Top reasons to see Machete: it's an action-packed Mexican version of a Blaxploitation film, directed by Robert Rodriguez, starring legendary grizzled actor Danny Trejo, and has a warning for explicit bloody naked violence in the preview. Top reasons not to see it: Jessica Alba was not given a silent role. Let's not get coy: shes an absolutely terrible actress, and despite her pleasant, bland, overrated face, she often gives interviews that make Megan Fox look articulate and profound. After all, Fox never bagged on her own ethnicity or stupidly said she hoped her baby was 'born brown and speaking Spanish' despite not being a Spanish-speaker.
Now that Alba has joined up with the most famous working Mexican director, she's all 'rah rah being a Latin girl!'. Kinda. "For me, I never wanted to reinforce any stereotypes about Latin women, and that was why I've shied away from Latin characters I've been offered. Most of them reinforced the stigmas. The women whom I grew up with are intelligent, strong women, and unless I read a woman being portrayed that way in a film, I didn't want to play it."
Yes, because it would probably be way too challenging as an actress for someone with such limited talent to say, "Hey, we're not all Rosie Perez, okay? Can I work with this?"
If Alba wants to pretend she's a major advocate on the behalf of fighting Latino stereotypes, she might want to reconsider some of her quotes from the past, like, "I've got cousins galore. Mexicans just spread all their seeds. And the women just pop them out." or when discussing her grandfather, "He tried to forget his Mexican roots, because he never wanted his kids to be made to feel different in America. He and my grandmother didn't speak Spanish to their children. Now, as a third-generation American, I feel as if I have finally cut loose."
Someone might want to tell Alba that her grandfather did that because he was worried about racism, not because denying your cultural heritage makes you a true American.
Don't worry: Alba might have declared her intent to make her daughter Honor the perfect little Mexican that she never was, but she's also carefully monitoring her diet because, as she told David Letterman, Honor was a chubby baby. Yeah, fat babies are gross! Better start advising her that the world frowns on weight gain as soon as she's old enough to understand you.
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