Blu-ray Review: Machete (2010)

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From shared experiences at Sundance to capturing their camaraderie through cinema via Four Rooms, From Dusk Till Dawn, Sin City, Grindhouse and beyond, the careers and tastes of unabashed movie geeks turned independent filmmaking pioneers Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino are undeniably intertwined.

Therefore, it's only fitting that – just like other colleagues or close friends who bond over one thing only to realize they have much more in common – the two filmmakers both share similar creative triggers that spark enough ideas to comprise if not a series of movies than at least one jam-packed epic.

Intriguingly, although both are walking, talking film encyclopedias that specialize in exploitation, trash and B-movies whose obsessive love for their craft fills every single frame with enough endless obscure referential minutiae to send any film fanboy into a frenzy, their most effective and humanistic sources of surefire creativity are usually found on the film set rather than in their DVD collection.

As opposed to dreaming up characters in their heads to bring to life in a short story, because the two visual thinkers are screenwriters, it's inevitable that they'd have more in common with painters rather than novelists. Thus just like the fact that centuries of exquisite portraiture have proven that there’s no use replacing the right human subject for the Renaissance and Impressionist painters and beyond, the individuals in the duo's orbit have ultimately the biggest inspiration to these two filmmaking independents as well.

And in the case of Quentin Tarantino, his muse Uma Thurman is almost as universally known as the movies he's made, having evolved from an effective supporting player in Pulp Fiction to his leading lady and partner in cult movie crime as witnessed in the Grindhouse filmmaker's own masterful two-part genre-blending B-movie mix-tape that was Kill Bill.

Yet even though, just like Tarantino, the loyal-to-a-fault Rodriguez loves working with so many of the same cast and crew members from one movie to the next, his muse isn’t one of his recurring A-list stars including Salma Hayek, Antonio Banderas or Carla Gugino and therefore much tougher to identify from among the lineup of his impressive ensembles.

And despite the fact that the terrific character actor Danny Trejo has a familiar face you’d recognize in an instant, Rodriguez’s muse whom he first encountered around the same time Tarantino met Thurman, in the early '90s on the set of Desperado has never been given the chance to carry an entire picture… until now.

Instead of Thurman's “Bride,” the acquaintanceship sparked Rodriguez’s idea to create in Trejo an entirely new character called “Machete” as the Mexican answer to Jean-Claude Van Damme, Charles Bronson or Chow Yun-Fat. In Rodriguez's mind, Machete would appear in a series of ridiculous guilty pleasure testosterone fueled popcorn pictures movies, which had more in common with the girls, gore and graphic nature of ‘70s Blaxploitation flicks than traditional mainstream action movies.

However, reality and limitations got in the way as the idea was more or less left on the back-burner for the better part of fifteen years because of Rodriguez’s hectic schedule and technically elaborate series of films from the Spy Kids franchise to Sin City that had usurped his time.

But in a particularly brilliant example of the way that sometimes things just fall into place, Rodriguez found himself in the midst of having precisely the right idea at precisely the right time – for those that got the joke that is -- given the increasing controversy and political concern about illegal immigration from Mexico in a post-9/11 world.

While I can’t argue for sure whether or not this new layer of subtext had been there before, suddenly Rodriguez’s idea for an escapist work of gratuitously ridiculous Mexploitation for the sheer sake of entertainment turned into the stuff of a rather ingeniously comedic political satire where our need to laugh at a world gone mad undoubtedly helped soften this film’s at time sickeningly exaggerated shots of ultraviolent carnage.

Expanding on the intentionally grainy, over-the-top trailer he’d shot a few years earlier for the then nonexistent movie to insert into the double-feature length running time of his Tarantino collaboration of Grindhouse, Rodriguez’s alternately crazy and clever Machete pushes stereotypes and clichés to the limit from its Charles Bronson style jaw-dropping opener.

After drug lord Rogelio Torrez (Steven Seagal in full-camp mode) brutally slays the loved ones of Trejo’s double-crossed gung-ho Mexico Federale right before his eyes, our bitter antihero known only as Machete illegally crosses the border into the U.S. where he maintains a down-and-out low profile until he’s given the dubious opportunity to embark on a path for revenge.

