Cuts like a Knife.

So…Robert Rodriguez’s Machete. I’m not going to spend a lot of time on this one, partly because by two weeks later, the movie has already passed its sell-by date. But regardless, a film like this is basically critic-proof anyway: After all, we’re talking about a purposefully cheap-looking, 90-minute Mexploitation flick based on one of the joke trailers from Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s Grindhouse — Does anyone really expect a good film here?

So having said that, I doubt that it will surprise anyone that Machete is more bad-bad than fun-bad, even going in with low expectations (and after libations.) I didn’t have a terrible time watching it, and I guess the movie basically succeeds at what it promised to be — an “ironic,” splatter-filled homage to and/or parody of terrible films of the ’70s. But the whole enterprise still felt really uninspired. In the end, Machete hits its marks, but it definitely doesn’t improve on the 90 seconds we saw of this flick in Grindhouse. (Hopefully we can expect more from Edgar Wright’s Don’t, Eli Roth’s Thanksgiving, or Rob Zombie’s Werewolf Women of the S.S., once they all get their inevitable day in the sun.)

While Danny Trejo plays the titular badass — a former Federale-turned-illegal-immigrant for whom “day labor” means cleaving through bad guys — with an admirable Lee Marvinish deadpan, a lot of the joking around in Machete involves stunt casting. This includes Steven Seagal as the Big Bad Mexican drug lord (has Seagal ever been in a good movie? Well, Under Siege, maybe), Robert De Niro as a sleazy race-baiting Senator (more on him in a sec), Jeff Fahey as the Karl Rove of Arizona, Lindsay Lohan as a druggy burnout, and the Nash Bridges team of Don Johnson and Cheech Marin as a racist cop and man of the cloth respectively. (Rounding out the cast: Jessica Alba is ludicrous as a INS detective on Machete’s trail, and Michelle Rodriguez once again does her Michelle Rodriguez thing as underground guerrilla leader “She” — inexplicably pronounced “Shee” insteady of “Shay.” Way to step on your own joke there.)

Well, ok, stunt casting is fun. In fact, one of the things I appreciated most about Rodriguez’s half of Grindhouse — Planet Terror — was both Fahey and Michael Biehn kicking around the movie. That being said, “Ha, it’s Robert DeNiro slumming it!” would probably work better as a joke if DeNiro wasn’t constantly, you know, slumming it these days. When he showed up in Meet the Parents ten years ago, it seemed pretty funny. Now, a la late-career Brando, Pacino, or Nicholson, it just seems kinda sad. (And like David Arquette outacting Harvey Keitel in The Grey Zone, Fahey probably gives a better performance than DeNiro does here. Trejo does for sure.)

Similarly, the meta-joke driving Machete — “Look, Robert Rodriguez made an intentionally bad film!” — suffers from the unfortunate fact that, ironically (From Dusk Til Dawn, Planet Terror) or not, Robert Rodriguez pretty much always makes B-movies. Even El Mariachi, the film that first put him on the map in 1992, is rather unmemorable, in my humble opinion. (I mean that literally — I can only remember the last 15 seconds of that flick — the pit bull and motorcycle and whatnot — which is still more than I can say for both Desperado and Once Upon a Time In Mexico.) For me, the one time Rodriguez struck gold was with Sin City, and that was mainly due to the wise, direct pilfering of Frank Miller’s “storyboards” — i.e., the original graphic novels.

All of which is to say, it’s hard to figure out in the end if Machete is a deft send-up of a bad movie or just a plain bad movie. (I had the same problem, to a lesser extent, with Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police.) Like Kurt Vonnegut said in Mother Night, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” I guess Rodriguez may just be pretending to be a hackish director of forgettable, derivative B-movies, but at this point he’s fooled me. (Maybe he should keep them trailer-length.)

Speaking of that original trailer, I’d recommend just watching that for your Machete experience, along with perhaps Machete’s Cinco de Mayo message to Arizona. Given both the virulence and the abject nonsense driving a lot of anti-immigrant hysteria these days, as well as the unfettered cravenness of the right-wing freakshows who most often push it, there was obviously room for some choice satire in this film. But, a few lines here or there aside, Machete is much more interested in playing with Z-grade movie tropes — breasts, blood splatter, and 70’s sound effects, say — than delving into any real political content about the borderlands. Eh, so be it — It’s Machete. It may be a missed opportunity, but it never pretended to be Traffic anyway.

