Wipe away the torrent of blood from the 2010 film “Machete” and you saw a coarse treatise on illegal immigration and those eeee-vil folks who dare to care about controlling the borders.

The film wasn’t a flop, but its $26 million haul hardly screamed “franchise.” Yet a sequel is on the way all the same, but this time it looks like we’ll see more of Machete the killing machine and less obtuse political content.

Deadline.com:

The new film finds Machete recruited by the U.S. Government for a mission which would be impossible for any mortal man. Machete must battle his way through Mexico to take down a madman cartel leader and an eccentric billionaire arms dealer who has hatched a plan to spread war across the planet with a weapon in space. Machete takes on an army in an effort to dismantle a plan for global anarchy.

“Machete” writer/producer Robert Rodriguez is one of the more pragmatic talents in Hollywood. His early claim to fame was making “El Mariachi” for a measly $7,000. Since then, he’s wisely concentrated on keeping his budgets relatively low and ensuring a decent return on investment for his projects. It’s clear he still has a grasp for the bottom line.

(more…)

Finally, a little justice. Some of you might recall that the prospect of director Robert Rodriguez receiving taxpayer dollars after bringing one the most anti-American and outright racist films in years to the bigscreen was more than a little upsetting to those of us who pay taxes, aren’t racist, and kinda dig America.

Good news today via the “Wall Street Journal“:

The Texas Film Commission says it will refuse to pay $1.75 million in state incentives to the movie’s producers citing a state law that allows the state to refuse to pay incentives for “content that portrays Texas or Texans in a negative fashion.”

But what exactly is the “negative” portrayal the governor’s staff object to? Most commentators assume it is Sen. McLaughlin’s character, a virulently anti-immigration politician whose faux ad supports an “electrified border fence” and pledges “no amnesty for parasites.”

Or is it the fact that at the end of the movie, the main character – an ex-Mexican federal police officer played by Danny Trejo – gets legal status? This is after he leads a group of Mexican immigrants in a confrontation with border vigilantes.

Calls to the Texas Film Commission were forwarded to Gov. Perry’s press office. Katherine Cesinger, the governor’s spokeswoman, said the letter to the filmmakers didn’t specify why the movie ran afoul of the “negative” portrayal criteria. “The totality of the project is what the office takes a look at,” she said.

Here’s our favorite part of the story, where after crashing and burning, Rodriguez gets to stand up, brush himself off, and say: “I meant to do that.” (more…)

Do the math. Instead of someone with the last name Rodriguez telling the tale of noble, sympathetic Hispanics victimized by white American southern rednecks  — all of whom are portrayed as murderous racists, what if we had a white filmmaker telling the tale of noble and sympathetic Texas border ranchers victimized by marauding, racist, gold-toothed unwashed Mexicans out to steal their land? Oh, and we would close our story with a stand-up-and-cheer race war where Texas ranchers unite to violently mow down evil Mexicans.

The same Left whose standards are so low that opposition to ObamaCare, same-sex marriage, and the Ground Zero Mosque can only be driven by a “phobia” or “ist” — the same PC Left that hides ”silly” old Bugs Bunny cartoons and can’t broadcast a season of “24″ without including a patronizing Don’t Be Racist to Muslims PSA — sees the vicious portrayal of white Texans in “Machete” as nothing more than a silly goof. I guess it’s easy to convince yourself of that when your principles are based on an agenda as opposed to any sense of consistency or intellectual honesty.

The bottom line, however, is that whether Rodriguez likes it or not, this is still the United States of America, which means he has the right to make whatever film he wants and 20th Century-Fox has the same right to distribute it. But does that mean Texas taxpayers should foot part of the bill for a cinematic slandering of both their state and identity? [emphasis mine] (more…)

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…)

—–

According to Kurt Schlichter’s script review, it looks as though director Robert Rodriguez is looking to pull a little bait and switch with this latest “Machete” trailer. All the race-baiting from the screenplay and the previous trailer has been completely scrubbed and now the Danny Trejo action pic is cut to look like a typical revenger.  

Of course, with all those Texas tax credits on the line, Rodriguez might have made some serious revisions to his film as well. (more…)

In 1987, Arnold Schwarzenegger took a big leap forward in his movie-star career by taking the lead role in “Predator,” a highly entertaining and effective mix of sci-fi action and horror that pushed him to do his first real acting after his one-note robotic role in “The Terminator” and a string of over-the-top action cheesefests like “Commando” and “Raw Deal.”

