[In accordance with the book of "Things Todd Lets Us Get Away With" this post will remain here on top of the page for, well, most of the day. Please scroll down for today's news.]
Some people look weathered, but few people look leathered!
I don't know what Danny Trejo has been doing with his skin to make it look like that, but I'd hate to try it myself.
With a face that transcends conventional opinions about "beautiful" and "ugly", the man has been a walking special effect since his near-accidental tumble into the film industry in "Runaway Train" at age 40, and from the start he has been almost lethally recognizable and continuously typecast.
But instead of wearing out his welcome Danny Trejo only became more popular, especially after Robert Rodriguez started to use him to great effect in his movies.
Even though he is by all accounts a very nice guy these days, Mr. Trejo has had a rather, eh... checkered past, so to speak, spending nearly all of the sixties behind bars in a wide selection of famous prisons. Funnily enough he still gets asked at auditions if he can play a convict.
Next year he'll turn 65 but there's no sign of him retiring yet. In fact the man is almost insanely prolific: in 2008 alone Danny Trejo was already visible in more than 10 films, another 10 are scheduled to be released later this year, and he did television work too!
Anyway, Danny Trejo's face almost seems created just for the purpose of being zoomed-in on. Which means that once again I'm going to use a turn in the Twitch-O-Meter to do a gallery of 5 close-ups.
Guess which 5 movies they're from. No competition, no prizes, just for fun, try to see how far you get without using IMDB. Because he always looks more-or-less the same I've kept it relatively easy and stuck to movies which have opened wide. So forget about those titles which were released Direct-To-Video only, these shots come from real movies with real budgets!
1st is Machete, 4th is From Dusk Till Dawn. In the 5th he looks oddly like David Carradine.
No knife throwing shot in DESPARADO?
I definitely wanted to but my Desperado disk went bust in the two PCs I tried to start it on. Maybe it has some very exotic copy protection (Once Upon A Time In Mexico does the exact same thing) but I couldn't get it to run.
Ah well, like I said, the guy is thankfully prolific. I was surprised how many movies I had with him in it. Well-known ones too!
Spy Kids?
Hey, whatever happened to the feature-length Machete movie Rodriguez said he was doing? The fake trailer for Machete was the best thing about Grindhouse.
I'm taking a wild guess at no.5 being from "Sherrybaby" ...
Orale. I love Danny Trejo ever since I saw El Mariachi when I was in high school.
And I didn't realize he was the same age as my dad. That's fucked up.
So what else does Todd let you get away with?
1. Machete fake trailer 2.Spy kids 1 3.Spy kids 2 4.From dusk till dawn.
The last one has to be viewed with lots beer and some Tequila.
I'm gonna second guess #5 : Heat ? Am I getting any warmer ?
Pabloman: the first 4 are absolutely correct! Is the fifth one a reference I don't get? Because if memory serves well, the movie indeed featured lots of beer and tequila (though not as much porn as the title suggested).
San Ku Kai: number 5 is NOT Heat, but is indeed the only one in this list which wasn't made by Robert Rodriguez.
Then, I' m pretty sure the last one is Vin Diesel's XXX.
How about Sven Thorsen? He's like a danish Al Leong?
;-)
Strangely enough the answers to this deMille have disappeared in the transfer over to the new site, so here they are:
fltr:
xXx
From Dusk till Dawn
Spy Kids 2
Spy Kids
Grindhouse