Nathan Lee Nails Grindhouse

Perhaps its just living in New York, but I'm really starting to enjoy Nathan Lee's Village Voice reviews, and his wild-eyed geek-gush over Grindhouse is a prime example of why. He seems to have gotten everything I wanted (but sadly didn't get) from the movie, and lavishes some proper love on the terrible twosome behind it:

I've got a theory about Grindhouse, and it goes like this: At some point during the brainstorming/beer-bonging process by which Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino developed their multimillion-dollar ersatz-exploitation double feature, the boys finished off the super nachos, sparked up a spliff, and said "Dude, let's just motherfucking bring it." From whence proceeded a checklist of must-haves: zombie hordes and one-legged go-go dancers, hot rods and hot pants, evil doctors and exploding pustules, trash-talking identical-twin babysitters, castration, decapitation, dismemberment, diminutive Mexican badasses, customized motorcycles, Kurt Russell, Osama bin Laden, Fu Manchu, tasty sausage, jive-ass stuntwomen, outrageous car wrecks, buckets of blood, geysers of gore, mountains of weaponry, explosions bigger than God (Tarantino: "How big?" Rodriguez: "Retarded big")—and of course titties, lots and lots of titties.

His prose is both literate and unself-conscious, carefully phrased and enthusiastic, shows a knowledge of cinematic history yet doesn't let it overwhelm his consideration of modern viewing habits or the film in question. He clearly loves movies, all kinds of movies, and is ready to accept and engage with whatever good they deliver--the smart, the dumb, the nasty, the gentle, the devious, the innocent, the obscure, the simple--he doesn't care what a movie does just as long as it does it well.

(One minor complaint: I don't recall the movie actually displaying any nudity. And even if there was some brief flash that I've forgotten, is it really accurate to describe it as having "lots and lots of titties"?)