I finally finished up Charles Stross’ ACCELERANDO late last week. Although it was filled with some amazing ideas, I’m afraid I can’t endorse it as a coherent novel. I’m still not quite sure what I read, or what the point of the book was. Something vaguely to do with post humans threatening organic life in the universe, possibly even effecting the universe on a subatomic level.

Still, you can’t beat ideas like a mission to find an extraterrestrial internet, accessible from a router in orbit around a brown dwarf star, or lawsuits used as a denial of service attack to businesses, or a man uploading a copy of his consciousness into a flock of artificial pigeons.

Next up: THE ZOMBIE SURVIVAL GUIDE by Max Brooks. Light reading, to say the least.

So, GRINDHOUSE, the double-bill by Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino, came in fourth place this weekend and has been officially declared a bomb. I can’t say this doesn’t surprise me, but Tina and I managed to go see it this weekend, and I have to say that as post-modern commentary on b-grade cinema goes, Grindhouse is a roaring success. I haven’t had that much fun at a movie in a long, long time, and I have to say that the themes of feminism and empowerment found in both Rodriguez’s PLANET TERROR and Tarantino’s DEATH PROOF were a very nice reminder of how “bad” movies once celebrated female power, quite unlike the grueling horror films of present day. It’s too smart and weird to ever gain a mass audience, but if you have an appreciation for post modern cinema, then you should go see this in the theatre while you can.

PLANET TERROR is a zombie film starring Rose McGowan and Freddy Rodriguez (“Rico” on SIX FEET UNDER) — in many ways it’s an echo of the early films of John Carpenter, or the more raucous work of Roger Corman. The story is simple — zombies come to small town Texas, and a Go-Go dancer and her ex-boyfriend, a mysterious man with a big truck, lead the fight against the monsters. In many ways, it reminds me of the b-classic NIGHT OF THE COMET, except with the violence amped up to impossible levels.

As a director, Robert Rodriguez has an inspiring sense of independence, shooting all his films — even the hit childrens’ series, SPY KIDS — in his own Austin studios. However, I’ve found his work to be largely uneven — for every SIN CITY, he also has a FACULTY or THE ADVENTURES OF SHARK GIRL AND LAVA BOY to throw up as a counterpoint. Still, PLANET TERROR is exciting in a way that his films rarely are. By dispensing with the gloss of his previous work, the naturalistic approach (which includes exploding heads full of red Kero syrup) takes him out of the cold confines of slick CGI and into a place where great characters get to carry the film.

DEATH PROOF, Quentin Tarantion’s ode to the “Road Demon” genre, is a harder movie to talk about. The first two thirds of the film are spent in the company of two different sets of female victims stalked by a psychopathic serial killer named “Stuntman Mike,” who is played with stunning bravado by Kurt Russell in his “John Travolta in PULP FICTION” moment. The women hold endless conversations about their lives, conversations that lull the audience into a state of boredom, or as in my case, squirming, “gotta get out of the theatre” boredom. However, there is a point in the film where everything changes — where you realize that the first two acts were set-up for an amazing finale. I won’t tell you what it is, just that the last thirty minutes of DEATH PROOF are sublime. You still have to sit through the first hour, but trust me, it’s worth it.

In the end, there’s something appealing about contemporary filmmakers actually dispensing with the usual “references” and making films that employ the cinematic tools and conventions of a dead genre. By resurrecting the grindhouse film, they’re sending a pretty clear message about modern cinema — chiefly, that it sucks. And looking at what passes as horror these days — fictional snuff films that glorify torture and sadism, where all the protagonists ultimately die — we forget that horror films used to be about triumph over fear. That the great horror films of the 70′s and 80′s had improbable characters standing up to the monsters with a wink and gallons of fake, fake blood and winning.