I don’t exactly “like” Robert Rodriguez and Ethan Maniquis ‘ Machete. I found it mildly agreeable because of three or four factors that I’ll explain in a second. But it left me persuaded all the more that Rodriguez lacks the sensitivity to be an A-level director. His movies are always about blood, bullets, hot babes and primitive emotions. He really does seem to lack the wit and the savoir faire to do anything else.

You’re not a serious director unless you can see, feel or otherwise sense the presence of invisible things. As a director (and probably as a man), Rodriguez has shown an interest and/or focus in the obvious physical stuff. He’s gone “within” exactly once, and that was some 17 or 18 years ago in El Mariachi (and particularly via the performance of Carlos Gallardo). Since then the man has pretty much been a shameless whore.

Machete, however, is half-tolerable because it’s an out-and-out comedy as opposed to a Grindhouse-style genre wallow, and as such is probably Rodriguez’s best (certainly least offensive) film since El Mariachi. It also pushes a pro-Latino, pro-immigration, screw-the-racist-Arizona-haters political theme that is very much to my liking.

On top of which it’s vaguely surreal to watch 67 year-old Danny Trejo strut around as Mr. Latino Stud with women 50 years younger licking their lips. And it’s mildly amusing to see Lindsay Lohan (a) playing a druggie, (b) doing a Lady Godiva topless scene (blonde hair covering certain regions) and (c) shooting a bunch of baddies during the big bloody finale while wearing a nun’s habit. And Robert De Niro, playing a sleazy right-wing Texas politician, delivers one great line near the end about how he’s “not even from here.” And there’s a reasonably decent slapstick bit involving the use of a body part. (No further details.)

That said, Machete is one of those sloppy B movies that throws as much gooey stuff at the walls as it can in hopes that some of it will stick. It’s the kind of film that makes the lower-end-of-the-gene-pool guys feel hip, so It’ll probably generate decent word-of-mouth. But the relentless emphasis on blood, sadism, slicing and limb-severing has a nauseating effect, and after a while you just want Machete to end. You feel like taking an Alka-Seltzer after it’s over.

On top of which two characters are shot and seemingly dead, and then it turns out they’re not for reasons that don’t add up. I hate that. If you’re going to kill someone, kill them and send them to kingdom come. Permanently. No reprieves.

Is it okay if I bypass Will Gluck‘s Easy A (Disney, 9.17) and proclaim Emma Stone as the next big thing — a sassy Michelle Monaghan-resembling actress-comedienne in the Elaine May-Eileen Brennan mold — on the strength of this trailer? Or do I have to actually go to this afternoon’s 4 pm screening and sit through it? Because the trailer makes me feel as if I’ve pretty much seen it.

if you were Quentin Tarantino, currently serving honcho of the Venice Film Festival jury, why would you be walking around with an emotionally vivid black cowboy hat? He’s never worn one before. Some kind of gesture of support and solidarity for fellow genre-wallower Robert Rodriguez?

Last night Michael Douglas told David Letterman that he has Stage IV throat cancer. Is that “not where you want to be?” Letterman asked. “Uhm, no,” Douglas said. “No, you like to be down at stage one.”

“The big thing you’re always worried about is it spreading,” the 65 year-old Douglas explained. “So I am head and neck. I am above the neck, so nothing’s gone down, and the expectations are good.” He said his chances of recovery are 80 percent “and with certain hospitals and everything, it does improve.”

Indiewire‘s Todd McCarthy, filing concurrent with the Venice Film Festival, isn’t as blown away by Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan as Obsessed With Film‘s Rob Beames, who fell to his knees and had kittens, or In Contention‘s Guy Lodge, who experienced heart fibrillations.

While acknowledging Aronofsky’s fully-earned rep as “a serious, driven director interested in discovering and charting outer boundaries,” McCarthy has a problem with Black Swan‘s equation between fervent commitment to art and offing yourself, and with a finale that he feels is excessive and “grand guignol”-ish.

