Machete

It’s amazing how indifferent some people can be in the face of total, unapologetic, non-PC, old-school cool.

‘Grindhouse’ was a cineaste’s wet dream – and I say that as someone who has yet to see ‘Grindhouse’ in its intended cut (watching the DVDs of ‘Planet Terror’ and ‘Death Proof’ with a quick sprint to the computer at the half-way mark to watch the fake trailers as downloads is about as close as I’ve come to the proper ‘Grindhouse’ experience). Two exploitationers back-to-back: dirty, cheesy and full-on retro, one directed by Robert Rodriguez, the other by Quentin Tarantino – who could say no to that?

Depressingly, as it turned out, plenty of people. Maybe the fact that Rob and Quent wanted them to spend – shock, horror – over three and a half hours in a movie theatre was too gruelling. Maybe the concept of getting to watch two movies for the price of one seemed too good to be true and they stayed away out of sheer suspicion. Maybe the prospect of Rose MacGowan with a machinegun leg, Vanessa Ferlito lap-dancing and Kurt Russell being all kinds of badass was rather déclassé. Whatever reason, the fact remains: the underperformance of ‘Grindhouse’ at the US box office meant that a movie I’d been getting excited about in a way I normally reserve for Mrs F limped out onto UK screens as two separate releases, in the wrong order, with about three months between them.

Four years down the line, I remain slightly peeved by this.

One of the chief in-jokey pleasures of ‘Grindhouse’ was the spoof trailers. Eli Roth’s ‘Thanksgiving’ managed, in three minutes, to be the best thing he’s ever made; Rob Zombie’s ‘Werewolf Women of the SS’ was madness in miniature, all Ilsa references, swastika armbands, Nic Cage going apeshit and Beethoven’s Ninth on the soundtrack; and Edgar Wright’s ‘Don’t’ nailed an entire subgenre of the Video Nasties list. But best of all was Rodriguez’s ‘Machete’, a masterpiece in miniature featuring Danny Trejo being a bad muthafucka in authentically grainy footage and kissing off the audience with greatest tag line ever.

“They just fucked with the wrong Mexican.”

Speculation was immediate: would Rodriguez extrapolate ‘Machete’ into a full feature? I prayed like no atheist, en-fox-holed or not, has ever prayed. Like Baron von Frankenstein raising his fists to heaven as the thunderstorm crashes, screaming, “Liiiiiiiiiiive! LIIIIIIIIIIIIIVE!”, I sent the unyielding force of sheer will across the miles and the oceans in the general direction of Troublemaker Studios: “Make it,” I cried; “maaaaaaaaaaaaake iiiiiiiiiiiiit!!!”

Eventually, word trickled out. ‘Machete’ was casting. Danny Trejo was on board, natch. Robert de Niro. Steven Seagal. Jessica Alba. Michelle Rodriguez. Cheech Marin. Lindsay Lohan. Holy Mary mother of a made up character!!! Danny fuckin’ Trejo, Robert fuckin’ de Niro, Cheech fuckin’ Marin and Lindsay fuckin’ Lohan in the same fuckin’ movie!!! (Yes, I know that’s a lot of profanity, but danged if it isn’t an accurate representation of how stoked I was getting for ‘Machete’.)

Then – finally – it opened. It opened in the UK freakin’ ages after it opened in America. (Oh, my fellow bloggers Stateside, how I cursed as I read review after review on your blogs, knowing that I still had a couple of months till the Trej-meister fucked up shit my side of the pond. There’s your dictionary definition of frustration: right there!)

A funny thing happened during all of this. While the faithful (ie. my aforementioned fellow bloggers) were giving ‘Machete’ its dues, the get cinema-going unwashed collectively went “meh” and didn’t really give a shit. ‘Machete’ kind of came and went, not boding well for the Bond-style post-credits that “Machete will return in ‘Machete Kills’ … and ‘Machete Kills Again’.”

My lords, ladies and gentlemen, guys and gals, dudes and dudesses, cats and chicks, blokes and birds, let me state this once and for all. For the record. Let me tell it on the mountain, shout it from the rooftops, write in the sky and piss it in big yellow letters in the snow:

I did not go “meh” over ‘Machete’. Quite the contrary, oh my brothers.

