From Dusk Till Dawn: Revisiting Rodriguez's revenants 15 years on

The mayhem actually starts before we catch up with the Gecko brothers. That Richie (Quentin Tarantino) busted Seth (George Clooney) out of jail, that the pair robbed a bank, took a hostage and left a sizable body count in their wake is, rather remarkably, all back story, preceding the opening scenes depicting the infiltration of a roadside liquor retailer that results in more pointless carnage, including the roasting alive of the proprietor (very nicely played by a young John Hawkes). Richie is shot through the hand during the firefight; the bullet leaves a hole the size of a carrot stick—some sort of perverse stigmata for this sadist, serial rapist and compulsive murderer—which he bandages with duct tape. To think, all Richie wanted was a road map.


Richie and Seth eventually manage to get south of the border by smuggling themselves in an RV driven by a pastor and widower (Harvey Keitel) weathering a crisis of faith by taking a road trip with his kids (one of whom is Juliette Lewis, who’s casting in this sort of thing was pretty much de rigueur back in 1996). The whole gang winds up in a biker bar called the Titty Twister (though I prefer the name given in the DVD’s Spanish subtitles: “Fiesta de tetas”) where Selma Hayek performs a dance in a bikini with a big snake that’s almost stupefying in its hotness and everyone turns out to be Aztec vampires, a breed of revenant that’s unusually easy to dismember and impale. It takes an hour to get to the vampire stuff, but from then on, rest assured, it’s a solid 40 minutes of bang-bang, crunch, tear, stab, shred, splatter.

The movie was directed with much enthusiasm and little flair by Robert Rodriguez, but its script came courtesy of the young Tarantino, who seems to have been galvanized by the genre fusion and the opportunity to toss elements of everything from Peckinpah to Graham Greene into the blender. There’s not a lot of the sort of verbal fireworks we find in top-grade Tarantino, the ostensible portrait of Mexico could just as easily be one of West Texas, and some of the special effects are kind of lame and superfluous, but the superb cast and relentless cartoony action sequences ensure that the movie’s entertainment value remains reasonably high.

Machete: Knives out, but not much cutting edge

“There’s an interesting face,” Jessica Alba says upon her first glimpse of Danny Trejo in Machete. It’s an observation that’s surely followed Trejo around his whole life. The beloved ex-con, boxer and character actor is 66 now and has been in well over 100 movies, yet, if we don’t count Champion, the documentary about Trejo’s life, Machete marks his debut as a lead. Trejo’s always been a welcome presence wherever he turns up, that distinctively weathered and initially frightening face that masks a terrifically deadpan sense of humour. He’s exactly the sort of perpetual background player film-lovers long to see promoted to the spotlight, yet thanks to largely half-assed conception, Trejo’s star moment as Machete’s eponymous ex-federale hero may just constitute the least interesting performance he’s given.

Written by Robert Rodriguez and his cousin Álvaro, and directed by Rodriguez and his longtime editor Ethan Maniquis, Machete is the fitfully entertaining extrapolation of a trailer featured in Grindhouse, the exploitation homage collaboration between Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino. Predictably, Machete plays like a convoy of trailers, united by a plot crammed with corrupt Texan politicians and underground revolutionaries that’s more busy than it is cohesive or even coherent. The lack of narrative elegance is of course part of the movie’s ostensible charm, but what starts out as prankish plot holes and playful implausibilities increasingly feels like lazy screenwriting. What resembles button-pushing political commentary rapidly reveals itself to be flamboyantly irrelevant. Rodriquez uses pastiche as an opportunity to rest on cliché. Clichés can make marvelous tools when animated, but Rodriguez frequently seems content to simply prop them up as platforms for yet another set piece.

Bereft of anything like emotions, ambitions or conflicts, Trejo is left mostly with one-liners, some of them quite deftly delivered—I especially liked “Machete don’t text.” Converted to the side of the desperate migrant workers she used to deport, Alba’s immigration cop becomes the resident cheerleader: “There’s the law, and there’s what’s right!” The rest is one-joke stunt casting: Robert De Niro’s an ultra-right wing senator; Don Johnson, in aviator shades, cowboy hat and shark fin sideburns, is a cop who slaughters Mexicans for sport; Lindsay Lohan stretches out to play a rich girl with a drug problem and a hunger for publicity; Steven Segal’s a drug lord with an absurd toupee. Cheech Marin’s a priest with a penchant for weed.

Machete’s most inspired, or at least liveliest bits arrive through a creative attitude toward the human body—a lady retrieves a telephone from her vagina. The killing is gleefully rampant and mercifully cartoonish, with fountains of digital splatter and everything that vaguely resembles a sharp object eventually impaling somebody—kudos to whoever thought of the meat thermometer. Thing is, Machete’s funniest display of violence is decidedly non-lethal, with Trejo warding off a bodyguard by slapping his wrists with a weed whacker. I suppose he could have just chopped his arm off or unspoiled his intestines like he does in so many other confrontations, but in a movie that thrives on excess it’s amazing how far a little restraint can go to win you over. When Trejo and the bodyguard finally part ways the latter is left caged to a wall with pruning shears, no doubt happy just to be alive. He never knew what hit him.