“Much as I’m enamored of The Red Shoes, I nonetheless always find myself jumping out of the film the moment Moira Shearer pirouettes into the path of the oncoming train at the climax,” he begins. “In that not one but two of the driven dancers in Black Swan seem to subscribe to the theory that a life in art may require the ultimate sacrifice — or at least that life may not be worth living if their creativity can’t be pursued to its limits — one must presume that Aronofsky flirts with such a view himself; Mickey Rourke‘s wrestler was certainly cut from the same cloth.”

“Black Swan takes the idea of giving one’s all for art to a morbid extreme,” he continues. “Applying the gritty handheld technique he successfully employed in the working class environs of The Wrestler to the rarefied domain of classical ballet, Aronofsky swooningly explores the high tension neuroses and sexual psychodrama of a ballerina on the brink of simultaneous triumph and breakdown.

“With Natalie Portman, in the demanding leading role, equaling her director in unquestioned commitment, the central issue for the viewer is how far one is willing to follow the film down the road to oblivion for art’s sake.

“As a sensory experience for the eyes and ears, Black Swan provides bountiful stimulation. Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique choreograph the camera in beautiful counterpoint to Portman’s dance moves, especially in rehearsals, and the muted color scheme on rather grainy stock look like a more refined version of what the director did on The Wrestler.

“But when the script by Mark Heyman and Andres Heinz, based on the latter’s story, struggles to carve out a real-world parallel to the life-and-death struggle depicted in the dance story, it goes over the top in something approaching grand guignol fashion.”

Former L.A. Times/Envelope Oscar columnist Pete Hammond will provide awards season coverage for Deadline‘s Nikki Finke, it was tweeted (and then reported by Kris Tapley) last night.

In an odd twist, Tapley has also reported that “all of Hammond’s material that runs at Deadline will also run at Movieline.com, so make that two outlets getting into the Oscar game in a big way this year.” Double posting on organizationally-linked-but-separate industry websites? That can’t be right.

One presumes that Finke’s flattering 8.13 profile of Pete’s industrious and well-liked life Madelyn Hammond (“The Job Whisperer”) was somehow linked to the Hammond hire, or vice versa.

In an impassioned review excerpt from the Venice Film Festival, Obsessed With Film‘s Rob Beames is calling Darren Aronofsky‘s Black Swan the “best film I’ve seen all year.

“[It] left me devastated, excited, tense and emotionally drained,” Beames texted. “[Jury chairman Quentin] Tarantino will be a fool if he doesn’t give this the Golden Lion…unless, of course, something even better is coming up. Aronofsky has made his first masterpiece and Natalie Portman must now be considered a favorite for the Oscar. [This is a] perfect film that blends The Red Shoes with Antichrist, via Cronenberg.”

Since I have to get my Toronto wish list down from 40 to 30 films (to be seen over nine days, starting on 9.9), here are some films I’m thinking of jettisoning. I’m aware of the cruel-sounding nature of this procedure, but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t want to dump any of these — I want to see everything — but something’s got to go.

Special Presentation Dumps (6): Brighton Rock (d: Rowan Joffe); Cirkus Columbia (d: Danis Tanovic); Henry’s Crime (d: Malcolm Venville); Love Crime (d: Alain Corneau); Stone (d: John Curran); The Whistleblower (d: Larysa Kondracki).

Gala Dumps (5): Barney’s Version (d: Richard J. Lewis); Erotic Man (d: Jorgen Leth); Essential Killing (d: Jerzy Skolimowski); Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (d: Apichatpong Weerasethakul — satirical Cannes comment opportunity); The Ward (d: John Carpenter).

Real to Reel Dumps (2): Cool It (d: Ondi Timoner); Mother of Rock: Lillian Roxon (d: Paul Clarke).

Reel to Reel Addition: Thom Zimny‘s The Promise: The Making of Darkness at the Edge of Town.

I’ve seen the wholly respectable Secretariat (Disney, 10.8) but can’t get into it without a green light. The rules are the rules. But it’s great watching the various YouTube videos of the 1973 Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the astonishing finale at the Belmont Stakes.