The upshot here: Machete is (to no one’s surprise, I’m sure) eminently missable. But if you’re at all inclined to board this train, the two trailers cover 95% of the good stuff, so save yourself an hour and a half and just watch those. Having gone for the full ride myself, I left the theater with only one thought in my head: I’d just f**ked with the wrong Mexican.

Los Suns and La Machete.

“‘I think it’s fantastic,’ Nash said…’I think the law is very misguided. I think it’s, unfortunately, to the detriment of our society and our civil liberties. I think it’s very important for us to stand up for things we believe in. As a team and as an organization, we have a lot of love and support for all of our fans. The league is very multicultural. We have players from all over the world, and our Latino community here is very strong and important to us.“

In honor of Cinco de Mayo and in protest of Arizona’s straight-up ignorant new ethnic profiling law, the Phoenix Suns will don their “Los Suns” jerseys tonight. “Spurs coach Gregg Popovich is on board, and the team even tried to get their ‘Los Spurs’ jerseys, though it was too late to do so. When asked for approval to wear the jerseys, the NBA “was all for it,” said Suns general manager Steve Kerr.“

“This is Machete, with a special Cinco de Mayo message…TO ARIZONA.” If the Arizona GOP won’t heed the carrot of the Suns’ inclusive orange unis, perhaps they’ll fear the sharpened stick of a ticked-off Danny Trejo, in the new holiday trailer for Robert Rodriguez’s full-length version of Machete, also with Jeff Fahey, Michelle Rodriguez, Robert DeNiro, Lindsey Lohan, Jessica Alba, Don Johnson, Cheech Marin, and Steven Seagall. I know I was just badmouthing this project in my review of The Losers, but I have to concede, it still makes for a pretty fun trailer. (Extra points for DeNiro channeling his inner JD Hayworth therein.)

A Bit of a Grind.

So, Grindhouse. Frankly, it seems a bit late to post this review. Those limited few who had any interest in this two-director vanity project caught it that first weekend, and it’s completely nose-dived since (so much so that even Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is now being scaled back to escape a similar fate, as if that were ever going to happen.) But, for completists’ sake, I found Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s homage to the violent, smutty B-movies of yesteryear to be a fun idea at first, but not nearly entertaining enough to merit the three-and-a-half-hour slog. Some of the fake trailers, particularly Rodriguez’s Machete (i.e. the Mexican Shooter) and Edgar Wright’s Don’t, are chuckle-inducing, and there’s a certain goofy relish to be taken in the Z-grade John Carpenterisms of Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, if you were ever a late-night Cinemax addict or grindhouse aficionado (I was not the latter — I’m too young for the whole Grindhouse scene, frankly, which may explain why the film bombed so badly. When even cinephiles in their early thirties missed the nostalgia train Rodriguez and Tarantino are serving up, that’s going to seriously eat into your audience figures.) But, otherwise, Grindhouse reminded me more than anything else of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police — a film that started off enjoyably, but ultimately became too much like its object of parody (there, bad action films; in this case, bad ’70’s movies.) And Tarantino’s Death Proof is to my mind just an egregious misfire, but more on that in a bit.

The first half of the Grindhouse bill is Robert Rodriguez’s Planet Terror, a sort of John Carpenter meets George Romero zombie flick in which a good-hearted stripper (Charmed‘s Rose McGowan) and her bad-ass trucker ex (Six Feet Under‘s Freddy Rodriguez — let’s hear it for short action stars) must rally a small Texas town against the flesh-devouring zombies in their midst (Said zombies were created by a wayward toxic cloud unleashed by the unholy tandem of Osama Bin Laden and Bruce Willis.) In keeping with the Grindhouse milieu, Planet Terror is, by design, a lousy film — its only upside comes in feeling in on the joke. And I will admit to sorta stupidly enjoying myself through most of Rodriguez’s half of the show, be it due to Josh Brolin’s low-grade Nick Nolte (as an HND poster noted), Rodriguez blasting away on a mini-bike, the CGI-enhanced sloppy edits and film deterioration, or the perfectly cheesy synth score. (And, really, who better to play redneck brothers in a capital-B-movie than Jeff Fahey and Michael Biehn? Speaking from a purely fanboy perspective, it was just great to see Hicks/Reese again on the big screen.) In short, Planet Terror is, frankly, kinda awful: I wouldn’t sit through it again, and I can’t even come close to recommending it. But it’s a better bad film than, say, From Dusk Till Dawn, the last time Rodriguez and Tarantino tried this gag, and for its first hour at least I found myself going along reasonably contentedly on the terrible-movie-ride I was promised.

