A whole N.Y. Times piece about Grindhouse — two high-style wankoff movies made in the spirit of ’70s exploitation flicks, one directed by Robert Rodriguez, the other by Quentin Tarantino — and not a single mention of the film’s most fascinating element, which is how heatedly and lasciviously Rodriguez will photograph actress Rose McGowan in his segment, called “Planet Terror.”

Rodriguez, a very clever and likable guy who, being a kind of lapsed Catholic, appears to regard women as either Madonnas or floozies, tends to make his actresses look hot and saucy in his films. He dressed and photographed Salma Hayek like a pistol-hot wet dream in Desperado and From Dusk to Dawn, and one naturally presumes that the ardor behind his on-set affair with McGowan during filming of “Planet Terror” (which led to the end of his 16-year marriage to Elizabeth Avellan) will be captured, so to speak, in the way in which he dresses and films her.
And yet Times writer Whitney Joiner writes only about the usual technical-attitude genre-homage stuff. Said it before, saying it again: Rodriguez and Tarantino seem to be chronically lazy genre filmmakers, incapable of creating a single honest (i.e., unreferenced) thought or emotion about anything real, indulging time and again in ironic (i.e., insincere) B-movie trappings and posturings — style, pizazz, attitude, etc. They’re both lost…totally lost.