09 | April | 2007 | Colinizer

There is certainly an element of self-indulgence in these two movies (Planet Terror and Death Proof that make up The Grindhouse double-feature bonanza) and I believe there’s enough old-style cheesiness in the trailers to make most teenagers stay away which is good because, frankly, they’d be disappointed. There was enough cheesiness for me to give it a try though.

In Planet Terror, you can look forward to many people in the audience whispering “That’s Bruce Willis,” and even better… “That’s the guy from Lost”. They are in fact referring to Naveen Andrews who plays Sayid; here he has his English accent on display and for some reason displays a penchant for a ridiculously inexplicable and bizarre trophey that I wont reveal…

Death Proof is for the most part utterly boring and even the eventual stunt-scene (which seems to go on for no apparent reason, although that’s probably deliberate) focuses on largely one stunt for a long time. The end is pure throw-back. Kurt Russell doesn’t seem to do all that much acting – but look for him at a bar stool in the second cafe scene.

Some people will probably say that some of the worst parts of the movies are genius, but if by that they acknowledge that the movies are slow, have no character development to speak of, are boring in most places and offer some awful close up camera angles and what amounts to a not very entertaining movie, they’d be right.

For self-indulgence: Quentin Tarantino gets a cameo in both movies and does in one scene what no man, even in the worst porno, has ever done probably; Robert Rodriguez (apart from probably having the more entertaing movie) of course does every job he can (including the music) except act in it (but has a surname namesake actor do that) or provide catering.

If you’ve ever been to a grind house movie from way back (and clearly these two guys have seen too many) you may enjoy this (and critics may love it for old-style cinema replication qualities) and it did admittedly have some laugh out loud cheesy moments. However, it was not entertaining enough, much of which could be equally attributed to the excessive length.

I had spoken to someone in the electronics department at Walmart last week. They said they were expecting Nintendo Wiis this morning.

I woke up early this morning knowing that Walmart would open at 7am. So…

I pulled up at 6:55 and the store was already open.

On the way in, I saw other people of the ‘appropriate type’ strolling in. I wondered if it would be a foot race to the check out, though given the fact that the store was already open, I was kind of expecting them to have sold out.

As it turns out, the department was desserted and I was the only one there, well at least for 2 minutes, at which point a young asian couple and a teenage boy both showed up just as a staff member appears at the counter.

Undeterred by the make-shift ‘There is a shortage of Wii and DS – please call Nintendo for details on ….’ sign on the display case we all asked the guy what the deal was.

He kept on repeating that it was “Hard to say”. I resisted the urge to be pedantic and go with “But still possible then?”.

So then it was time to leave the store empty handed with that… ‘perhaps I should not leave because I need to stalk the display case for any possible sign of Wiis surfacing and I can not have those other people getting one an not me’ mentality. OK, not really. In fact there’s actually a kind of instant fellowship between console hunters, though this can be quite interesting given that heavy duty gamer types can be awkward social geeks – this was evident at 7am on the PS3 launch day last year when we were all waiting outside EB Games in the cold engaging our social skills; probably to avoid de-evolving to cavemen and ripping each other’s head off for the primal prey kill.

On my way out I remembered that Walmart has begun mandating a large amount of RFID chipping on supplier palettes (not yet individual items). I don’t know how widespread the mandate is yet and I wondered if Nintendo was subject to this. With my IT head on I thought of all the smart but useless things I could have said like “This is the company that mandates RFID chips – surely you know exactly where the shipments are and when they sneeze”.

So really my point is that I am (of course…) somewhat appalled by the fact that ‘in this day and age’) Walmart did not know whether a shipment of Wiis was coming, and couldn’t show me GPS tracking of the truck in question (highway robbery anyone? OK that’s the PS3). Actually I was pretty sure that someone somewhere did now, but of course they wouldn’t dare tell the floor guy for fear that alien beings would extract his brain matter just for the chance to be able to play some human entertainment.

So Walmart may have RFID but they only still pass on a RFIDer to the customer. Yes, OK, it’s cheesy.