The signs had been there throughout the opening half hour, but I realised that the Beatles-scored, Clement-and-La-Frenais-scripted musical Across the Universe was iredeemably silly and rubbish when a girl called Prudence climbed into our Liverpudlian hero's apartment through the kitchen window. Oh, the hero's called Jude, by the way. And the heroine is called Lucy. Indeed, there are so many obvious cues and clues to Beatles tracks it made me wonder how an already overlong film (directed by Julie 'Lion King' Taymor) didn't, in fact, go on for days. Surely somewhere on the cutting room floor is a scene where the protagonists, while protesting the Vietnam war (as they repeatedly do throughout) paint a submarine yellow. And an entire character called Eleanor Rigby (it's a huge suprise that a character introduced as 'Rita' turns out to be a lesbian circus performer rather than a meter maid). Not to mention a scene where Jude twists his ankle and, er, shouts.

Attempts to parlay the Beatles' back catalogue into any sort of narrative almost invariably results in schmaltz, crass commercialism, or pure inanity, and this falls into the last category. Perhaps a better title would have come from John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band: Cold Turkey.

Right, in common with many of my colleagues, I owe you an apology. The last time I posted, I said I was going on holiday to Ibiza. Well, I had that holiday, and I've just been for another one, to Sicily (where the cinemas were so beautiful - some modernist, some slightly fascist, some open air  - that I was almost tempted to sit through a subtitled Jennifer Lopez film, which seemed to be the only thing playing. Almost). I didn't post at all in between, which means I've missed the boat on Atonement. And I'm only just in time to get a few kicks into the walking corpse that is Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof.

God, Death Proof is awful. I suspect Tarantino knows it's awful. I think he may even have made it more awful than it was. When Miramax saw it in its original form, twinned with Roberto Rodriquez's Planet Terror and accompanied by trailers for nonexistent sicko freak schlock movies, all of them shot in the deliberately inept, technically cack-handed style of the genre that gave it the embracing title, Grindhouse, Miramax freaked. Harvey Weinstein allegedly told Tarantino to put more footage into Death Proof, so it could be released as a full length stand-alone work in advance of the weaker Planet Terror. Which makes you wonder how bad Planet Terror can be. I think Tarantino was so pissed off about this he complied with the lackadaisical reluctance of a surly child, not caring what the end result would look like.

Death Proof looks like what it is, a film that's been mucked about with. It slips between clunky grindhouse-style camerawork and bad synching and some blandly professional cinematography. For a film that ostensibly pays tribute to such hymns to vehicular speed and nihilism as Vanishing Point and Dirty Mary, Crazy Larry, it's incredibly slow, sprawling and wordy. There are pages and pages of typical Tarantino dialogue: riffs on figures of speech, the difficulty of finding French Vogue in Hicksville, odds and sods of popular culture, and sexually aggressive conversations delivered with a thousand-yard stare. It's all unutterably tedious but it does bring into sharp focus two of Tarantino's particular obsessions: his apparent foot fetishism, and his vicious misogyny.

There's chapter and verse on the foot thing here. But in Death Proof, the preoccupation with women's pedal extremities that we saw in Kill Bill ("wiggle your big toe") and to an extent in Jackie Brown is given full rein as women's feet are dangled out of car windows, over chairs, and at one point, rather gag-inducingly licked by Kurt Russell's loony stuntman. I don't have a problem with this, particularly. Each to his own, I say. Live and let live. But the lasciviousness with which Tarantino dwells on elegant arches and bud-like toes is mirrored in the way he seems to savour the mutilation of women.

I've been a sucker for Tarantino in the past. I loved Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown and I thought Kill Bill was a hoot. But even while I defended the latter film's cartoonish violence, I thought there was something indecent in the way Uma Thurman's character was abused - particularly the relish with which her repeated sexual abuse while in a coma was described. I have also always assumed that the pornographic depiction of the beating of Patricia Arquette's Alabama in True Romance owed as much to Tarantino's writing as to Tony Scott's direction. Violent misogyny in movies is nothing new, of course, and Death Proof is arguably less graphic than, say, Wolf Creek or Captivity. But the misogyny of Death Proof is relentless (three women leave a friend dozing in - ho ho - the company of a redneck potential rapist, having - oh my sides - told her she's a porn star). And it is boring.

Maybe the big problem with Tarantino is that he doesn't know when to stop these days. His films have got longer, more prolix, more over the top. The quirky obsessions that initially made him seem such a fresh cinematic eye and ear are now indulged in willy-nilly. And I don't think he cares. The only other explanation for the disastrousness of Death Proof is that the whole thing has been an elaborate promotional exercise for some later director's cut of Grindhouse.

Whew. That was all a bit solemn, wasn't it? Coming soon are Control, Anton Corbijn's monchrome film about Ian Curtis and Joy Division, and A Mighty Heart, in which Angelina Jolie reminds us she can act as the wife of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl, but since neither of these are exactly laugh-a-minute, I don't feel up to writing about them yet (post holiday hangover doesn't help, either). So I'll leave you with one of my favourite jokes.

Why did the farmer win the Nobel Prize?

Because he was out standing in his field.

Well, my wife liked it. Which is one of the reasons I married her.