Director Robert Rodriguez gave the conservative blogosphere fits when he cut a trailer for his newest film blasting Arizona’s anti-illegal immigration law. (warning: link includes profanity)
But it was all a put on, the director assured us later.
Now that the film itself, “Machete,” is ready to be released the same arguments will likely return.
Early press accounts show the movie features a rabidly anti-immigrant politician who compares Mexicans to roaches as well as a Minuteman-style thug who shoots a pregnant Mexican woman.
Subtlety was never in Rodriguez’s directorial tool kit.
But will audiences who believe immigrants should come to America legally want to hear themselves described as hate mongers? Will the film simply stoke more ideological op-eds, or can it actually change a few hearts and minds on the issue?
It’s hard to see the movie doing anything but alienating audiences over its incendiary subject matter. That’s Rodriguez’s right, but if he really cared about the issue in play he might have taken a different tack. Or, perhaps, he could have avoided the subject altogether. He hardly seems the best choice to make a movie that can have a positive impact on a serious social issue.
That’s not a critique, per se. It’s just acknowledging that his filmmaking gifts don’t extend to that style of movie making. He’s a gifted shlock director, and there’s not a thing wrong with that. I’d rather watch a Rodriquez movie on a lazy Sunday afternoon than many Oscar-nominated features. Movies like “Desperado” and “From Dusk ‘Til Dawn” remain good, dirty fun. Nothing more.
By all early accounts, “Machete” is as over the top as the director’s past efforts. So it’s not as if he’s trying to make a sober political statement. Or is he?
This critic will see the film on Friday since I missed the preview screening earlier in the week, and my review will appear at PajamasMedia.com – look for a link at WWTW when it goes live.
(Photo: Actor Danny Trejo stars as one mad Mexican in “Machete,” a politically charged action film from director Robert Rodriguez. Photo: 20th Century Fox Films)
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{ 8 comments… read them below or add one }
Just what we need, another anti-white movie. The methods of the communist left are to drive wedges between factions in our society. It’s a shame these loons couldn’t be more like Glenn Beck and try to bring people together. But alas, that’s just not the communist way, is it. They work with the differences and not with what people have in common with others. They have to make folks hate one another in order to attain power over them.
I’m curious if the film will include mass graves in Mexico that are filled with the bodies of people who were making their way to our border to enter illegally.
I think at the end of the day…”It’s only a movie”.
I have never received my marching orders from “Liberal” Hollywood by watching one of their America bashing films (by this, I mean their typical America is the bad guy with it’s rogue president/rogue CIA agent/rogue backwoods murdering christian rednecks.)
I will imagine this film is a mindless blood-soaked gore fest…and probably a lot of fun as long as the politics are kept at a minimum.
That being said, look how fast these openly anti-America films (think the soon to be forgotten Matt Damen) drop off the radar….and look how the Expendables is still holding it’s own.
@ mike3481 — Or if Rodriguez will be planning free screenings to the coyotes and Mexican gangsters who have made SE Arizona/SW New Mexico such a joy to live. Maybe they’ll let El Spielbergo use space on the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge park they commandeered.
Robert Rodriguez is the most successful, assimilated Latino film-maker in America. He owns multiple mansions, directs lucrative if silly Disney style kid movies (Spy Kids, Shark Boy and Lava Girl), as well as exploitation movies. He partners with Quentin Tarantino. He dumped his wife and mother of his children for younger, hotter, Rose McGowan.
And he makes a movie which is basically, an incitement to every Latino to conduct a race-war upon Whites. With the participation of Jessica Alba, and Michelle Rodriguez.
A key moment in the film is when Border Agent Alba, decides to “side with her people against Whites” and shouts “We didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us!” In a statement of ethnic solidarity (against Whites). Who in Rodriguez’s film have no place in America.
Ironically, the main message of the movie to the (rapidly diminishing) White population is that “We Didn’t Cross the Border, the Border Crossed Us” as America morphs into Mexico Norte, or “Amexica” as does California into what Victor Davis Hanson called “Mexifornia.” Mostly Mexican, in culture and language and race, but with a few remnants of White America still lingering.
No one ever had a vote, on replacing the White majority in America with Mexicans. Nobody ever said why making Mexicans the new majority, and Whites a discriminated, third-class minority, in their own country, was a good idea.
The residual effect of the movie is to make most Whites that much more likely to abandon any shame over past bad treatment of non-Whites and adopt a matching racial/ethnic solidarity to mirror Rodriguez’s. Along with marginal more belief that NO assimilation is possible — EVEN or PARTICULARLY a Rodriguez will side with foreign Mexicans explicitly against fellow US citizens who are White, no matter that White Americans made him rich and famous.
Whites too, are likely to claim that we did not cross the border, it crossed us. And we don’t like it.
Robert Rodriguez has produced a fine piece of “Mexploitation” cinema. “Machete” is his “Shaft.” The politics of the film, such as they are, are absurd. I saw the film today with a largely Latino (albeit mostly older) crowd. They laughed at the “message” parts of the film. I won’t say “lighten up, it’s just a movie,” because I know better. But this movie cannot be taken seriously as incitement to anything.
Just saw it, too. Very disappointed. I think Rodriguez can crank out shlock cinema better than most. The political material was over the top in so many ways … but imagine the uproar if the content’s targets were reversed?
Yeah, I get that, Christian. But that’s why I likened it to “Shaft.” “Superfly” might work, too. Or “Jackie Brown” for that matter. Rodriguez is far less derivative than his friend Quentin Tarantino (Rodriguez at least composes the scores for his own soundtracks), but he owes a lot to the style established by B-movie schlockmeisters of the ’70s and ’80s. I thought the politics of it was just garden-variety, radical chic Hollywood nonsense. If I had to guess, Chicano/Latino Studies professors and the “real” radicals are going to hate “Machete.”
One more thing. The core political message wasn’t Jessica Alba’s idiotic monologue near the end (“the border crossed us”… a refrence to/rip-off from “Malcolm X” and “Plymouth Rock landed us”), but Michelle Rodriguez’s monologue about the Network: “The system is broken, so we created our own.” The crucial concession there is the need for some kind of system. That isn’t La Raza stuff.