japan: Japan Times Interview


The Japan Times Online has an interview with Quentin Tarantino on the eve of GRINDHOUSE's Japan release. It's not a particularly insightful piece, nor do I find it particularly well-written **, but it's worth a quick read for Quentin Tarantino's comments about two things:

1. Japan will get a limited release of the complete 3-hour long GRINDHOUSE before it is released as two separate but expanded films (as per the norm now). Snip:

Japan is fortunate in that viewers here will get to see the full double-feature — with the awesome trailers — for a week, before the films go on to play separately. In other markets, not-so-confident distributors opened "Death Proof" and "Planet Terror" separately. Tarantino is happy with both versions but notes that for "Grindhouse," "me and Robert had to cut our films to the bone, past the bone, to make it work for the whole double-feature experience. It's interesting to be in that situation and see if your movie can still survive, and it did." But the full-length version of "Death Proof" is 30 minutes longer, while "Planet Terror" gains another 15.

2. Apparently, Tarantino loves himself some 70s Roman Porno. Ah yeah.... (Like this is a surprise...) Snip:

"I even like — in fact, I'm quite enamored with — the whole Nikkatsu (studio) roman poruno thing ('70s, big-budget adult movies). I almost can't believe that that existed in cinema! The way they did it in the '70s, where they're real movies with real actors. The woman who played the proprietor in "Kill Bill" (Yuki Kazamatsuri), she was a roman poruno actress. I saw a couple of her films and I thought they were fantastic! Even the fact that the genitals were blurred out actually made it work even more!"

You can read the rest of Giovanni Fazio's typically middling write-up here.

Japanese Grindhouse website.

(** Seriously, I'm getting tired of people feeling like they're above 'genre' cinema. This piece on Tarantino feels so phoned in by Fazio and the palpable disdain for genre cinema -- and GRINDHOUSE, in particular -- almost oozes out of the screen like a nose drip on a cold day.)

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi Nicholas, lovely place you have here.

I totally share your sentiments about Fazio's writing. "Palpable disdain" is one of the few things it doesn't lack for.

Nicholas Rucka said...

Hi Don,

Thanks for checking out the blog! And I would say that I'm glad we're in agreement on Fazio's 'writing' but I'd just rather that the JT would hire someone more competent...

Cheers!

Nicholas