By Jason Apuzzo. Here’s Machete’s Michelle Rodriguez today, speaking to the LA Times:
“I was nervous about doing a movie about Latinos. I’ve usually stayed away from it,” she told 24 Frames, saying she found most depictions of Latino culture on the big screen to be one-note and marginal. “But after I read the script, I realized this is about a symbol of hope. It was kind of the way we felt about Obama when he was first elected …”
The depiction of Machete as a symbol of hope for a Latino community, at a time when, as the movie noted satirically, immigration fears were running riot, heartened Rodriguez. And to the extent it shows Latinos and whites working together, she says, it felt even more ideological.
“It was like seeing Run DMC and Aerosmith doing that video together,” she said, referring to “Walk This Way.” “It was like, ‘Yeah, man, we can all do this together and laugh about it.’ “
All do what together? Incite a race war?
Robert Rodriguez, by the way, apparently wants to do a trilogy of these films. I’ll be telling you what I think of the first one tomorrow.
Posted on September 2nd, 2010 at 12:00pm.
Machete’s like Obama? Overhyped and quickly devoid of relevance? Yeah, I can see that comparison.
On a serious note, why are so many of the people in this movie interested in killing white people?
It’s interesting, by the way, that she’s speaking in the past tense (“felt”) about Obama. If he’s lost people like her, he really is finished.
Ha! I didn’t even catch that. Good point.
You know, all my life I’ve been very sympathetic to Latino and Hispanic people. I’ve tried to help out the ones I know in any way I can, I’ve defended them whenever people complained about illegal immigrants, I was an advocate for giving them worker visas and trying to find a way to solve the illegal problem without deporting them all, etc. … but apparently all the good will on my part was wasted.
It’s very personally disheartening to know that the Hispanic/Latino community feels this way about America. That’s what a movie like “Machete” does. It doesn’t bring “hope” to anyone. It just divides and sows hatred. Now I’m angry and distrustful of the Latino community, when I had no such feelings in me before.
Sweet review of Machete! http://bit.ly/boGI9e