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Machete

Posted on November 30, 2010 by Paul

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Emerging from the fleapits of the 70s, Machete is a 100 minute trailer for a genre that died with good reason. If 2007′s Grindhouse, reverent trailers and all, was a successful revival of the exploitation genre, then it was only intermittently so: the films, shown back-to-back in what become a commercial failure, proved too enamoured with their function to resonate much outside the setting they belonged to.

Robert Rodriquez’s Machete is a feature-length version of the trailer of the same name, and if you’ve seen those five minutes then you’ve seen the whole movie. Machete is as we might imagine Danny Trejo to be, a product a drugs and crime whose scarred face tells its own story. As a man, Machete is mostly a functioning mute. As a weapon, to quote a character, he’s one mean burrito.

For almost the entire film, Machete slices and dices his way through a plot that drives him only as far as his next bloody massacre. Against a backdrop of war against Mexico’s immigrants, Machete is a constant. He works alone as a part-time labourer and hired gun, and moves between jobs with but an impaled corpse left as a calling card. If he’s made enemies along the way, then they are surely dead. Of his friends, many no doubt followed.

Then there’s ‘She’ as a Che Guevara figure who operates The Network from her taco stand, an operation that serves as passage to would-be immigrants, protecting them from the uniformed goons that stalk the border. Amongst their number is Senator John McLaughlin, a hardliner whose proclivity for catching jumpers is matched only by his supporters fervour for it. He polls badly outside the converted, but Michael Booth has a plan: kill him. Or, more accurately, con a Mexican to wound him and start counting the sympathy votes as the police launch their manhunt.

That Mexican is Machete, if you were wondering.

Lost’s Jeff Fahey always seemed to have been transported from an 80s western throwback starring Tom Sellek, and his Booth comes with just enough relish to avoid the complete parody of co-star Nash Bridges Don Johnson, whose value to the film as a vigilante begins and ends with his screename being ‘Von’. His boss, Torrez, barely even manages that, hovering menacingly by his sun-kissed pool without threatening to actually deliver; one wonders why he wasn’t simply billed in the credits as ‘Steven Seagal as Retired Steven Seagal’.

Planet Terror, Rodriquez’s half of Grindhouse, led its publicity charge with the iconic armed-amputee Cherry Darling, and his fetishism of female masculinity continues with Michelle Rodriguez as ‘She’, whose desire to have you eunuched is barely masked by her smiley delivery of tacos. It’s the kind of role she excels at, and it never ceases to contrast with the weak thrills of Jessica Alba’s hard-boiled US Customs Agent, in a casting that seems immediately unlikely until its raison d’être is revealed in a naked bathroom scene.

As for Machete himself, Trejo’s unique charisma is joined by an old-fashioned decency that sees him only sometimes sleep with pretty young things passing by. If he had a catchphrase it would almost certainly be “I Machete, Therefore I am”, preferring to speak through his blade when idioms like “Machete don’t txt” fail to get the job done. It’s a succinct performance that isn’t out of place in a script defined by the conciseness of its words if not its runtime, but amounts in the end to an Hispanic Marv out of Sin City.

It comes as an odd relief that, despite its origins, the film is mostly far more conventional than Rodriquez’s B-movie Planet Terror, which, in its rush to be faithful to the Grindhouse experience, omitted to entertain outside the parameters of pastiche. Death Proof got it right, as does Machete, just less so: devoid of a Tarantino script that might bring empowerment to its ragtag heroines, Machete is left to rely on its – not inconsiderable – charms as a bloated action spectacle.

As a budget adventure in exploitation, it succeeds at what it sets out to do, which is to say not very much. But then, Machete is as Machete does, and so it goes.