I. Goddamn. Bloody. Love. ‘Machete’.

I love ‘Machete’ because it gives Danny Trejo an honest-to-God leading role and the man goes for it in fine style; because it’s got a Jessica Alba performance that’s not entirely insufferable; because Robert de Niro seems to be enjoying himself onscreen for only the second time in the last decade (the other occasion being ‘Stardust’); because Cheech Marin as a shotgun wielding priest quite simply redefines iconography; because Michelle Rodriguez looks tough and sexy in equal measures to their point where you’d probably be too scared to buy her a pint let alone spill it; because Lindsay Lohan’s first scene depicts her as a coked up socialite and her last as a gun-toting nun; because pudgy, whispering action start has-been Steven Seagal redeems himself for decades’ worth of unadulterated crap; and because the Crazy Babysitter Twins turn up in ridiculously skimpy nurses uniforms and fire off Uzis.

I love ‘Machete’ because it’s a 100-minute rollercoaster showcase for Danny Trejo fucking up the shit of all who cross him in a variety of gratuitous, capillary-siphoning and – most importantly of all – imaginative ways. This is a film where the hero utilizes knives, guns, swords, strimmers, surgical equipment, pimped-up cars that bounce a lot, and a motorbike with a gatling gun welded to the handlebars in his fight for truth, justice and rights of the downtrodden Mexican working class.

I love ‘Machete’ because it exists in a movie movie universe of unrestrained over-the-topness that makes ‘Kill Bill’ look like a Mike Leigh production*; because it looks more authentically like a 70’s exploitation than either part of ‘Grindhouse’; and because the contemporary touchstones are witheringly subverted (“Machete don’t text”).

I love ‘Machete’, in other words, because it manages to be batshit crazy and utterly true to itself at one and the same time. I love it because Rodriguez and his co-director Ethan Manquis obviously didn’t have a single imperative – commercial or aesthetic – beyond having a good time and making the kind of movie they wanted to make. Gracias, dudes.

*Which, granted, would be interesting. Imagine: Imelda Staunton as The Bride and Jim Broadbent as Bill. Scene: a suburban kitchen. Bill is sitting at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette and reading the Racing Post. Enter The Bride, laden down with shopping. The Bride: “You’re a right bloody sod you are, Bill. I ask you to do the pots and put the oven on and what do you do? You sit there smoking! I bet you put money on the horses again and lost it, didn’t yer? Didn’t yer?” Bill says nothing. The Bride starts crying histrionically. “I wish I’d never bloody married you, Bill.”

The Killer Inside Me

On paper it didn’t look too promising: the prolific but wildly inconsistent Michael Winterbottom in the director’s chair; a source novel that was always going to present difficulties in adaptation; the lead female roles assigned to Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson, who have done nothing of interest, acting-wise, since ‘Sin City’ and ‘Almost Famous’ respectively; and controversy already raging over its depiction of violence against women.

Ordinarily, I’d have waited for the storm in the teacup to blow over and appraised it on DVD maybe a year down the line. But with Mrs Agitation away at a seminar and the temptation of getting wasted in any one of Nottingham’s many watering holes not conducive to either the finances or the liver, I took myself off to a showing at the Screen Room. I took the philosophical approach: no matter the quality of the film itself, a blinding performance from Casey Affleck was almost guaranteed.

I was right. Casey Affleck is singularly the best thing about ‘The Killer Inside Me’. The next best thing is a triumvirate of excellent supporting roles courtesy of Simon Baker, Tom Bower and Net Beatty. Jessica Alba is as blandly miscast as she was in the remake of ‘The Eye’, while Kate Hudson’s turn is acceptable rather than inspired.

Still, in the case of the people versus ‘The Killer Inside Me’, it’s neither Ms Alba nor Ms Hudson that I’d haul into the dock to answer the charge of turning Jim Thompson’s darkly compelling dissection of the mind of a psychopath into such a dull and muddled film. No, sir. It’s Winterbottom and – on an aiding and abetting charge – scripter John Curran who stand before us today.

Let’s hear a few words from the defence and see if there’s any mitigation to be had. Well, the retro titles are pretty cool and establish an atmosphere, which carries over into the first five minutes or so, suggestive of a laconic contemporary noir. Marcel Zyskind’s cinematography is very good, lending everything a parched, faded look; washed-out vistas contrast starkly with shadowy interiors. Mark Tildesley’s production design, on the other hand, is a bit too fussy.