Now, more than two decades later, Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody (“The Pianist”) is taking a cue from the Governator and redefining his image in a sequel to “Predator” called “Predators.” While the title seems obvious, it was the only way to go since the original film had previously inspired a much weaker sequel, “Predator 2,” back in 1990 as well as two awful films in which the titular aliens battled with the creatures from the “Alien” film series: 2004’s “AVP: Alien vs. Predator” and 2007’s “AVPR: Aliens vs. Predator Requiem.”

“Predators” kicks into high gear from the first frame, as Brody awakens from unconsciousness while hurtling through the sky in a parachute before crashing through trees into a jungle. Within moments, several other people have crashed around him, including a mysterious doctor (Topher Grace), and a mass murder (Walton Goggins of FX’s “The Shield”), and a woman (Alice Braga) who’s just as tough as the rest. (more…)

After waxing poetic about John Woo’s talent for the last month, it may surprise you to learn that I consider his later career an embarrassing falloff from his Hong Kong prime. That such sad declines are all-too-common among directors (and actors, and authors, and painters, and musicians) doesn’t make it any easier a pill to swallow. I miss young John Woo almost as much as I miss young Steven Spielberg, and I don’t make that comparison lightly.

Part of Woo’s problem was the advent of American special effects capable of mimicking, with a few mouse clicks, the previously unique style he pioneered via endlessly inventive cinematography and editing. Soon anyone could make what at least superficially looked like a John Woo movie, and they saturated the market with mediocre simulacra of his imagery until it felt old and tired. This is what I suspect Werner Herzog once meant when he condemned the “worn-out images” which imperil our civilization’s collective imagination “because of the inability of too many people to seek out fresh ones.”

Then there was Woo’s catastrophic loss of creative control, resulting from his move to Hollywood soon after he finished Hard Boiled. He once wearily explained his momentous decision to abandon his homeland in this way: (more…)

[Editor's Note: Script reviews of upcoming projects have been around for as long as there's been an Internet. Therefore it's no secret that a film can evolve into something quite different from its screenplay. Please keep in mind that this article represents a look at a particular script and not the final product.]

Take 1:

In another regurgitated burp, Hollywood has again shown it’s unable to step out of the box and into a fresh creative realm. They’re remaking/rebooting the 1987 classic Predator. And to be honest—I can’t wait to rent it from Red Box. You know the box, tucked away in the corner of Safeway like an evil-little-red-monster taking dollars from Hollywood one at a time.

Having taken on this sucker punch assignment, I dove into the script with a semi-chub that if could speak would ask, “Is that a script in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?” I found myself in this heightened state anticipating scenes depicting evil human spaceships with thirteen onboard monitors all tuned to Fox News, or scenes of pro-choice predators standing in line at a Planetary Planned Parenthood waiting to abort their alien burden. No such luck. Not even the humans in the script stopped at Whole Foods for an extra hot, soy, cappuccino served in a corn cup before being murdered by dreadlocked sporting monsters. Other than a single comment in the script about how we deserved to lose the Vietnam War, I cannot deliver a sucker punch, nor even a bitch-slap.

However, what we do have in this remake of Predator is a story about the useless nature of human beings, how they fall from the sky, and are torn to shreds by a higher specie. And, if the characters in the script were talking heads from MSNBC, they’d have a point. Sadly, that’s not who’s tossed into this all you can eat Country Buffet; instead, it’s a multiethnic band of assholes, and one hot chick. (more…)

Robert Rodriguez has never been a favorite director of mine. My undying love for B-films aside, Rodriguez always weighs what could’ve been simple and fun down with over-complicated plots (“Once Upon a Time in Mexico”) and way too much talk. Interesting concepts and a few good action scenes just can’t compensate for a story that never pops — that never hits that point where you lean forward in your seat ready for the payoff.

—–

The effectively brutal “Sin City,” where the director wisely remained faithful to the structure and style of Frank Miller’s source material, proved that the main problem with Rodriguez’s work is structure. His stories don’t flow, pick up momentum, or ever feel like they’re going anywhere.

This Predators trailer, however, looks terrific.

But now we have to deal with the whole political thing. Now that Rodriguez has proven himself more than capable of going to the darkside of racial divisiveness and hard-left politics – not to mention a sense of entitlement for our tax dollars only a millionaire, Hollywood leftist could summon — we all will now have to sit through Predators wondering when and if we’re going to get hit over the head with La Raza talking points. Or do we? (more…)

There’s no confusion about who the villain is in Machete – it’s you.

