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Showing posts from October, 2012

The Alamo Drafthouse and Tarantino's "Death Proof"

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[See update at the bottom for a very brief review of Death Proof .] 2007 saw the closing of the original Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin, TX.  Quentin Tarantino marked the event with an on-location film festival.  It was not his first at the Alamo Downtown, a theater which reveled in the independent, low-budget, nitty gritty feel that he and Robert Rodriguez celebrated in Grindhouse (including Death Proof  and Planet Terror ), which also came out in 2007. I had gone to a Tarantino film festival at the Alamo Downtown just two years earlier, in 2005, the year Entertainment Weekly ranked the Alamo Drafthouse as the #1 movie house in America .  (That was when the Alamo Drafthouse had just begun to expand outside of Austin, but was still limited to Texas locales.)  It was Tarantino's sixth film festival, " QT6 ."  I and about ten or so others managed to attend all of the screenings, including the all-night horror marathon. Tarantino introduced one of those horror fi