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Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

Posted on October 31, 2010 by Paul

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It isn’t clear what world Scott Pilgrim inhabits, but it plainly isn’t ours. For one thing, he likes this girl, but to be with her he has to defeat her seven evil exes in a series of larger-than-life arena spectacles. For another, he’s Michael Cera and he’s in a band. Michael Cera wouldn’t be in a band.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World is a collection of tricks masquerading as a movie, but when the tricks are this neat you don’t really mind. The premise is all in the title: for two hours, Scott Pilgrim must fight the world. For reasons that aren’t clear but – as in a dream – feel completely natural, the object of his affections, spunky blue-haired Ramona Flowers, is protected by a league of wronged ex-boyfriends, whom he must defeat to earn his place at her side. And by ‘defeat’ I’m being crushed, pulverised, obliterated, add-1000-points-to-your-score literal about it.

See, the thing about this film is that it’s really a video game, and so the rules don’t apply. It’s a film about fighting, but not in any Hero or Unleashed sense, and it’s a film about teenage love without the sloppy archetypes. No, this comic book adaptation is firmly of the video game genre, and the closest movie parallel I can draw to Pilgrim’s hyper-stylised world is Jason Statham’s equally ridiculous Crank, and even that is pretty far removed when you consider the seven fights here each end with the defeated party exploding in a shower of coins and a 1UP ding of satisfaction.

Scott Pilgrim is the awkward superhero Michael Cera has waited his whole life to play. He is, of course, playing the same bumbling fool he always does, but this seems a natural fit in a way something like Year One wasn’t: he’s perfect fretting with his roommate over a date with Ramona, his kitchen pacing fuelled by the kind of ridiculous angst only he can muster: “She changed her hair without making a big deal of it or anything. She’s fickle. Impulsive. *Spontaneous*. What am I. Going. To. Do?”

As it turns out, he’s going to fight and he’s going to do it a lot. Once the initial setup is dispensed with – his own ex-girlfriend, the rather wonderful Knives Chau, is discarded in favour of a girl from his dreams, whom he must win her over whilst progressing in a Battle of the Bands competition with his friends – the film settles into a procession of fight scenes separated by just enough exposition to take them to the next, subsequently less interesting, clash. What initially works well starts to become fatiguing, and by the forth fight it all blends into a samey mess that relies entirely on its art direction to keep things moving.

Handy, then, that director Edgar Wright has delivered a superbly innovative and visually arresting picture that goes a long way to papering over those cracks. Almost every scene comes bursting out of the screen, figuratively and literally, a shower of comic-book exclamations and physic-defying Kapows! narrating every line as Pilgrim navigates his fantastical world. Along the way there are the endless stream of geek references you’d expect from Wright, with everything from the sound samples to background details you’ll only spot on repeat viewings being lovingly rendered. There’s even an amusing Seinfeld riff thrown in for no other reason than because they can and because it works.

Whether all this is a style that will hold up or – more likely – be aped to exhaustion is impossible to know, but in 2010 it works beautifully. If the film underneath isn’t all that deep or interesting, then it’s a testament to the power of the screen that you’ll allow yourself to be whisked away on this ADHD journey all the same. The cast are young and attractive, the visuals are spectacular, and the music is never-ending. Sit back, relax and enjoy; like girls, don’t think too hard or you’ll ruin it.

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The Town

Posted on October 29, 2010 by Paul

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In Charlestown, Boston, you don’t so much find crime as it finds you; you’re born into it. Ben Affleck’s The Town is a substantial, bleak crime drama about the debts of a city that can’t be repaid; the blood oaths passed down from fathers to sons, cradle to grave. If you’re in, then it’s for life and there’s no two ways about it. They’ll shoot you in the back if they have to, just so you can’t walk away.

It begins and ends with bank robber Doug MacRay, and everything in-between is just the cops trying to stop him. As a boy he dreamt of making it at hockey, but with his mother gone and a father in prison, he instead kicks around in the dirt, working balls in a vice for The Florist, just like the old man. MacRay’s gang are sent out to make good on the robbery leads he feeds them; four guys who should know better, led to the wolves by a bully who surely does.

