(Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, 2007, USA)
I couldn’t pull the trigger. But it stayed on my Top 10 for a very, very long time, until I stared myself in the face and had to admit that I had absolutely no idea how in the hell to compare this movie to e.g. Talk to Her. Taken as two individual films – even as two individual films that can be watched right in a row – neither Planet Terror nor Death Proof would have ended up anywhere near my Top 100; but there’s something alchemic about combining them, and then adding four brilliant parody trailers (Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Woman of the S.S. is the funniest and by far the most intelligent part of what is all in all, a pretty marvelous project) that makes what amounts to an artistic recreation of an old advertising gimmick seem like it’s pretty much the nerviest thing on two legs – make that a leg and a machine gun. But its brilliance is almost exclusively conceptual and post-artistic, in ways that left me completely unable to “rank” it, even in the casual, “we’re all friends” manner of this list. So I’ll just say this: outside of the late-night premiere of Snakes on a Plane, seeing this film in a crappy cheap theater where the projection got fucked up was by a significant margin the best film-going experience of my adult life. (Reviewed here)