Machete: Part (- 4) in the Seagal Odyssey

In simple terms, this film’s a triumph before the projector had even flickered on. The only time I’ve seen Seagal on the big screen is in the hallmark Orange adverts he did a few years ago, as I was too young for either his Golden or his Silver age. Only by sheer dint of fortune did my teenage self have the prescience of mind to steel well bloody clear of Exit Wounds, Ticker, or Half Past Dead. Robert Rodriguez’s Machete heralds the first time in (count ‘em) eight years that the Big Man is back on the Big Screen, and being one of about 6 people in the world for whom the man is still a draw in his own right, well I’d be an idiot to miss it. The fact that the film’s a pastiche grindhouse film about Danny Trejo wielding various cutting tools of assorted sizes, well, that’s just a bonus.

The good news is that Seagal’s actually in it. This isn’t some half-a-day-on-set, calling-in-a-favour cameo that Schwarzenegger disappointed audiences with in The Expendables, no no. Seagal fills the boots of the ‘Evil Drug Lord’ Cortez with his ample frame, albeit by way of comically wobbly Meh-E-Co styled accent. A good heft of his screen presence is as the mastermind a Skype call away from the dirty work, and that mostly involves his big and surprisingly square mug leering from a laptop while he’s surrounded by nubile young things in bikinis. Recently dismissed sex trafficking charges aside, I’m sure this is a persona our man feels no acrimony in putting about. Even beyond the webcams Seagal looms large, mostly to throw taunts at poor susceptible Danny Trejo, and at the end to actually throw himself around in some vicious machete-on-katana duelling action. In a move contrary to established Seagalian convention, it doesn’t end well for our man, but he leaves with a smile on his face, and some ripe lines too boot. I couldn’t have been happier.

As for the rest of the film, well that doesn’t do quite so much to surprise and delight, despite grand promises to that effect. It certainly has its moments, and the endless conveyor belt of recognisable cameos intertwine with some frankly baffling events: Lindsey Lohan gets naked, before donning a nun’s habit; Robert De Niro dances around his best efforts of a George W. Bush impression; Don ‘Miami Vice’ Johnson hunts illegal immigrants with a rifle;  Jessica Alba sort of gets naked for no good reason at all; Cheech (but not Chong) appears as foul-mouthed priest with a shotgun; Tom Savini rocks up, shooting from the hip, but not with his patented cock-and-ball-gun.

On paper that might sound like a riot, or an appalling demonstration in crassness, but in practice it’s an exercise in SCREAMING AT THE TOP OF YOUR VOICE for the whole time. Come the rather overblown and somewhat convoluted finale, where every sodding cameo has to make an appearance, well needless to say the film’s gotten rather hoarse. Keeping the bombast of the action permanently at eleven does however hit a few sweet notes, particularly in the dialogue spitting Padre Cheech, as well as in the parody campaign videos put out by De Niro as Bush, which are funny only in matching the insane hyperbole of real-world American political ad campaigns out there. [this clip being a terrifying example for illustrative purposes]

But the film is a long way from satire, and as a piece of exploitation the film also rings sadly hollow. In making an arch imitation of the skid-row, fleapit favourite, Rodriguez seems to be missing two rather simple qualities: Machete is neither cheap nor naff. Despite the time and effort that’s been put in to digitally scuffing-up the film, for all the bearing of breasts and the bursting of over-pumped veins, at no point does it feel grotty or genuinely exploitative. For want of a better missive it doesn’t have any distinct feel at all. Momentarily funny and overblown, but not a lot else, thankfully at least one lumbering part didn’t disappoint.

European Silent Cinema Trailers

Or more precisely the case of the mute trailer.

The sad fact is that Brits, as a whole, can’t stand listening to foreign tongues. Much can be made of the abysmal standards of modern languages teaching in the British school system. Marry that with the ‘everyone speaks English, why bother’ attitude and you’ve got cause for the unashamed dislike of many things culturally ‘foreign’.

In film circles this manifests itself in the bizarre notion of someone being ‘not too keen on subtitles’. By extension of the same logic you should have audiences biased against films with a lot of red in them, as ‘it’s quite demanding of your attention’ and ‘you can’t really relax when watching a [red] film’. In reverse the liking of predominantly [red] films is seen as a pretentious affectation, and some of those who actively seek out [red] films wear it as some sort of badge of honour. ‘If you didn’t see the original [red] version then you may as not have seen the film. The Hollywood remake is far too bland and unimaginative, and it overlooks a side of the film which is inherently [red] y’know?’