If Doug’s the steadying influence on the group, then Jem is surely their liability. Jeremy Renner plays him as an unpredictable wildcard: he’s beady-eyes and anxious sweating, an itchy trigger finger aching for the next cashier who gets in their way. Everyone knows it, but the group stands steadfast. These kids are brothers in all but name, and though they might have grown up, they’ll still up tools without a second thought, and that’s loyalty you can’t throw away on a chancer. One desperate night, Doug finds himself at Jem’s door: “You can never ask me about this later, but we need to hurt some people”. Crowbar already in hand, Gem simply offers: “Whose car are we taking?”

In a similar vein to The Dark Knight, things start with a downtown bank robbery, but that’s where comparisons end. Brooklyn is a world away from the metropolis of Gotham, and these guys are a tight, realistic unit on a slick operation to the vault. Amongst them, only Jem stands out, so eager to crack heads that he doesn’t realise his signature tattoo is on show for everyone to see. It’s only later, after releasing their hostage, that it dawns on them that she might have seen something. Doug heads Jem’s vengeful streak off at the pass, only too aware of what it would mean. Besides, he likes the girl; it happens.

Later, at the laundromat, they strike up a conversation about nothing in particular, and we watch for any flicker of recognition in her eyes. Nothing. For now he’s just Doug from Boston Sand and Gravel, and she’s none the wiser; how could she be? Last time they met he had a mask on and a gun to her temple. “I’m sure I’d recognise their voices” she reasons, heading to their first date. “Don’t be so sure” he shoots back. From its unconventional beginnings, their relationship grows to be intimate and genuine, so when their cozy lunch date is interrupted by an oblivious Jem, we hold our breath: the tension is palpable and all we can do it wait for the inevitable.

It soon becomes apparent that The Town is about divided loyalties in a city that accepts only allegiance and demands you swear by it. The film’s dual narratives of the bank robberies and a desperate FBI come to a head when a botched job leads to a city-wide shootout as thrilling as I can recall, squad cars closing in like there’s blood in the water. These four from Boston throw their battered van around narrow streets like it was Ronin, and the camera perfectly captures a sense of urgency and heightened stakes so lacking in the myriad of humdrum chase films it competes with. In a clever juxtaposition typical of The Town’s darkly humourous script, this robbery even has them dressed as nuns, machine guns blazing a trail from their van as they race fresh from executing a bank clerk who dared to resist. Were it not such riveting viewing, that sight alone would be worth the ticket price.

Doug is the only wise man in a crew of wiseguys, and he sees time is running out. With a hefty bundle of cash in tow – “Against my better judgement” – he goes to settle with The Florist so he can make a clean break. “That just ain’t gonna cut it”, comes the response, and in an unforgiving and heartbreaking speech, Pete Postlethwaite lays his cards on the table for us all to see, and shows just how deep his ties to the MacRay family go. “I’m gonna clip your nuts like I clipped your Daddys”, comes the threat, if you don’t do this one job.

There’s always one last job.

What follows is brutal, unflinching and doesn’t quit until the credits roll. Ben Affleck is drawn to Brooklyn like Scorsese before him, and as a native the city flows through his veins, his characters every bit as realistic as the friendships that serve as the film’s foundation. If Gone Baby Gone was his figurative Mean Streets, then The Town is his Taxi Driver; a step up to the big leagues with an affecting film of urban decay. In not only his action sequences but his superior handling of story, the fine balancing of Doug’s new loyalties with the old, The Town is two hours and change of compelling cinema as inescapable as the lifestyle it depicts, demanding our attention from the very first frame.

Movies like this are hard to come by, and The Town is a near flawless, visceral masterpiece of cinema that represents a towering accomplishment for all involved. There are multiple sides here, and though some of the good guys win, and some of the bad ones might lose, it hardly matters because no one gets away. The night before it all blows up, Jem asks himself if after this he’ll finally leaves it all behind; he snorts. “The funniest thing about being in prison were the guys pretending they wanted to get out”.

You never really lose it, do you?

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