But, then comes Quentin Tarantino’s Death Proof, which admittedly I’m holding to higher expectations. Rodriguez has shown himself over the years basically to be a prolific and well-meaning hack. But, from Reservoir Dogs — a movie that blew me away as an 18-year-old Blockbuster clerk — to Pulp Fiction, the thrill ride (and soundtrack) of my sophomore year in college, to Jackie Brown, still Tarantino’s most mature and accomplished work, QT seemed like he might be a true auteur, a guy who could recombinate his extensive knowledge of cinema with his sheer passion for movies to create a career’s worth of films for the ages. But, like Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Kill Bill Vol. 2, Death Proof marks another self-satisfied retreat into Tarantino’s narrowly-defined, solipsistic fanboy universe. To be honest, even though I was bored through much of Kill Bill 1, I never expected him to make a movie this dull.

Basically, Death Proof examines the fate of two female quartets — one in Austin, one in Tennessee — after they encounter the dark, dangerous, and wheedling persona of one Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell, winking back to his Carpenter roots), a homicidal stalker with a “death-proof” car. But, despite its schlocky set-up, Death Proof is way too talky to have ever made much headway in a real grindhouse: The film is mostly comprised of these gangs of four nattering endlessly in unrealistic fashion about boys, music, or whatever else comes to mind, and each and every one of them talks and acts like Quentin Tarantino in wish-fulfillment mode: Amidst the MF and N-bombs, these beautiful gals name-drop movies like Zatoichi and Vanishing Point or esoteric bands like Dave Dee, Dosy, Beaky, Mich & Tich, all the while showing off their sumptuous feet and eventually, of course, kicking ass and taking names. (Yes, we already saw this in Kill Bill. In fact you could argue Tarantino’s cameo as a fiend-rapist who gets his just desserts in Planet Terror is all of Death Proof in a nutshell.) Really, Tarantino’s ear has never been so off. It being a grindhouse/exploitation flick, QT can get away with unrealistic women…but boring is its own problem.

At any rate, as you might guess from the plot, the last half hour or so of Death Proof involves a car chase between Russell and one of the aforementioned quartets, but that isn’t much more interesting than all the interminable chat we’ve already labored through. (Some reviews have pegged this as a bravura moment in car chase cinema — I thought it was dull even compared to recent stuff like The Bourne Supremacy or Ronin, to say nothing of flicks like The French Connection.) There’s one exceptionally haunting scene involving Vanessa Ferlito’s very last encounter with Stuntman Mike that suggests Tarantino might still have a few tricks up his sleeve, if he ever gets his act together some day. But, all in all, Grindhouse suggests more than anything else that he’s still stuck in the Kill Bill rut. What he probably needs to do is try to adapt someone else’s work again, a la Jackie Brown, before indulging in yet another B-movie flight of fancy like the Kill Bills and Death Proof. As it is, Tarantino’s flicks are sadly becoming a bit of a grind.

Grind, Kingdom, Prime, FF.

Another wave of holiday trailers comes down the pike: Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez let their B-film freak flags fly (again) in the full trailer for Grindhouse, with Kurt Russell, Rose McGowan, and Freddy Rodriguez, among others; Jamie Foxx, Jennifer Garner, Jason Bateman, Chris Cooper, Jeremy Piven, and Richard Jenkins fight the war on terror in Saudi Arabia in this first look at Peter Berg’s The Kingdom; and Shia la Boeuf and the US military run from metal toy-like things in the new preview for Michael Bay’s Transformers (If you’re interested, see also the pic of Optimus Prime here.) Word is the trailer for Fantastic Four 2 is also showing in theaters at the moment, although the only thing online right now is this rather meh image of the Silver Surfer…hopefully, they do a better job with Galactus. Update: The FF teaser is now up.

Terror & Pan.

In the movie bin, Robert Rodriguez wallows in 70’s B-movie kitsch in the new trailer for Planet Terror, his half of Grindhouse, with Rose McGowan, Freddy Rodriguez, Michael Biehn and several others. And, more promisingly, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth gets another trailer, albeit one with Mr. Movie Voice.