From Dusk Till Dawn 8/10 - It took a few viewings and looking at it from a few angles to really appreciate what this beast is; a very deliberate and sometimes misunderstood experiment.
The first half is an unfinished Tarantino gem, in the same vein as True Romance, Jackie Brown etc. All the Tarantinoisms are there: the clearly defined / larger than life characters, the razor sharp screenplay and character clashes, the trunk shot, the feet, Big Kanuna burger, "come again". If it chose to continue down this path as the tale of the Gecko Brothers & the Fuller family, it would have been another one for his DVD box set.
Then it has the balls to take this carefully built setup, firmly in the Tarantino universe, and forcibly throw it into Robert Rodriguez land. Now all of the latter director's cliches suddenly turn up: the Mexican setting, the babes, the over-sexualising, Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin, the gratuitous gore fest. Taping movie A to movie B with duct tape, the only constant being the lead characters sharing the audience's "wtf is going on" reactions. I don't think there is any other movie like it.
What makes it work is the script and the cast selling the sheer madness of it all. Clooney miraculously fits like a glove, he's never been this badass and never will be again. Seth Gecko is one of Tarantino's finest creations. Keitel grounds everything, and Tarantino himself delivers his only worthy acting performance as the oddly soft spoken, yet neurotic completely off-the-rails psycho.
Boy did I have fun watching this.