Soon embroiled in a political conspiracy involving an ultra-right wing, anti-immigration senator (Robert De Niro as a thinly disguised exaggerated composite of real public figures) along with vigilantes and freedom fighters on both sides of the border and people on both sides of the law, Machete must navigate through the vendettas, beguiling women and endless misinformation to ensure he’ll be one of the last Mexicans left standing.

One of those films that ultimately you want to like more than you actually do since subtlety isn’t Rodriguez’s strong suit and he’s in a constant tug-of-war with himself regarding when to show and when to tell, Machete is nonetheless a work of a completely singular vision that no one can claim they’ve ever seen before.

And although it’s fast-paced and furiously filmed with passion and humor that pours out of every frame, Rodriguez’s creativity is at times his own worst enemy as he never quite manages to engage us into empathizing with his one-dimensional zany caricatures.

Incredibly uneven in tone, Machete moves uneasily between dialogue that sounds like idealized soundbytes for a Daily Show watching crowd and enough blood and guts to rival any given slasher movie, which undoubtedly added to the confused reaction among divided audience members unsure whether or not Rodriguez wanted to preach or put on one outrageous show.

Yet even though you can’t help wishing it was executed in a smoother way by giving us the chance to laugh with Machete or go along for the ride rather than push us away from the intentional satirical freak show that it becomes, there’s still more than enough there to rave about in a movie in which you’re sure never to find yourself bored.

Since the visual presentation is styled in such a way to make the film look retro, you’re not going to notice a big difference in the picture clarity from standard and high definition aside from being impressed by a terrific Blu-ray soundtrack.

Likewise, although it does lack the trademark over-abundance of Robert Rodriguez bonus feature material, Machete’s Fox combo pack does boast a digital copy of the movie and even though I’m unsure that you’ll ever be able to it watch in public without being arrested for public indecency, on the plus side you may find yourself a muse if an interesting character passes by and likes what they see.

Text ©2011, Film Intuition, LLC; All Rights Reserved. http://www.filmintuition.com Unauthorized Reproduction or Publication Elsewhere is Strictly Prohibited and in violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. 
FTC Disclosure: Per standard professional practice, I received a review copy of this title in order to evaluate it for my readers, which had no impact whatsoever on whether or not it received a favorable or unfavorable critique.

Blu-ray Review: Sin City (2005) -- Recut, Extended, Unrated 2-Disc Edition

Now Available on Blu-ray

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A.K.A. Frank Miller's Sin City

To hear Frank Miller explain it, the creation of Sin City was one he undertook for the most selfish reasons in deciding to build a comic book around all of the things he enjoyed drawing the most such as fast cars, hot babes, and more. And of course, to match the images with the tone, it would all be carried out in the style of film noir complete with a Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane feel of hard-boiled insanity lurking around every dark corner.

Although, truth be told—we’re all united by taste and art is the greatest bridge upon which to build a relationship-- so with the unrelenting passion of super fan and digital filmmaking genius Robert Rodriguez who damn near stalked Miller down (contacting his editor, agent, and lawyer Godfather style), Miller realized he’d found a like-minded artist who was turned on by and tuned into the exact same things.



Flash-forward more than a decade and—eager to prove his worth and mettle for the material—Rodriguez invited Miller out to his very own Troublemaker Studios in Texas for one day to run a “test.” Humoring Rodriguez by obliging to visit-- all the while wondering what on Earth a filmmaker could accomplish in a single day—Rodriguez managed to round up A-list talent like Josh Hartnett with the plea of “I don’t have the rights; help me convince Miller” to shoot what is now the opening sequence of the film as the old-fashioned, handsome Hartnett startles a beautiful blonde on a rooftop, mistakes her into trusting him for a smoke and embrace before she’s left dead for reasons unknown.

Needless to say, Miller was dazzled and honored by just how incredibly faithful Rodriguez was to his material as the two collaborated as co-directors on one of the most surprisingly visceral, visually spectacular cinematic works of 2005—complete with one mini-macabre comedy sequence filmed by guest director Quentin Tarantino-- whom Rodriguez hoped to seduce with technology as a gateway drug to encourage QT to move from film stock to all-digital filmmaking. It didn't work but boy, did Tarantino have fun as he's all over the Blu-ray and commentary tracks.

