One of Robert Rodriguez's craziest movies: Angel of Battle is on Netflix

Nowadays, the available streaming options and contradictory recommendations are so numerous that it's hard to see through all the bullshit you could watch. Every Friday, The edgeThe Cut the Crap column simplifies the choice by sorting out the overwhelming multitude of movies and TV shows on subscription services and recommending just one thing to watch this weekend.

What to watch

From dusk till dawn, a 1996 gangster / vampire photo directed by Robert Rodriguez from a screenplay by Quentin Tarantino, with a story by Robert Kurtzman, horror makeup maestro. Tarantino and George Clooney are the two Gecko brothers, two murderers and two bank robbers on the run who are hijacking a motorhome and forcing a beautiful Christian family, the Fullers (with Harvey Keitel playing father and Juliette Lewis to give her teenage daughter ), them across the border to Mexico. While the Geckos wait in a rowdy strip club for the man who is supposed to hide them from the law, they discover that the bar is infested with blood-sucking demons.

Why look now?

Because Alita: Battle Angel arrives (finally) in theaters this weekend.

In development since the early 2000s, the film adaptation of Yukito Kishiro's manga series was originally intended to be directed by James Cameron. Avatar and its consequences are still rather theoretical. Cameron hired Robert Rodriguez to streamline his script and turn it around. The production was completed in February 2017. The two years since then have been devoted to perfecting digital effects to create the illusion of a realistic cyborg (played by Rosa Salazar) in interaction with the human and other hybrid man / machine on a ruined Earth of the 26th century.

When Alita: Battle Angel opens this weekend, it will be the first feature film of Rodriguez as a director since 2014 Sin City: a lady to kill. It is a long time between two projects on the big screen for a filmmaker who made 18 films between 1992 and 2014. Rodriguez first made himself known by the 1992 film. El Mariachi, an elegant revenge thriller, which was shot for pennies in Mexico. In the decades that followed, he mainly worked on films that he also wrote and produced, from dirty B movies like B. Machete special family rate heavy effects like Spy Kids to more experimental genre pieces like Sin City and Planet terror.

Rodriguez had his share of surprise successes and expensive flops. He also spent a lot of time promoting the community and the Texas film industry. Throughout his career, he has defended the principles of DIY, urging aspiring filmmakers to take a camera and do it rather than waiting for money or permission from someone else.

That said, From dusk till dawn reveals the differences between Tarantino – who is obsessed with "trashy cinema", still looking for ways to raise him – and Rodriguez, who is perfectly happy to create a proudly irrefutable entertainment. The first half of From dusk till dawn feels very much like the work of the man who was still riding high the success of Reserve dogs and pulp Fiction. It contains long scenes of dialogue, exploring the tragic past of the Fullers and the relationship between the evil Seth Gecko (Clooney) and his disturbed brother Richie (Tarantino). Once the vampires show up, Rodriguez comes in and delivers a frightfully bloody chaos of movies driving, featuring long appearances as guests by veterinarians of genre pictures Tom Savini and Fred Williamson.

Photo: Lionsgate

For whom is this?

Fans of violent independent films from the 1990s and Tex-Mex pop culture.

When Reserve dogs debuted at Sundance in 1992, it marked the arrival of a new voice in American cinema, combining the influences of the 10s pocketbooks in the dimes, European films New Wave of the 1960s, television years 1970s and 1980s drama. At the end of the decade, there did not seem to be more than a month without another film that could be called Tarantino-esque – including some movies he had written or rewritten in the early 1990s when almost every Hollywood producer wanted to work with him. From dusk till dawn actually at the originReserve dogs scenario that Kurtzman hired him to write, which then became a real estate afterpulp Fiction.

As such, the film feels a lot of its time and can only arouse nostalgic feelings among all those who were at the multiplex every weekend of the 1990s. The magnificent opening scene alone – An almost self-contained drawing in a convenience store, featuring a sinuous conversation between an employee played by John Hawkes and a Texas ranger played by Michael Parks – represents "the Tarantino touch" at its best. digressive, becoming essential to the flavor and fluidity of the film.

However, as Rodriguez has done throughout his career, he also puts his footprint on From dusk till dawn as Texan and Mexican-American. It fills the cast of actors of Mexican origin, including Danny Trejo, Cheech Marin and Salma Hayek (performer of the seductive vampire stripper, Santanico Pandemonium), and defines the show in its entirety on a tape. its composed of Texas music, two of the gods of ZZ blues rock. Top and the Vaughan brothers. It is this kind of confidence in his instincts and tastes that led Rodriguez to such a long and prolific career. He tends to work fast and belly.

Where to see it

Netflix. The service also has all three seasons of the From dusk till dawn TV series (Rodriguez has made seven episodes) and several Tarantino films, including pulp Fiction, The Hateful Eightand the two volumes of Kill Bill.