The Alamo Drafthouse and Tarantino's "Death Proof"
[See update at the bottom for a very brief review of Death Proof .] 2007 saw the closing of the original Alamo Drafthouse in downtown Austin, TX. Quentin Tarantino marked the event with an on-location film festival. It was not his first at the Alamo Downtown, a theater which reveled in the independent, low-budget, nitty gritty feel that he and Robert Rodriguez celebrated in Grindhouse (including Death Proof and Planet Terror ), which also came out in 2007. I had gone to a Tarantino film festival at the Alamo Downtown just two years earlier, in 2005, the year Entertainment Weekly ranked the Alamo Drafthouse as the #1 movie house in America . (That was when the Alamo Drafthouse had just begun to expand outside of Austin, but was still limited to Texas locales.) It was Tarantino's sixth film festival, " QT6 ." I and about ten or so others managed to attend all of the screenings, including the all-night horror marathon. Tarantino introduced on...