Joking that despite the enormity of the three men’s egos they were still able to get along, Miller stated that he wouldn’t have relinquished the rights to Sin City if he hadn’t had the opportunity to help direct. Throwing out the idea of a screenwriting credit and even alienating the Director’s Guild of America by Rodriguez’s incredible vision and determination to bring Miller in on the same level, he decided he didn’t want to simply make a movie of the comic but instead use the medium of cinema and turn that into the comic since at their core, he argues that they’re very similar mediums that both use still images.

The best evidence of this theorem you can see below in the aforementioned rooftop scene beginning with Miller’s drawing, the use of the green screen during production, only to digitally transform the background in the post-process to the startling and riveting finished product.





Relishing in every opportunity to be as deliciously twisted or lurid as possible—watching the film again today on Blu-ray, a few years after seeing it for a paper I wrote on modern day neo-noirs in film school—it dawned on me that for those who were disappointed by the Grindhouse film undertaken by Rodriguez and Tarantino with their respective contributions-- Planet Terror and Death Proof respectively--Sin City is the answer.

Moreover, you can see how well all the time spent watching "grindhouse" movies in the ‘70s was put to use in this alternatively exploitative and disturbing yet compelling and mesmerizing contradiction of a trashy masterpiece.

Although the second disc of this astounding Blu-ray transfer gives the filmmakers the opportunity to present the complete unrated, recut and extended version of the film which adds on a little more than twenty minutes and gives you the opportunity to watch the individual stories unfold one at a time with four specific breakdowns—aside from the Hartnett cameo that opens and closes the work-- essentially the film can be broken down into three distinct stories all directly pulled from Miller’s series of graphic novels.

A cross between vintage film noir with a bit of the old west spirit thrown into the mix (and not simply just in the scene with exotic dancer Jessica Alba whipping up the crowd with her lasso)-- the film’s characters who populate the eponymous Sin City aren’t presented to us in the traditional white hat/black hat or good guy/bad guy Hollywood standard, instead showing us the evil and the good side by side and on both sides of the law as in the case of the film’s standout storyline.

This finds Bruce Willis’ dedicated cop John Hartigan ignoring his doctor’s orders and warnings about angina in order to save eleven year old Nancy Callahan from the clutches of a sadistic pedophile, who is incidentally the son of a powerful politician. When his partner turns on Hartigan and leaves him for dead-- pinning all crimes involved on Hartigan-- he gets locked up for eight years trading his freedom to save the beautiful little girl he’d rescued who sends him weekly letters under the pen-name of “Cordelia” until one day they suddenly stop.

Fearful that she’s either grown too old to write pen pal letters to the cop that had saved her life or that something has happened to Nancy—and not knowing which thought is worse to Hartigan who states that her written words were the only thing that kept him from killing himself—he confesses to the crimes he didn’t commit and ventures back into the dimly lit, dicey streets to hopefully rescue Nancy once again.

Of course, by this point in the nonlinear narrative that jumps around with characters and storylines that overlap and blend together unexpectedly, we’ve realized that Nancy is none other than the beautiful Jessica Alba who has fallen in love with her childhood hero. But, unfortunately endings are never traditionally happy in the world of noir and especially not in the realm of Miller’s Sin City as the same themes of love, loss, and revenge are woven throughout the other tales.




Featuring a nearly unrecognizable Mickey Rourke as the battered Marv who falls in love with the angelic “perfect woman” Goldie-- a one night stand to whom he awakens to find dead,-- he tears throughout the city in order to avenge the woman he considers his true love, enlisting the help of others including his tough but tender lesbian parole officer Carla Gugino who maternally reminds him to take his anti-psychotic medication without which he has a tendency to hallucinate.

Worried that he’s been led down the wrong path by his own mind playing tricks on him, Rourke’s Marv gets far more than he bargained for when he starts down a horrifying maze of bloodshed, insanity, cannibalism, conspiracy, and mad science that are far beyond his worst nightmares.