“Like many changes that are revolutionary, none of Washington’s problems happened overnight. But slow and steady change over many decades — at a rate barely noticeable while it’s happening — produces change that is transformative. In this instance, it’s the kind of evolution that happens inevitably to rich and powerful states, from imperial Rome to Victorian England. The neural network of money, politics, bureaucracy, and values becomes so tautly interconnected that no individual part can be touched or fixed without affecting the whole organism, which reacts defensively.

“And thus a new president, who was elected with 53 percent of the popular vote, and who began office with 80 percent public-approval ratings and large majorities in both houses of Congress, found himself for much of his first year in office in stalemate, pronounced an incipient failure, until the narrowest possible passage of a health-care bill made him a sudden success in the fickle view of the commentariat, whose opinion curdled again when Obama was unable, with a snap of the fingers or an outburst of anger, to stanch the BP oil spill overnight. And whose opinion spun around once more when he strong-armed BP into putting $20 billion aside to settle claims, and asserted presidential authority by replacing General Stanley McChrystal with General David Petraeus. The commentariat’s opinion will keep spinning with the wind.

“The evidence that Washington cannot function — that it’s ‘broken,’ as Vice President Joe Biden has said — is all around. For two years after Wall Street brought the country close to economic collapse, regulatory reform languished in partisan gridlock. A bipartisan commission to take on the federal deficit was scuttled by Republican fears in Congress that it could lead to higher taxes, and by Democratic worries about cuts to social programs. Obama was forced to create a mere advisory panel instead.

“Four years after Congress nearly passed a comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws, the two parties in Washington are farther apart than ever, and hotheaded state legislatures have stepped into the breach. Guantanamo remains an open sore because of fearmongering about the transfer of prisoners to federal prisons on the mainland. What Americans perceive in Washington, as Obama put it in his State of the Union speech, in January, is a ‘perpetual campaign where the only goal is to see who can get the most embarrassing headlines about the other side — a belief that if you lose, I win.’

“His chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, whose Friday-afternoon mantra has become ‘Only two more workdays till Monday!,’ sums up today’s Washington in terms both coarser and more succinct. To him, Washington is just ‘Fucknutsville.’ — from “Washington, We Have A Problem,” a brilliant piece by Vanity Fair‘s Todd Purdum about the absurd dynamic affllicting the Obama administration.

I tried seeing John Scheinfeld‘s Who Is Harry Nilsson? once more a couple of weeks ago, but I could only make it up to the point when he finishes 1971’s Nilsson Schmillson, after which it was all downhill.

I just can’t stand watching people destroy themselves. And yet for some reason these John and Harry pics, taken during their infamous Troubadour fracas on 3.12.74, always bring on the chuckles. Famous and gifted people getting all primitive and sandbox. The baser the emotions, the funnier it seems.

Scheinfeld’s doc opens at the Cinema Village on 9.12, or smack dab in the middle of the Toronto Film Festival — great timing.

Earlier today Movieline reported the Jim Cameron vs. Mark Canton battle over Piranha 3D, which Cameron basically feels is a sleazy and essentially worthless piece of shit.

“I tend almost never to throw other films under the bus,” Cameron said last week, “but Piranha 3D is exactly an example of what we should not be doing in 3D. Because it just cheapens the medium and reminds you of the bad 3D horror films from the 70s and 80s, like Friday the 13th 3D. When movies got to the bottom of the barrel of their creativity and at the last gasp of their financial lifespan, they did a 3D version to get the last few drops of blood out of the turnip.”

At the beginning of Canton’s nearly 1400-word response, he says that Cameron’s comments “are very disappointing to me and the team that made Piranha 3D,” blah, blah. “Cameron, who singles himself out to be a visionary of moviemaking, seems to have a small vision regarding any motion pictures that are not his own,” blah, blah, blah. “It is amazing that in the moviemaking process, which is certainly a team sport, that Cameron consistently celebrates himself out as though he is a team of one.

“His comments are ridiculous, self-serving and insulting to those of us who are not caught up in serving his ego and his rhetoric,” blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Cameron is right, of course, and Canton is just trying to prop this one up so more people will go see Piranha 3D.