And Another

Los Macheteros

A nice holiday touch: today Robert Rodriguez and Danny Trejo released a special Cinco de Mayo trailer of Machete.

[The trailers keep getting yanked; you can check it out here if the video refuses to play.]

The timeliness isn’t really about Cinco de Mayo, of course, but the snarled “to ARIZONA.” With the police-state Arizona immigration law SB1070* in the news, the film is thematically relevant, the story here revealed to be about Machete & co. standing up against right-wing anti-immigration forces. Machete, like the film from which it spun off, is couched in a faux-grimy exploitation veneer; like Grindhouse, it’s too well-cast to feel all that much like the exploitation films it apes, though it’s hard to be too mad at the big-namers (Robert De Niro, Jessica Alba, Michelle Rodriguez, Lindsay Lohan, etc.) for wanting to have a little fun with Rodriguez on a goofy retro-tinger actioner.

*Jeff Fahey violates SB 1070 in the preview. See if you can spot it!

Machete should be the first of the Grindhouse trailers (once jokey bits to provide atmosphere for Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s retro evening-on-42nd-Street assemblage, now considerably less so) to make it to release, scheduled for September 3rd. Hobo With A Shotgun (you might not have seen that trailer during Grindhouse; it won a contest at South By Southwest, and only shipped with some prints of the film) started shooting in late April with Rutger Hauer in the title role. As a considerably more independent flick, it might end up quicker to its presumed straight-to-DVD release date.

Other Grindhouse spin-off updates: Eli Roth still wants to make Thanksgiving into a feature film, and discussed with Edgar Wright the possibility of combining it with a full-length version of Don’t to comprise Grindhouse 2. Who would have thought that out of any given group of filmmakers, Rob Zombie would be the most restrained?