In the fascinating but a bit overly long and meandering middle storyline that boasts a ridiculous number of gifted actors including Clive Owen, Benicio Del Toro, Brittany Murphy, Rosario Dawson, Alexis Bledel and others—the tone changes from darkly comic to terrifying as the talkative, flirtatious barmaid, Shellie (Brittany Murphy) tries to stop her married, old abusive boyfriend (Del Toro) from busting down her door where she’s presently with her new one (Owen).

And despite the fact that Del Toro has brought along a group of heavy-hitters with weapons, we all know that the man who should’ve been James Bond can easily take ‘em down as Owen chases them off into the night, venturing into Old Town which is coincidentally run by the women of the night who look after their own and exact their own brand of justice.

When things get out of hand and Del Toro’s character is killed before they discover his profession as a police officer, Owen and his ex—the dominatrix styled Rosario Dawson—begin preparing for an all-out war. Not willing to let the mafia or the cops take Old Town from the women, Dawson and her motley crew of nubile, scantily clad but deadly divas strap on guns, ropes, and ammo in a standoff that lasts far too long when a double-cross enters the equation and too much time is spent explaining what we’re seeing in a way that would’ve benefited from tighter editing.

While the men are mostly out for the kill whether it’s in the name of love, revenge, or insanity (and sure enough the second disc boasts an interactive "killing" game) and the women are either damsels in distress or vixens—essentially, the work is a depiction of violence at its most primal and carnal. Additionally, it's one that never shies away from its exploitative tendency (repeatedly on display throughout the oeuvre of Robert Rodriguez from the most over-the-top sex scene in Desperado and beyond) but despite this, the film keeps you watching for the sheer audacious aesthetic appreciation of the groundbreaking techniques employed in its creation.

Primarily filmed in black and white with flashes of color whether it’s in a woman’s blue eyes, red lips, a dress, blonde hair, blood, or the personification of evil in the form of the monstrous “Yellow Bastard"-- Sin City is that rare film you find yourself wanting to turn away from but realize you’re unable to do so since you’re riveted by this wholly creative, free-wheeling, yet painstakingly precise world concocted by Miller and Rodriguez.

While Disney’s Buena Vista Home Entertainment and Miramax have managed to nail down the Blu-ray format to an exact science with recent releases, they’ve truly outdone themselves in what has to be the second most impressive Blu-ray of the year, closely following their amazing restoration and multi-disc presentation of Pinocchio.

The level of clarity in the sound and picture makes Sin City honestly a film that looks much richer on Blu-ray than it did in the theatre as it was originally filmed with high-definition Sony cameras, so its move right into 1080 pixels helps reaffirm that for Sin City’s origins as a digital picture, “there’s no place like home” on Blu-ray.

While in these economic times, I’m usually pretty cautious in recommending readers upgrade from DVD to Blu-ray unless there’s a marked difference in quality or features viewers truly want-- I have zero hesitation this time around in advising you to move directly to Blu without passing go.

Having fun with the format itself and equipping the film with D-Box motion control along with three different audio tracks (including commentary and one Austin Audience Reaction track), you’re also given the opportunity on the first disc alone of utilizing the “Cine-Explore” feature that incorporates behind the scenes extras into the viewing experience itself.

Giving viewers the freedom to watch the individual stories separately on the second Blu-ray in their longer, uncut forms—Rodriguez continues with his grand tradition of loading discs with some truly first rate bonus features such as his short “15-Minute Film School,” along with a surprising inclusion of a “10-Minute Cooking School.”

While some of the extras are fun but not quite necessary like the cooking lesson and Willis rocking with his band—the making-of-featurettes are all quite interesting breaking down the film from the costumes, special effects, props, to interviews and play-by-play recollections with Miller, Rodriguez and Tarantino such as in the one I cited at the start of this review, “How It Went Down: Convincing Frank Miller To Make The Film.”

Although unfortunately as filmgoers master the art of digital technology and that irresistible green screen that makes anything and everything possible and unfortunately sometimes making films feel a bit cooler, artificial, and uninvolving like the beautiful but vacuous recent Miller release The Spirit-- in Sin City it feels absolutely essential in transferring the comic to the screen.

