I started watching Robert Rodriguez' Planet Terror the other day, but didn't even bother to fast forward to the end. It felt like Rodriguez equivocated through the whole thing. Sometimes he ventured into grindhouse satire mode. At other times, he reverted to his own film vocabulary. I also remember watching one shot that didn't make any sense. The camera cranes up while a car drives into frame, but the crane shot just keeps going and doesn't end anywhere. Plus Rose McGowan's acting wasn't very good. It got me wondering if Rodriguez was wearing too many hats. He's writer, director, DP, editor and composer on this one. He probably helped duplicate the DVDs in his spare time.
Then today I found out that Rodriguez is divorcing his wife of 16 years and is now engaged to McGowan. Now it makes sense. He was in love with his actress! That's why he wasn't thinking straight. It's like Irreconcilable Differences, where Ryan O'Neal's film director character dumps Shelley Long for the ingenue played by Sharon Stone. And O'Neal goes off the deep end financing and directing Stone in a musical Civil War pic (based loosely on the Heaven's Gate debacle) which turns into a disaster.
What's interesting to me now is how this will affect Rodriguez' writing. His work has often been about family, one of the central themes in the Spy Kids series. He took the idea so seriously that he got his kids to help him write Shark Boy and Lava Girl (it screens like it was written by children). Publicly, Rodriguez and his ex-wife are on good terms and she is still slated to produce some of his upcoming films. But still, there must be some kind of repercussion from the breakup of a long marriage with five children. I wonder how it will all play out in Rodriguez' films? I can imagine that one of his next pictures might be titled, "Geez, look at her, can you blame me?"
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