More specifically, it’s you and the other 69% or so of American citizens who agree that we should have a say in who does and doesn’t come into our country by enforcing our immigration laws.  There’s been a lot written about the race war angle of Machete, including a lot of back-pedaling from writer/director Robert Rodriguez himself.  But it’s hard to see this script as anything but a sick MEChA-approved fantasy in which every Anglo man is a slobbering borderline savage who tortures Mexicans when not slaughtering them outright, and every Anglo woman a nymphomaniac yearning to strip down and have a crack at our hero Machete’s macho Mexican manhood.

—–

Perhaps Rodriguez isn’t making an explicit plea for racial warfare, but Rodriguez’s crude racial stereotypes make Hitler’s Der Stürmer propaganda look like a subtle, sophisticated and affectionate commentary on Jewish culture.  The script does not bat an eye as Machete butchers nearly every Anglo, innocent or “guilty,” who is unfortunate enough to cross his path.  In the end, there is no doubt that Rodriguez is making the most overtly, outrageously and unrepentantly racist film in modern Hollywood history.

But Rodriguez does deserve props for one thing – in purely technical terms, this is one of the best-written scripts I’ve ever seen.  It is vivid, coherent and flows smoothly, unlike the majority of unreadable Final Draft failures out there.  There is not an ounce of flab.  The “jokes” mostly fall flat, but Rodriguez will likely direct it with flair and style.  It’s just too bad this movie combines the racial insights of a 1942 Robert Byrd with the collective moral sense of Enron’s Board of Directors. (more…)

The irony of the most anti-capitalist industry in America begging for tax credits/incentives/welfare in order to keep pumping out their anti-corporate/American product is just too rich. Nevertheless, from this story, it’s obvious “Machete” creator Robert Rodriguez is very much counting on mucho tax dollars to make his film… And may still receive them:

Oddly, Machete may have been shot in a different state if not for Perry, who signed a bill last year giving his office the ability to grant larger tax incentives to lure filmmakers to shoot in Texas.

Perry signed the bill at an April 2009 ceremony at Rodriguez’s Troublemaker Studios. Rodriguez told The Associated Press at the time that, without the bill, he would have had to move the production of projects including Machete to another state.

“Thanks to this bill, I don’t have to go shoot out of the state,” Rodriguez said.

Harry Knowles at AICN interviewed “Machete” director Robert Rodriguez about the controversy surrounding the director’s “special” Cinco de Mayo message to Arizona after that state passed a new set of (wildly popular) laws meant to protect its borders – laws nowhere near as strict as the Police Statish laws Mexico enforces to keep illegals out of their own country.

Watch below as the film’s protagonist, Machete (The Great Danny Trejo), targets a Southern politician who favors border enforcement (The Formerly Great Robert DeNiro) for assassination on behalf of illegals being “forced out” of the country “at an alarming rate.”

—–

Rodriguez’s response to the uproar that followed the release of this trailer?: Just kiddin’!  According to him, it’s not the actual movie that’s all about ginning up racial divisions … just the trailer, I guess. 

You know, three minutes of race baiting, but thankfully not ninety.

You gotta love the way the Hollywood mind works. 

But as with all things Leftist Hollywood, you have to look and read closely. The backlash was obviously unexpected and so Rodriguez poses as the innocent and tries to laugh the whole thing off as a misunderstanding. But buried deep in a rather tortured explanation and disguised as a throwaway is the real story: (more…)

***UPDATE: According to Texas Governor Perry’s office:  “At this time, no funds have been released to Troublemaker Studios.”

I’m assuming this statement is in reference to ”Machete.” But Rodriguez wasn’t going to to shoot “Machete” in Texas without the promise of tax incentives:

****END UPDATE

Not sure which is more revealing about our friends in Leftist Hollywood; the blatantly racist double standard at work in Robert Rodriguez’s ”Machete,” or the fact that the same industry relentlessly lobbying both behind the scenes and up on that big screen to “soak the rich for socialism” is also the biggest group of corporate welfare-whores we’ve ever seen. The Worst People In The World are fully aware tax cuts/credits help businesses to create jobs and obviously feel that they’re the only industry entitled to them.

—–

In the case of “Machete” the tax cuts/credits you and I pay for are being used to intentionally stoke racial tensions.

Infowars.com not only discovered that “Machete” sucked hard on the public teat for funding, but a copy of the script they managed to get their hands on confirms that the actual film is somehow more incendiary than the ”Fuck Arizona” trailer Rodriguez released last week:

Worst of all, Robert Rodriguez’ incendiary race film ‘Machete‘ was made, in part, with help from tax incentives and location access provided by the Texas Film Commission, a division of Governor Rick Perry’s Office. A spokesperson from the organization confirmed that Rodriguez has indeed applied for funding. (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…)