"Grindhouse"

Love it or hate it, you sure get your money's worth with "Grindhouse": Rodriguez and Tarantino enlisted several modern-day schlock filmmakers to direct the phony trailers clustered around the two main features. Eli Roth, director of "Cabin Fever" and "Hostel" (he also has a small role in Tarantino's portion of "Grindhouse"), gives us the sickest one, for a slashfest called "Thanksgiving." (Its superb tag line: "This year there will be no leftovers!") The "Thanksgiving" trailer caused the Motion Picture Association of America to waggle its reproachful finger: Roth had to trim a few frames -- involving a protruding butcher's knife and a gymnastically inclined topless cheerleader (use your imagination) -- to get the all-important R rating, but the thing is still sufficiently depraved. Edgar Wright, director of "Shawn of the Dead," offers a sweetly twisted, tantalizingly vague promo for a horror pileup called simply "Don't." My personal favorite, though, is the one featuring the wonderful actor Danny Trejo as a rebel peacekeeper and ladies' man (as evidenced by the naked cuties he cavorts with) in a hot little number called "Machete" -- which also happens to be the name of the gadget whiz Trejo plays in Rodriguez's "Spy Kids" movies (the first two of which are terrific).

The "Grindhouse" feature directed by Tarantino, "Death Proof," is somewhat pokier than "Terror Planet." But it's also, in the end, more exhilarating, and in its perverse, twisted way, more elegiac. In the first section of "Death Proof," a posse of tough girls -- played by Sydney (daughter of Sidney) Poitier, Vanessa Ferlito and Jordan Ladd; their rival is played by Rose McGowan, this time in hippie-blond tresses -- show up at their favorite local watering hole and encounter a seemingly benign older dude who goes by the name Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell). The second act of "Death Proof" features another set of girls (Rosario Dawson, Tracie Thomas, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Zoë Bell) and one very cool car: a 1970 Dodge Challenger, the same car featured in Richard C. Sarafian's groovily existential 1971 car-chase drama "Vanishing Point," a movie revered by two of the girls; the other two have never even heard of it.

In the first half of "Death Proof," Stuntman Mike is a laid-back charmer, an aging hunk who knows just what to say to melt a girl's heart, or at least get her, momentarily, to stop rolling her eyes: "There are few things as fetching as a bruised soul on a beautiful angel," he tells one. Later, he'll reassure another that, as a former stuntman, he's made sure his souped-up, skull-emblazoned car is "better than safe -- it's death proof."

Some bad stuff happens in "Death Proof" -- it chiefly involves flying limbs and decapitation -- because Tarantino isn't just riffing on the style of these old movies; he's also capturing their heartlessness, the ways in which, even when they followed a rough code of justice, they didn't always bother with niceties like allowing characters we've grown to care about to live. But the sustained climax "Death Proof" builds to is purely a thing of beauty: At one point Stuntman Mike reflects that most stunt work is now, unlike in the old days, enhanced by computer graphics. In "Death Proof," Tarantino does everything the old-fashioned way, with fast cars and real human beings doing crazy things. Even if you've seen it all before, you've never seen anything quite like it.

"Death Proof" has an unusual, loping rhythm: Whole chunks of it focus chiefly on dialogue (Tarantino's specialty), featuring the girls yakking idly about what they do with their boyfriends, or about why they carry guns instead of knives. (If you need to know the answer: "You know what happens to the folks carry knives? They get shot!")

But the centerpiece of "Death Proof" is a car chase in which Zoë Bell, the New Zealand-born stuntwoman who was Uma Thurman's double in both of the "Kill Bill" movies, and who makes her acting debut here, spends most of her time outside the Challenger, instead of driving it -- while it's barreling down two-lane Tennessee blacktop. Bell is an extraordinary presence, supremely likable even as she radiates a sunny intensity. Dawson, with her perky bangs and high, original-Barbie-style ponytail, is a ballerina goofball; Poitier, a classy Amazon in short-shorts. (Tarantino, who acted as the movie's D.P., gives us a wonderful shot of her stretched languorously on a couch, a visual echo of the enormous blow-up of Brigitte Bardot in "The Night Heaven Fell" on the wall above her.) Russell, superb as always, gets a great introduction here: The camera lingers on him, his face artfully and obliquely lit, as he demolishes a plate of nachos. It goes on for so long that each successive instance of finger-licking and lip-smacking is funnier and funnier.

Russell's Stuntman Mike is a lost soul speeding toward hell, a man out of time in every way: He tries to impress a cluster of young women by telling them about the TV shows he's done stunt work on, shows like "The Virginian" and "Vega$." They stare at him blankly, until he finally asks them if they've ever heard of any of the shows he's talking about. When they say they haven't, he's not surprised, and neither are we.

The first half of "Death Proof" has a definite '70s vibe, while the second half is undeniably contemporary in its look and feel. It doesn't matter that Poitier uses a cellphone to text-message her boyfriend: When she sidles her bodacious booty up to the jukebox, it's Joe Tex's 1966 "The Love You Save (May Be Your Own)" that comes streaming out, a song that makes us forget what year it is and transports us, in a feat of supersonic magic, into a place called the past.

"Death Proof" straddles the past and the present: It's not sure where it should be living, or where it wants to live. Like all of Tarantino's movies -- the bad ones as well as the good -- it's marked, and energized, by restlessness. Tarantino is sometimes a marvelous director and sometimes a maddening one: "Vol. 1" of the "Kill Bill" epic is a clutter of references with no emotional glue, but the second half, "Vol. 2," is bitter, dark and gorgeously poetic. I'm not a fan of "Pulp Fiction" -- stylized violence served up with a smirk generally leaves me cold. But "Jackie Brown" -- which Tarantino once called, aptly, his "Howard Hawks movie," and which took part of its inspiration from his love for Pam Grier -- is, simply put, one of the finest pictures of the last decade.

And now, in 2007, Tarantino, formerly a renegade and a groundbreaker, has become something of an old-fashioned filmmaker. His movies have always been filled with references that only true movie eggheads would get. But as the original audience for his movies ages, younger moviegoers aren't as likely to get his jokes, his asides, his visual fillips. That isn't to say they won't enjoy his movies: Tarantino is a smart filmmaker, and a lively one -- I think he'll always find his audience. But even at his relatively young age, he's already on his way to becoming Stuntman Quentin, the guy who remembers "Rio Bravo" and "Foxy Brown" as the youngsters gather 'round to listen. That's not the worst fate that can befall a director: We need filmmakers who can move us forward even as they maintain a sense of the past. To that end, "Grindhouse" captures a bit of rowdy movie history in a bell jar. Tarantino and Rodriguez can tell it like it was, because for better or worse, they know how it is.

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