But laboured analogies aside, and Cannes and Oscars gongs aside, Brits can very rarely be sold on foreign language films. [Try convincing a class of undergraduate students that an American film is actually foreign and you open a whole new tin of worms.]

How then do you sell a foreign language feature to this stubborn audience? Quite simple: you make it mute. Which is not to say that you hark back to the good old days of silent cinema, but that you keep all the characters in any trailer from actually saying a word. It’s absurd to think of it, but once you notice it you’ll quickly realise that no one ever says a word in foreign language trailers.

The story which first flagged the idea was when audiences apparently walked out of The Lives of Others precisely because it was full of foreign speak. The trailer had led them to believe that it was in English, and would the box office very kindly refund them as this was obviously cut and dry deception of the highest order. That anyone would assume that a film about the Gestapo could ever be in English makes you wonder how apocryphal the story actually is, but the point remains. The scary fact is that The Lives of Others presents a very clear example of the muting process in action.

US Trailer :

The film’s initial release in the US was two months before it came out in the UK. Looking at the US trailer we can see it is 1min49secs long. Look at the UK trailer and you can note is only 1min27secs long. The only difference is that the UK trailer as had every iota of dialogue snipped out of it.

UK trailer :

Dumbed down trailers are nothing new, but to think that the only way cinema advertisers can engage with British audiences is by actively deceiving them is a return to a very sorry standard. The boom of foreign language films in the UK and US through the fifties and sixties was of course fuelled by the now totemic work of Bergman, Fellini, Kurosawa and de Sica. The dark underside to this was that these films were often actively marketed as seedy and salacious imported films for ADULTS ONLY. While the sexual/emotional frankness matched with the chance of seeing some boob kept the seedy cinemas of Soho filled with Bergman, one particularly noteworthy advert in the New York Post sold de Sica’s Bicycle Thief as a sexual film of transgressions. Social realism doesn’t sell. Sex does. Go figure.

Arguably the selling of The Lives of Others taps into that as well, with the American DVD cover showing the Gestapo’s auditory voyeur sensationally listening in on the saucy bohemian playwright making passionate love to his creative muse. That’s not really what the film’s about, but it gets the Dirty Mac Brigade in all of us to at least pick up the DVD and have a closer look at it.

The two strategies of obscuring a film’s nationality with overplaying its sexy-sexy foreignness is coming to a nadir with the English language release of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The Swedish trailer released last year plays up to the film’s strong narrative pull, the slow uncovering of a grander conspiracy through hard-nosed investigation and archive sifting. The two main characters Lisbeth and Mikael get reasonably equal billing, and the trailer culminates in quick cut action. It’s pretty representative of the film as a whole.

Looking at the dubbed German trailer a lot is made of the original novel which was incredibly popular in Germany. Again the detective novel aspects of investigation, archive cracking and the unlocking of secret codes is foregrounded, culminating in some breathless but unexplained action.

Get to the UK trailer and the frying-pan-around-the-head bluntness starts with the bass-y voiceover of reckoning from the spirit of Don LaFontaine. ‘HER JOURNEY HAS BECOME AN INTERNATIONAL SENSATION. HER SECRETS HAVE CAPITAVTED MILLIONS. THIS YEAR…’

The whole film is about Lisbeth and her secret, and lots and LOTS of action. The British distributors have even acquired the domain www.thegirl.co.uk for the film, just so we all know who the focus of the film is supposed to be. Poor acne scarred Mikael doesn’t get a look in, and heaven forefend if we should catch a glimpse of paper, or perhaps a file of archive materials.

And of course no one besides Hollywood -Voice-Over-Man gets a word in edgeways. You’d be forgiven for mistaking this for the Hollywood remake that’s already being negotiated. Shame that they can’t highlight the film’s inherent [red]ness, and how like pretty much all modern films from [red]land, that it’s largely about the failing of the [red] social model. After all the original [red] title was Men Who Hate Women, but I guess that wouldn’t trip off Hollywood-Voice-Over-Man’s tongue so well. But what do I know, I’m just half [red] anyways.