Quotes of the Week -- Rendition

Hollywood—particularly during Oscar season—functions on the assumption that no trauma has entered the national consciousness until it's been undergone by a flaxen-haired gamine with major box-office draw.

Dana Stevens, Slate

Slate's action movie catchphrase contest

In the distinguished tradition of the Bulwer-Lytton first line of a bad novel competition, Slate's action-movie one-liner contest has produced some hilariously authentic-sounding catch phrases that almost make me want to see the movies they might be part of.

[S]everal readers incorporated new media into their catchphrases. From Demolicious: "Consider this negative eBay feedback." Michael Martin provides a variation on the theme with "Myspace friend add … denied!"

Calaphin captures the latent jingoism of the genre with "Welcome to America, douche bag." And Chris Larson taps into a related action trope—the comeuppance of the pretentious European bad guy—with "You shouldn't have said shed-yul, asshole."

Quote of the Week -- Dana Stevens on "Grindhouse"

Of all the reviews I read, Slate's Dana Stevens best conveyed and illuminated the transgressive pleasures of "Grindhouse."

We've all experienced some degree of Tarantino fatigue since ["Pulp Fiction"], whether with the director himself (who sometimes seems to be using the screen as a place to play out his own airless adolescent fantasies) or with the endless imitations spawned by his particular brand of fast-talking, genre-savvy splatter (this year's dreadful "Smokin' Aces" is one latter-day example).

But Death Proof is a reminder of what there was to like about Tarantino in the first place: his uncanny ear for dialogue that's at once naturalistic and deliriously wordy, his kinetic action sequences, and his voracious love for cinema in all its incarnations, especially the sleazy ones. With its lean 90-minute running time and a near-complete absence of CGI, "Death Proof" feels like an experiment in austerity after more than a decade in which Tarantino had free run of the special-effects candy store. And it works fabulously, much to the surprise of this generally Tarantino-weary writer.