Spielberg Told QT This Was a Failure
In the book "Tarantino," QT remarks on the failure of Death Proof...evidently more with the critics than at the box office. QT says Spielberg said this to him:
"Well, Quentin...you've been pretty lucky. You've had a success, to one degree or another, every time out. Its almost like playing the game and not paying for it. All right? Well today you paid for it. And it can make you a more well-rounded person, having done that. But the other thing is, the next time you have a success, its going to be sweeter because you will have known what it is to have the cards fall the other way."
This is QT quoting Spielberg; but still. You can figure that maybe Spielberg was remembering how "1941" was a big flop after Jaws and Close Encounters -- and how Raiders of the Lost Ark and ET "brought him all the way back, quick."
But...but....was Death Proof all THAT bad a movie? QT seems to have decided its the least of the movies he's done to date....but good enough.
Which is true. And which also makes Spielberg a bit wrong in advising QT that this was ultimately a failure.
Where "Death Proof" fails --surprisingly -- is in the dialogue for not one, but TWO sets of four women each whose dialogue inexplicably fails to match the great QT speeches (for men) in Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction....or even the great QT speeches for a woman(Uma Thurman's Mia) in Pulp Fiction. These women are uniformly irritating and with little or nothing to say.(Which makes the movie "dangerous," because ultimately Stuntman Mike kills -- or tries to kill -- women who "have it coming.")
Where "Death Proof" succeeds is in the great final car chase with Zoe Bell "for real" hanging on by belts on the hood of a speeding car and -- once the tables turn -- the car chase after Kurt Russell's psycho.
Where "Death Proof" also succeeds is in the performance of Kurt Russell as the amiable but extremely terrifying Stuntman Mike -- for whom QT's patented dialogue machine DOES kick in with plenty of "good stuff" for the charismatic Russell to say.
Finally, as irritating as the two sets of four women are in this -- a ninth woman set apart from the sets -- Rose McGowan -- demonstrates her command of the screen back when she was willing to play up her beauty and her sassy sex appeal. She's the ONE really likeable woman in Death Proof -- which makes Stuntman Mike's sadistic murder of her the worst one in the movie.
Hey...maybe Spielberg was wrong.