I love Death Proof.
Its portrayal of the inexorable slings and arrows of living as a woman
in a society that, through its inaction and indifference, creates victims of
women every day is one that is as underappreciated as it is overlooked.
A symptom of both the film's lack of prominence within Tarantino's body of work
and its loudest statements lying, at first,  cloaked behind its characters most inconspicuous subtleties.
The depth of its antagonist's fear of women who are capable of retalation by any measure, for instance,
being truly revealed to us  only in the distance he deliberately keeps between himself and every woman
in the film. The seldom moments of stillness in his otherwise perpetual current of childlike fear
coming in flashes of sexually predacious behavior and in strokes of his own ego. The binary occasions
in which he voluntarily touches a woman throughout the film coming first during a lapdance from a woman  
he knows is intoxicated and emotionally wounded and second against the sole of a sleeping woman's
foot with the tip of his finger and a shut car door lying between them. What at first appears to be the  brash
but nonetheless calculated behavior of the barbarous antagonists so often found within the reels of the 70's
exploitation films that Death Proof and Planet Terror were crafted as tandem tributes to, quickly
become  glaring expressions of fear and a representation of the fragility of men's predatory  
behavior as well as  the anxiety and angst that underscores it. The moment our second-act
protagonists retaliate against his viscious and callous behavior, his breathing becomes sharp and the
thin veil of composure him and men like him hide behind quickly begins to tear under the pressure.
And with this jarring change in momentum, his previously grizzly and confident voice is supplanted
by a multitude of shrieking cries  as the film reaches a hair-raising, blistering crescendo with what is
perhaps the most satisfying act  of vindication I've ever seen. His death blows coming at the physical
as opposed to just the  proverbial hands of women, instantly  strips away the degrees of separation  
between him and the gratuitous violence he carried out. And - this barrage of raucous strikes that heralds the
film's conclusion stands as an incredibly fierce condemnation, both of the  malignant behavior of
its antagonist and the indurated inaction of the men that could have stopped him sooner. Death Proof is as
much an homage to the bloody and coarse  thrillers of the past that trumpeted the pained cries of women
as it is an exultant and aggressive subversion of them. A film boasting one of Tarantino's greatest  curations
of music throughout his career and one that delivers some of his most unabated social commentary,
from the inter-exclusionary behavior of marginalized people rooted in regressive societal norms to  the
ever-present moral selectiveness of law enforcement and their flippant negligence of those they are meant to
protect(?), Death Proof feels like it has a more willing-to-listen audience  now than it did when it was released 11 years ago - and it does so with all of the provocatively charismatic dialogue and intoxicating momentum as Tarantino's best. Because as far as I'm concerned, it is his best.
I love it. Thanks Quentin.