Posted on 12/08/2006 4:56:23 AM PST by Dr. Scarpetta
Mel Gibson is sicker than we thought.
As his new film "Apocalypto" makes clear, he's not just a drinker and a raving anti-Semite, but a man with a grotesque appetite for human suffering and an enormous talent for exploiting it.
There was great violence in "Braveheart," too, but it was cloaked in historical context. And the stripping of Jesus' flesh in "The Passion of the Christ" had the cover of Scripture. But "Apocalypto" exists solely as an action-adventure and a deft cinematic demonstration of man's capacity for cruelty.
This is the true passion of Mel.
If you can take unflinching views of throats being slit, heads being caved in, a man's face being eaten by a panther, beating hearts torn from men's chests and decapitated heads bounding down the steps of a pyramid, you're in for a first-rate spectacle of inhumanity.
"Apocalypto" is set in the final days of the crumbling Mayan civilization, when drought and disease have driven warriors farther into the Mexican rainforest to collect natives for the sacrificial altar. As no one knows better than Gibson, the gods must be appeased.
One captive is Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a gentle hunter/gatherer who hides his pregnant mate and child in a dry well before being led away. At the temple atop a massive stone pyramid, Jaguar Paw is about to meet his maker - or the Mayans' maker, or at least the priest's knife - when fate intervenes.
A total eclipse of the sun convinces the priest that the gods' thirst for blood has been sated, sparing Jaguar and the other captives. But not for long. They're taken to a field and told to run for freedom while Mayan warriors shower them with spears and arrows.
Somehow, Jaguar clears the gauntlet and races into the jungle toward home and his family, with a band of angry, tattooed spear throwers hot on his trail and a tropical storm brewing overhead.
Is Gibson making some kind of comment about the inhumanity of non-Christian cultures - first the Jews, now the Mayans? "Apocalypto" suggests that the pagans are about to be tamed, if not have their souls saved, by Gibson's Catholic forebears rowing ashore from the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria.
More and more, Gibson's personality problems seem beyond the scope of movie reviews.
In any case, "Apocalypto" is the real deal as a jungle thriller. Its digital cinematography is gorgeous, its makeup and costumes are stunning, and its mostly nonpro cast - speaking in obscure Yucatec and translated with subtitles - is as authentic as the jungle of Veracruz where the film was shot.
Now that "Apocalypto" is being seen, four months after Gibson's arrest and tirade in Malibu, some in the media are asking whether Hollywood can forgive him by bestowing an Oscar.
What an ironic possibility! This is a movie dedicated to bloodlust (forget the gods, can the audience's thirst be sated?) and not the sort of thing Academy voters typically honors with awards.
An Oscar would not be forgiveness; it would be blindness.
If anyone really feels the need to see throats cut up close just google some of the Chechen atrocities for the real thing. If after that you haven't had enough then by all means give Mad Mel your money.
There's only 2 movies I've seen where a heart is lifted from a live person....
..Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom..(hated that movie)...
..and Last of the Mohicans...Loved the movie, hated the heart scene.
Even in the Mohican movie, essentially you see the victim's eyes open very wide, but barely see the Indian cutting out the heart.
In Jones movie, the music & drums add to the suspense, but it doesn't DWELL on it for long.
I will pass on this movie....
There is too much happening in real life too horrifying....
..and potential for real horror from the mideast.
Yeah, and Hollywood loves Quentin Tarantino's movies, as well. Maybe Mel should change his name to Sam Peckinpah, Jr.
the reason these guys are so good is that south Park speaks the truth, often pointing out the Emporer who has no clothes. they also target everyone and everything ..so they are fair and have much more material to use in their humor.
Yeah--and how about the Tarantino movies? Gore as high camp.
That sentence didn't make any more sense than your criticism.
nah, Mel just makes snuff films for the massess. the guy is an arrogant self centered violent-loving jerk.
"Snuff films for the masses." Yeah, that's his genre all right. He's never done light comedy or romance or adventure. Nope. Just "snuff films."
Get out more.
Exactly. Not that this movie is campy, but if gore serves a purpose, then it shouldn't be avoided any more than any other film element. And the bloody truth is, the Mayans were utter savages.
The usual story is that the Mayan relgion ws not as bloodthirsty is the Aztec. Indeed, it is claimed that the Spanish story about the Aztecs was a lie. But the temples in Mexico smelled like slaughter houses, and horrified even soldiers hardened in war with the Moors.
Uh, yeah, sure. I suppose Hitler and Stalin were doing the same....just ran out of time to make the connection to Jesus.
You need to take more care in distinguisihing between fantasy and reality. Apocalypto is a movie, no one actually dies. Hitler and Stalin actually killed millions of people.
The hypocracy of Hollywood is stunning...there is more raw violence in an episode of The Sopranos than there was THE PASSION. Hollywood thrives on violence...ask Mr. Tarrantino what he thinks of Mel's films. When it comes to Gibson, all of a sudden everyone gets so puritanical. It's incredible.
Maybe they started working to figure out when the eclipses would occur after this happened a few times, ruining all their human sacrifice party plans.
The others with whom I went to see the film plan to go back a second time.
I do not like gore and at spots just looked away. But this is what the Mayans were liked.
Babies don't count with Libs.
Grand Guignol
http://www.grandguignol.com/
Mel has designated the wrong group as "the enemy" if his rant about the Jews being at fault for all the wars is any indication of his views. It's pretty evident that the Isalmic terrorists are the "enemy", that evil and the devil are the "enemy", so he needs to think that through. Germany had a great resource in the talented and productive Jewish people; what a horrible waste of humanity, from those lost in the Holocaust, not to mention the loss of life among the non-Jewish people of the world. My father survived the war, but it affected our family adversely in spite of all we could do to rise above it. - I'm so sick of the megalomaniacs and egotists of the world, from the politicians to the Hollywood so-called "intelligentsia" imposters.
Youre watcfhing too much TV - the conventional wisdom re: indians is largely myth.
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Similarly, where game was plentiful, Indians used only the choicest cuts and left the rest. When the buffalo hunting tribes on the Great Plains herded hundreds of animals over cliffs in the 18th and early 19th centuries, tons of meat were left to rot or to be eaten by scavengers - hardly a result consistent with the environmental ethic attributed to Indians. Samuel Hearne, a fur trader near Hudson's Bay, recorded in his journal in the 1770s that the Chipewayan Indians would slaughter large numbers of caribou and musk ox, eat only a few tongues, and leave the rest to rot.
Indians also manipulated the land to improve hunting. Upland wooded areas from east to west were burned to remove the undergrowth and increase forage for deer, elk, and bison. Indeed, because of this burning, it's possible that fewer "old growth" forests existed in the Pacific Northwest when the first Europeans arrived than exist today.
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