Therefore, it makes one even more excited for the 2010 announced sequel as surely Rodriguez’s wizardry and penchant for digital invention will have the opportunity to climb even greater heights five years after the first film was made.

New on DVD & Blu-ray for the Week of 4/19/09

Jen's Pick of the Week:

Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler

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Arctic Tale



Battle Star Galactica: Caprica



Dallas: The Complete Eleventh Season



Frost/Nixon



How About You



iCarly: Season 1, Volume 2



Into the Blue 2: The Reef



The Last Word



Marvel's X-Men Vol. 1 & Vol. 2



Notorious



The Poker Club



Sam's Lake



Sin City



Street Warrior



Tiny Toon Adventures: Season 1, Volume 2



X-Men



X-Men Trilogy




Wolverine and the X-Men



The Wrestler

Additional Releases

Meet Bill

Alternate Title: Bill (2007)

Directors: Bernie Goldman & Melisa Wallack

Replacing the storm clouds and rain that established the dour tone of Gore Verbinski’s mirthless windy city set “dramedy” The Weather Man for sunnier skies and a lighter, brighter change of scenery, the similarly themed Aaron Eckhart vehicle Meet Bill not only benefits from the false sense of inviting warmth in its location change but also adds a subtle ironic counterpoint to the unraveling of our neurotic main character.

Whether he’s playing the cocky tobacco spokesman in Thank You For Smoking, the sleazy, racist, used car salesman adulterer in Nurse Betty, or the handsome, grown up boy scout in the final season of TV’s Frasier, like a lot of attractive men, Eckhart seems to have the most fun playing against his appearance and this latest performance is no exception.

Like Nicolas Cage’s Weather Man character, Bill (Eckhart) is filled with self-loathing and dysfunction but whereas Cage portrayed an aggressively ambitious, narcissistic louse, Bill is the type of guy whose name you’d probably immediately forget as soon as you shook his hand at a cocktail party, which makes the film’s poster all the more fitting. In fact, his own wife Jess (Elizabeth Banks) and smug, contemptuous and condescending in-laws including his boss and father-in-law, Mr. Jacoby (Holmes Osborne) and Jacoby’s sycophantic son John Jr. (Todd Louiso) hardly seem aware of him at all, except when the time comes to send him on meaningless errands, of course with the perpetual warning that he better not screw anything up.

Unhappily saddled with a trivial position at the Jacoby’s ironically named Family Freedom Bank, Bill’s rank as a useless V.P. is repeatedly in lieu of his true, unnamed position as the family’s whipping boy from running off copies like a glorified secretary to fetching the fresh kill of the Jacoby men from their latest hunt. Prone to second guessing every move Bill makes, it’s hardly a wonder that in that sort of environment, Bill seldom has the courage to make one on his own and although outwardly, Bill seems to have grown accustomed to constantly being patronized, internally, he’s a volcano ready to explode.

Nevertheless, as harsh as the Jacoby family is on Bill, like most insecure and sensitive individuals, he’s his own worst enemy. Sure enough, all the proof we need for Bill’s self-loathing prophecies can be found in the film’s opening minutes as we encounter the overweight, poorly groomed man sizing himself up in a bathroom mirror and in an unmerciful voice-over critiquing every aspect of not only his professional and personal life but his physical appearance as well.

It’s an image that one doesn’t often associate with conventional masculinity, even in our contemporary era of metrosexuals. And while granted, the screenplay for Meet Bill was in fact penned by a woman (Melisa Wallack who co-directed the film with Bernie Goldmann), the concerns that Bill expresses to himself don’t seem that far out of left field and any woman who’s been privy to the inner workings of the heterosexual middle aged male mind know that-- despite what the media would like us to believe-- both genders have similar preoccupations when it comes to their appearance.

Needless to say, what Bill needs most in life is change, and his unlikely agent to do so comes in the form of an unnamed precocious teenage boy (actor Logan Lerman in a role credited simply as The Kid) who bursts into Bill’s restroom of frustration to escape a school official. Possibly impressed by the fact that Bill doesn’t squeal on the youngster or perhaps drawn with pathos driven curiosity to the adult’s obvious midlife crisis , The Kid latches onto Bill like a magnet, and despite the elder man’s protests, surreptitiously maneuvering to become the student Bill is fast-talked into mentoring as part of a company-wide volunteer program.