Yeah, that’s about it for the defence. The prosecution have the weightier case. Let’s start with the fact that Thompson’s novel is a first person narrative by a charming but unreliable narrator. Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford isn’t guilty of withholding the details of his violent outbursts in the novel; but what he does is he puts a certain spin on them. He makes the most abhorrent acts seem reasonable, and there’s no doubt as you read that Ford sincerely believes that, well heck ma’am I jus’ didn’t have no choice in the matter. His sexual deviations – not his fault. His violence against women – just somethin’ he had to do. Loved ‘em really.

Now, as Anthony Burgess pointed out re: the translation of his novella ‘A Clockwork Orange’ into Stanley Kubrick’s film, the use of “nadsat” – the admixture of cockney rhyming slang, corrupted Russian and Romany colloquialisms which first person narrator Alex expresses himself in – acts as something of a protective screen between the reader and the events depicted. Lou Ford’s narration in Thompson’s novel isn’t quite as cloaked in linguistic experimentation as Alex’s, but there’s a great difference between reading the book, being properly horrified by it, but knowing we shouldn’t take Lou’s words entirely on trust and sitting in a cinema watching Casey Affleck beat Jessica Alba into a bloody pulp in a scene that seems to run on as long as the gang rape in ‘I Spit on Your Grave’ and is accompanied by some of the most inappropriately heavy-handed sound effects work in the history of cinema.

I’m not going to get into the whole debate about whether this kind of thing should even be depicted on film and in this kind of detail. Violence happens in life and a serious and mature artist, in whatever medium, should not be afraid – or discouraged – to deal with the subject. However, the way Winterbottom deals with the subject is questionable. Where Ford romanticises the murders in the novel (ie. by pleading his case to the reader while sidelining the victims’ importance/humanity), Winterbottom visualises this aesthetic by having prostitute Joyce Lakeland (Alba) demonstrate no reaction whatsoever – no shock, no attempt to flea or fight back, no desperation to cling onto her life – while Ford systematically beats her to death.

So: problem number one – and bear in mind that this comes only 20 minutes or so after a scene where Ford gives Joyce one hell of a spanking to which she responds by enthusiastically having sex with him – this paints women not only as submissive but responsive to heavy-handed treatment and sexual misuse.

Problem number two – by comparison to the two women Ford kills onscreen, in protracted and graphic detail, the deed is done quickly (or even offscreen) when he deals out violence against men. The double standard speaks for itself.

Problem number three – as soon as Ford’s finished with his seemingly interminable killing of Joyce, the life goes out of the film. The potential for drama is high. With Hitchcock or Clouzot at the helm (hell, I’m betting even Shyamalan could build up a fair amount of suspense), the tension, as Ford tries to set up some poor dupe and stay one step ahead of a coterie of characters all of whom pose him some degree of threat, could have been unremitting. Winterbottom, however, barely seems interested.

Which leads to a question: was Winterbottom aiming to deny the audience the comfort zone of recognisable genre-based tropes, thereby forcing them to face the brutality of Ford’s misdeeds by leeching the dynamic out of every scene that doesn’t involve a woman and Ford’s fists? Or were the two scenes featuring said participants Winterbottom’s entire raison d’etre for making the film?

My money’s on the latter. In some respects, Winterbottom strikes me as a bargain basement Michael Haneke. The violence against women scenes in ‘The Killer Inside Me’ are there for the same reason as the sniffing-the-cum-stained-tissue scene in ‘The Piano Teacher’, the suicide in ‘Hidden’ and basically every frame of film between the opening and closing credits in ‘Funny Games’ – to provoke. But while Haneke (whose films I have mixed feelings about) brings a coldly intellectual formalism to the art of filmmaking, the very look and aesthetic of his work demanding a cerebral response, Winterbottom doesn’t have the same cachet. His films don’t quite function on the same level.

‘The Killer Inside Me’ has flashes of an interesting film – mainly due to Affleck’s performance – but the problems it engenders along the way are finally and irrevocably compounded by a ludicrous final scene (how the fuck can you soak an entire house in gasoline and then sit there smoking a cigar while you wait for the authorities to come for you? the fumes would ignite first flick of the lighter!) that’s almost guaranteed to send you haring back to the box office demanding a refund. I’ve read that Michael Winterbottom came to the project after something else he was working on fell through. In other words he made the movie for the sake of making a movie. It shows.