Director Robert Rodriguez’s spoof trailer for “Machete” was easily the best part of his and Quentin Tarantino’s failed attempt to return to those glorious days of early ‘70s exploitation flicks with 2007’s “Grindhouse.” And it made sense that the fan reaction would eventually result in a feature film the director has wanted to make since the mid-nineties. If nothing else, Rodriguez is as famous for delivering low-budget, high concept genre films as he is for directing them. He’s even better at marketing himself and his latest project, exploiting to the hilt an intriguing concept that, unfortunately, usually fails to pay off in a satisfying way on screen. Politics aside, never has this been truer than with “Machete” (though the truly dreadful “Once Upon a Time in Mexico” is a close second).

Recently, Rodriguez has furiously tried to backpedal away from the racial bomb he exploded into the middle of the Arizona immigration debate back in May with his cravenly cynical attempt to market “Machete” using a racist trailer. After the backlash and with Texas tax credits on the line, the director’s now selling “Machete” as a goof, a “Mexsploitation” flick that harmlessly employs the same kind of over-the-top politics that have always defined the genre. But nothing could be further from the truth.

The story of a former Mexican “Federale” (the great Danny Trejo) framed for the attempted assassination of a racist Texas State Senator (the hammy Robert DeNiro) is both racial and racist. “Machete” isn’t about a political call for the powerless to fight THE corrupt MAN, it’s a call for revolution; Mexicans against Americans – and in the words of the character meant to be our evolving conscience, Jessica Alba’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agent Sartana, it’s about how those who believe in only LEGAL immigration “deserve to be cut down.” This is her rousing fist-in-the-air message to a gathered army of illegal day laborers who have been patiently waiting for the call away from their jobs as dishwashers, gardeners and hotel maids to wage war against a cruel America whose immigration laws, by the way, are nowhere near as harsh as Mexico’s. (more…)

The new film Machete is born of a joke. No, really. In 2006 when Quentin Tarantino was gearing up for his double feature movie experience Grindhouse, he solicited other directors like Eli Roth and Rob Zombie to make fake trailers for bad 70’s exploitation moves. These trailers were shown between the two features in a takeoff of the coming attractions shown between movie features in those old 70s era B-picture film houses Tarantino was spoofing with Grindhouse. Machete was one of these over the top, fake movie trailers and it featured the catch phrase, “This time they f**ked with the wrong Mexican.” It got such a rousing reception from fans that director Robert Rodriguez decided to proceed with a full-length feature version.

But the joke has soured. In this film, white America is the enemy and the United States is an oppressive force. It gets so extreme that in one scene a pair of white men shoot to death a pregnant Mexican woman merely so that her baby won’t be born in the USA. The pair then cruelly say, “Welcome to America,” to the dead woman’s Mexican husband. From the Hollywood Reporter:

Among “Machete’s” more provocative elements are border vigilantes led by Don Johnson as a kind of avatar for Maricopa County’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio and fake political ads for an incumbent senator whose platform is built on his “hard line against wetbacks” and a description of them as “parasites.” That the two characters murder a pregnant Mexican woman to prevent her baby from being born in America and then shoot her distraught husband while uttering the line, “Welcome to America,” underlines the point.

That is some pretty harsh stuff.

Sometimes Hollywood doesn’t know when to leave well enough alone. As a two-minute fake trailer in context with the Grindhouse experience it was funny. I attended the full Grindhosue movie experience and had a great, laugh-a-minute time. Unfortunately, Machete is now a full movie of its own, one that is polarizing people instead of entertaining them like the original, fake trailer was able to do. (more…)

Editor’s Note: After the publication of this piece we made an internal discovery that this interview was not a one-on-one interview between our writer and Quentin Tarantino, and that some of the questions attributed to “Big Hollywood” were asked by other journalists in what was a roundtable interview.
 
Upon discovering this, we temporarily removed the piece from the site until all the facts were known and a proper correction could be added.

Quentin Tarantino exploded on the world film scene in 1992 with “Reservoir Dogs,” a brutally profane yet ingeniously plotted and often funny deconstruction of the heist-film genre. He took things to a whole other level in 1994 with “Pulp Fiction,” reviving the foundering careers of superstars John Travolta and Bruce Willis while launching the star careers of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman while winning a Best Screenplay Oscar himself. 

Yet in the 15 years since that classic, Tarantino hasn’t been able to score quite as big an impact. 1997’s “Jackie Brown” made just $39 million, while the two “Kill Bill” films scored $70 million each yet were considered hyper-violent trifles compared to what he was really capable of. And he really bottomed out with 2007’s “Death Proof,” which made up half of “Grindhouse,” a three-hour homage to the trashy drive-in films of America’s past. Its 21st-century audience didn’t get the joke and largely ignored it, earning just $27 million at the US box office.  (more…)