Yes, it feels very long. Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof teeters this close to total collapse, for example, and I felt a missed heckling opportunity by not shouting out after 15 minutes of dialogue about boyfriend-trading, “Shut the fuck up!”
But I like going to the movies and that’s what Grindhouse is about: Going to movies. Not muscling through well-made, prestige-oozing Oscar bait and then packing into the local wine bar to tug your beard and point out truly excellent performances or pieces of set design. Nope; Getting loaded, watching a bunch of heads explode, and then quoting the most retarded bits of dialogue on the way out of the theater. In this case: “They FUCKED with the wrong Mexican!” “I never miss!” “Best… in… Texas.” “You know what happens to motherfuckers carry a knife? Motherfuckers get shot.” And of course, “White meat. Dark meat. All will be carved.”
Now, all that said, Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof is a mighty slog of a movie. The director unlearns years of technique to put something together that looks like a middling porno circa 1974. Bad miking, shots that go wide of what they’re supposed to be covering, reels put together by spit and glue. And that’s all amusing at first, until this style is applied to roughly 20 minutes (then another 20) of mostly boring dialogue between cute girls. I don’t normally complain about movies that I generally enjoyed, but at points this became intolerable.
It looks like the film’s tanking, which is too bad, because the immersive experience of one-and-a-half good movies and four awesome fake trailers really demands a theatre.