GRINDHOUSE: you've gotta see it!

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*I caught GH tonight with Jacky, Yuko, In, and her friend Jen and it was a hilarious, thrilling, and damn satisfying three hours and change. However, this post is *not* about the GRINDHOUSE experience... I'll get something more review and rave-like up in a while.

Do you like 120 mile-an-hour action? Do you like edge-of-your-seat thrills? Do you like home videos entitled "football to the groin?" Do you like go-go dancers? Do you like a good zombie movie? Do you like a good chick flick? Do you like Bruce Willis, Kurt Russell, and Michael Biehn doing that thing they do? Did you enjoy DESPERADO, FROM DUSK TIL DAWN, RESERVOIR DOGS, or the KILL BILLs?

Good God, people—do you love America?!!

If the answer to any of the above is "yes," you MUST NOT MISS GRINDHOUSE on the big screen! And see it soon, as I've been hearing things... reading things...

Apparently, Dimension films is very disappointed with the opening weekend numbers for GRINDHOUSE. Poor/confusing marketing and a long running time (3 hours 12 minutes) are being blamed. I gotta wonder if Easter weekend/holy week might have been a factor in more than one market. Maybe if they'd thrown in an ass-kicking Easter bunny (or even a non-denominational Peter Rabbit), numbers might have benefited from a tie-in bump.

The front-running Weinstein solution to the box office problem seems to be... Cut it into two movies and redistribute. I've seen snippets that talk about doing this just in Europe, or waiting a while and doing it in the states, and then some that say it will only happen on DVD in the U.S. Given the idea behind the films and the collaboration in the first place, re-creating the so-called "Grindhouse" experience for 21st century moviegoers, it's just plain wrong.

I have *not* seen or heard anything in the way of reaction from the directors.

I know that it would probably meet with some kind of resistance from theater owners/managers, but couldn't they split up the movies (and the fake trailers) but still *play* them as a double bill? That is, ship the films together to theaters and have them play them separately, but always one after the other, and ideally, if someone buys a ticket for either one, they can sit thru both shows, or leave after one. But, y'know, your ticket is only good for one or two movies at the time you puchase it.

I'm sure that would cause problems with ticket/headcounts for each show and available seating on weekend nights, so maybe the policy is different then. A single-feature ticket could be regular admission and a double-feature ticket could be 1.5x, and would be recorded as such. I guess you'd hafta have tickets checked between features, just to keep the cheats from holding seats that could be sold for the next show.

Yeah, it could be tricky. Y'know, assuming that the marketing was well-done and the movie drew the sell-out crowds that it should!

Hey, keep your eyes on the Brattle schedule—they're gonna be running a Grindhouse series on weekends in May!

Keep on keepin on~