Conflict of interest: Inglorious Basterds

The first chapter of Inglorious Basterds finds SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christopher Waltz) visiting the home of stoic French farmer Perrier LaPadite (Denis Menochet). Like a vampire, Landa, in studious French, cordially requests to be let inside, where he sits and enjoys a glass of fresh milk. The rolling pastoral beauty framed by every window of LaPadite’s modest abode subtly contrasts the strange glare reflected off the heavy wooden table, offering just the faintest suggestion of interrogation—which for all the politesse is of course precisely what’s underway. Landa’s worldly, chatty, digressive. He’s like the sensitive Nazi aesthete from Jean-Pierre Melville’s La Silence de la mer, but more assured and far more menacing. He’s also a lot more entertaining. The tension escalates conspicuoulsy, buffered by diversions, like Landa’s deadpan reveal of an absurdly large accoutrement. The scene’s climax, like that of the movie as a whole, promises to be explosive.

Quentin Tarantino’s latest magnum opus is, unsurprisingly given its author, a rather wordy war movie. This scene between Landa and LaPadite is but the first of what we might call variations on the theme of double talk and games of life-or-death deceit. Tarantino’s war is fought with language, which gives the apparent advantage to Landa, in a bravura performance from Waltz, since over the course of this chamber epic we hear him speak articulately in no less than four different tongues. But linguistic Euro-sophistication isn’t everything—what of the invincibly confident Native American-imbued hillbillyisms of Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), the cool British pith of Lieutenant Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), or the theatrically trained good-time sass of UFA starlet and secret spy for the allies Bridget van Hammersmark (Diane Kruger)? Watching these shamelessly colorful characters verbally spar is one of the great pleasures of Inglorious Basterds. The others have a lot to do with sheer audacity. The score fuses ‘Für Elise’ with Morricone. Later on we get a Riefenstahl homage set to David Bowie. Hitler appears, in a cape, like James Brown. Churchill sits in on a meeting, frozen in iconic wax museum pose. Goebbels turns up too. As things chug along, swerving vertiginously from one locale and set of players to another, some dying spectacularly, you start to notice that the Second World War isn’t going along quite as you remembered it. Tarantino’s war isn’t Spielberg’s. It isn’t even Paul Verhoven’s. Inglorious Basterds is inspired revisionist comic melodrama, and it’s absolutely fucking bananas.

Playing perversely with convention and expectation, Tarantino doesn’t introduce his one bonafide star until a good half-hour into the movie. Pitt’s outsized Raines is the leader of the so-called Basterds, a special squad of tough motherfucking Jews who, as Raines cheerfully puts it, “are in the Nazi-killing business—and business is a-booming!” Every Nazi they encounter meets with death and a scalping or is marked for life by a giant swastika carved into their foreheads. They’re less somber and a lot more Jewish-looking than the boys in Defiance. Hostel writer/director Eli Roth shows up to play “the Bear Jew,” whose specialty is clobbering Nazis to death with a baseball bat. But despite sharing their name with the movie they’re only in about a third of it. This is no reason to complain.

The lynchpin in the structure of Inglorious Basterds—as elaborate and deceptively tight as that of Pulp Fiction—is Shosanna Dreyfus (Mélanie Laurent), a survivor of a massacre overseen by Landa. He lets her flee, it seems, for pure sport. Years later she turns up in Paris with a new gentile identity and a cinema to manage. Her icy allure, combined with her respect for filmmakers and ace projectionist, snags the heartstrings of Nazi hero Frederick Zoller (Daniel Brühl). He’s recently wrapped a movie about how he earned the Iron Cross—he plays himself—and he wants the film to have its gala premiere at Shosanna’s theatre. (The scene in which she begins to realize she’s in danger of becoming a Nazi collaborator plays out as she adjusts the marquee to announce Henri-George Clouzot’s German-produced Le Corbeau—it wouldn’t be a Tarantino movie without clever nods to a lot of other movies.) Hitler himself is to be present for the premiere, and refusal of the offer seems out of the question. But Shosanna has a plan. It involves the 350 nitrate prints stored in the cinema’s basement and a really big face. (For explication on the flammability of nitrate Tarantino gives us a quick lesson, making use of scenes from Hitchcock’s Sabotage.)

Am I giving too much away? Is it any comfort to know that there’s much, much more? I suppose those who insist on the horrors of history being handled with kid gloves, or even, you know, sensitivity, should be warned that Inglorious Basterds is wildly irreverent, and the Holocaust remains a strictly peripheral event. But the film holds our great collective fantasies of what could be as something of sacred value. It’s also among the best ensemble films of the last decade, showcasing the talents of Waltz, Kruger and yes, even Pitt, with sublime results. If there’s anything to groan over in the film it’s merely the few overt exhibitions of Tarantino’s insufferable ego. He has the impudence to close the film with Rains announcing that his latest bloody swastika may just be his masterpiece, the implication being that Tarantino wants you to know that Inglorious Basterds is his. The thing is, I feel no compulsion to argue with him.