However, we quickly realize that in Bill’s case, The Kid is the one doing most of the mentoring, helping Eckhart develop a stronger backbone in saying “no” for the first time in his life, supporting the man’s odd desire to open up a doughnut franchise to free himself from the Jacoby stranglehold and more importantly, coming to the rescue with a bizarre plan for revenge after Bill discovers that his wife has been having an affair.

If it sounds like a spoiler, rest assured it isn’t, since indication that Jess has been fooling around is introduced nearly from the get-go as we, along with Bill, sense an uncomfortably worrisome level of intimacy between Jess and Chip, (Timothy Olyphant), the local, cheesy “On the Scene” news guy. One of those local pretentious celebrities not unlike the one Cage played in The Weather Man, Chip is the type of guy we dislike immediately, possibly because—as his name implies—we know he’s going to chip away at Bill from the moment the two share a scene. Although, perhaps if we would have known how much fun it would be to watch Bill crumble, we would’ve thanked Chip instead of hating him from the start.

Innocuous, predictable, yet refreshingly affable thanks to the lead actors, Meet Bill thankfully avoids the trappings of raunchy, toilet driven humor for its genre and sadly after debuting at The Toronto Film Festival, failed to garner a wide theatrical release before being unceremoniously dropped on DVD shelves. And although her beautiful face appears prominently on the DVD box as a selling point, Jessica Alba turns in a nice if tragically underwritten performance in a very minor role as a kind lingerie salesgirl on whom The Kid nurses a hopeless crush. However, much like the surprising friendship between Bill and The Kid does feel a bit conveniently cinematic (and owes a great deal to Rushmore and Harold and Maude), admirably Alba’s role never feels clichéd, even when The Kid enlists her help in trying to make Jess jealous by pretending she’s the new woman in Bill’s life.

Despite an over-the-top third act which makes the unfortunate decision to abandon the film’s more subtle and clever style of humor in favor of going for bigger and broader gags to garner larger chuckles, the uneven but surprisingly enjoyable film is far more viewer friendly than your local gloomy Weather Man. And while it’s hardly on par with more sophisticated midlife crisis fare such as Sideways or Little Miss Sunshine, it’s a small gem of a sleeper. It’s also one that, for those who take the time to seek it out, offers additional evidence that Eckhart-- the same man who first made a terrifying impression on moviegoers in his dark roles in Neil LaBute’s first two films and most recently took on the role of Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight-- is quite a versatile performer with equal gifts in drama and comedy, or more accurately, to cite Bill’s genre-- in dramedy.

The Ten

Director:
David Wain

Although it’s comprised of ten vignettes that use the biblical Ten Commandments as a jumping-off point, those who are overly devout or easily offended may want to skip director David Wain’s irreverent, unbalanced, yet undeniably hilarious The Ten. Hosted by Paul Rudd whose character finds himself breaking one of the commandments himself by being torn between his beautiful, loyal wife Famke Janssen or the young, sexy film buff Jessica Alba, the offbeat comedy The Ten which begins with a cautionary tale of a young man (Adam Brody) who jumps out of a plane without a parachute, only to find himself stuck in the ground where he’s worshipped as a false God but still finds time to party and star in his own television show, gets progressively more outrageous with each successive story.

Featuring a relative who’s who of comedians and actors, we soon encounter Gretchen Mol as a buttoned up thirty-something virgin librarian who has a summer fling while vacationing in Mexico with a carpenter named Jesus, a surgeon who leaves a pair or scissors inside a patient as “a goof,” Oliver Platt as an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator who becomes a surrogate father to teen black twins, Liev Schreiber as a jealous father who tries to out buy his neighbor in the cat scan machine market, a man who covets a prison wife and of course, Winona Ryder who steals a ventriloquist’s dummy with whom she falls in love while on her honeymoon. Also featuring Justin Theroux, Bobby Cannavale, and others, despite its uneven nature as some of the more ridiculous plots and characters do detract from the overall success, The Ten is compulsively watchable and sure to interest devotees of sketch comedy.