http://chud.com/nextraimages/tarantino.jpgAs if I weren’t already looking forward to Death Proof enough, Variety is reporting that writer-director Quentin Tarantino is prepping an extended cut to perhaps screen in competition at Cannes. That his currently eighty-seven minute segment of Grindhouse has the potential to run a full two hours without padding shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who’s read the 127-page screenplay. As is probably common knowledge by now, but I’ll invisi-text it for those of you trying to remain spoiler free, both Planet Terror and Death Proof feature "missing reels", but Tarantino, unlike Robert Rodriguez, actually shot the fifteen minutes he excised, which, according to those who’ve seen it, contains a significant portion of the story, so that’ll bring the running time up to 102 minutes. And it should hardly be a shock that Tarantino’s ode to the slasher and car chase genre might interest the Cannes Festival President Gilles Jacob; QT’s already got one Palm d’or to his credit (for Pulp Fiction in 1994), and the aesthetes on the Riviera love to play favorites.

Though I won’t be seeing Grindhouse until tonight, reliable sources indicate that Planet Terror is a massively entertaining goof while Death Proof is a real movie. That’s right. I busted out them italics. What’ll be interesting is whether The Weinstein Company decides to distribute Tarantino’s Cannes cut of Death Proof internationally, since they’ve already split the movies up for most (if not all) foreign territories. The Variety article also floats the possibility that Planet Terror might sneak in as a competition pic as well, which I thought was nonsense until realizing that Sin City played Cannes in 2005. This is where I stop offering my opinion because I haven’t seen either fucking movie yet.

Grindhouse opens in the U.S. on April 6th, 2007, but won’t be distributed internationally until May 31st.