[Ken522]

I take it Zack is an expert on Mayan civilization?

[farmer18th]

portraying non-Western natives as evil savages.

Hollywood, in other words, is getting back to the truth.

[the invisib1e hand]

what's the upshot of the critique? That it was thinly veiled anti-Semitism? Or right-wing propaganda?

[Cicero]

Is Mel unfair to the Mayans, or unfair to left-wing, politically correct, revisionist anthropology professors?

[CzarNicky]

I thought the Maya were extinct by the time the Spanish arrived and this was about the Aztecs.

[Uncle Hal]

Its a movie folks. Its a movie. Relax.

[Rodney King]

I'm sure the Mayan's all sat around singing Kumbaya in between a daily routine of smoking pot and engaing in homosexual sex, as the SF Chronicle imagines them.

[Brad from Tennessee]

I go to movies for entertainment. I go to the beer joints around here for anthropology. I will probably see this movie.

[uncbob]

"King Kong" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" show these natives as uncaring, beastlike and virtually inhuman.

King Kong was in Central America ?

[elhombrelibre]

Thanks for the post. To please my wife, I saw the movie. As a history major, I went in realizing there would be some major flaws. There were; it's not to be viewed in that light. I place this movie in the category of escapists schlock, like a Stephen King novel or a Charles Bronson movie. Anyone a quart low on schlock should see it and enjoy it as such. I personally prefer the original Bronson, such as "Hard Times."

[xcamel]

Movies are movies, and most of the critics are on crack.

[padre35]

I couldn't get the link to work.


I am certain that the movie will be a huge hit in SF area......Yeah right.

[KellyAdmirer]

it is part of a disturbing trend re-emerging in the film industry, portraying non-Western natives as evil savages.

Hey Zach, can only Caucasians be depicted as evil savages? Would that make you happy? What if Mayans were evil savages sometimes? Would it still offend you to portray them that way?

Oh, by the way, Zach, you might not know this because you are only an expert on such a race of absolutely perfect and non-violent people as the Mayans, not on anything else, but many ancient civilizations, even relatively advanced ones, did have their share of "evil" and "savage" practices. Did you know, Zach, that ancient Carthage engaged in the systematic killing of babies? Huh, Zach? The priests threw the newborns off the cliffs into pits called toffets. But we couldn't actually show anything like that in a film, now could we, Zach, seeing as how that would offend you. And we really CARE about your personal view of history, Zach, really we do.

Hey Zach, why don't you keep you politics out of my face and go away.

[atomic conspiracy]

Hruby's article is misleading in some respects, accurate in others. As portrayed in the movie, the Mayans of the early 16th century were in fact jungle dwellers whose great civilization had collapsed centuries earlier.

Hruby is correct in saying that there is no evidence of Mayans practicing human sacrifice on the same enormous scale as the Aztecs. That isn't saying much, however, since there is no doubt at all that the Mayans did practice it. The most famous example is the original form of the Mesoamerican game ulama, which included sacrifice of the entire losing team. Tlachti, the Aztec version of the game, did not involve sacrifice. Some of the remains of sacrifice victims recovered from the Mayan "cenotes" show evidence of unusually cruel and barbaric methods, notably "de-fleshing."
Academics like Hruby consistently mislead their students about this, as well as about cannibalism and ritual torture among native Americans, apparently in pursuit of some political agenda.

[NCSteve]

What the hell is a "non-Western native?"

[popdonnelly]

"portraying non-Western natives as evil savages."

Most present-day interpretations of the Mayan civilization indicate that the Mayans were warring and engaged in ritual human sacrifice. Now, if that's a fact, what is inaccurate about Gibson's movie?

I thought the violence in "Saving Private Ryan" was a little overdone, but that doesn't mean that World War II wasn't, in fact, savage and bloody.

[hosepipe]

Yet this San Fransicko newspaper thinks that murdering people(babies) and replacing them with Mexican slave labor(and democrat Votes) from across the border is hunky dory..

The White House strangely buys at least half that story..

[fight_truth_decay]

Blood Diamond (or war diamond) was my pick for last weekend. http://stopblooddiamonds.org/default.asp?adv=sbd1

However, the epic "mythic action-adventure" Apocalypto was Number UNO at the box office.

MOVIEWEB Interview: How did you research this film to make it authentic?

Mel Gibson: There's a lot of books around. There's a lot of evidence being unearthed as we worked. They were digging out murals going, "Look at this." We even changed some murals we drew on the walls... to emulate the murals that they just found. They were a whole different color scheme and we changed it. Some of the stuff was so cryptic when you looked at it... you couldn't quite make it out. We had to make things a little bit more readable. One's eyes don't just adjust to that unless you lived in that culture.

So the human sacrifice scenes that was what it was like for that time period?

Mel Gibson: I would think so. There's a lot of hypothetical dialogue in terms of what's addressed, but I'm sure that that's what it was about. It was an appeasement of God's wrath. The hearts and bloodletting... that's what it was about. So we just put words to it. I don't know whether they used those words but they probably used something like them. It used to take them less then a minute to get a guy's heart out. That's if you didn't go through the ribcage. It was just awful what they did to one another. Chewing their fingers off, cutting their eyelids off, and their lips. They were doing target practice on real targets.

Farhad Safinia (co-writer) : I think it was about humiliation.

Mel Gibson: It was so much about humiliation. That's the really crazy thing about the culture. You have this fantastic civilization on one hand, and there's such acts of barbarism in there. They knew about the stars, and the constellations, and about all kinds of things; buildings. They a library with books and a language. They were like the Greeks, you know?

What is the key for you in humanizing these people?

Mel Gibson: It's all to do with the human story. It's the universal, mythic kind of tale but knocked down to a level, hopefully, we can all understand. When I was 15 years old, you're not complete at all, in fact I'm not complete, yet! I just remember some older guy, really putting the jab into the middle of me by calling me the most insulting thing I could think of, what he did was to call me "Almost." "Hey, Almost." Like that, and I was just so offended by that. That's where that came from in the film. It means Almost. He really is Almost and then he becomes. Those human experiences we have get put into it.

The film's about fear. We've explored every primal fear we could fit into two hours and five minutes.

Can you talk about the waterfall sequence?

Mel Gibson: Well, it's a real waterfall. We used a SpiderCam. We put the Genesis on it. I think that's the first time that's happened. We had to span the waterfall and river with cranes and put the cables up. It was quite an elaborate setup to enable the camera to go over the guys shoulder, down on the water, over the edge, turn around and then pull back in one shot. Of course you're not going to make a real guy jump off something like that. He'll kill himself.

A cow fell over one day. A cow was trying to swim across... it was just overtaken by the depth of water and it fell over the waterfall! It hit the water and I thought, "It's toast." It was about 170 feet, this waterfall. It came up somewhere on the other side and it was all busted up... then the waves got it, it was upside down, bouncing off the rocks... and it got into this deep water. One of the local guys, this is the weird thing of all... the cow's in the water, but this Mexican guy just goes up to it and it's like he said something to it, it was the weirdest thing I've ever seen, and the cow just walked up and started eating grass!

Farhad Safinia: The cow was just munching grass. It felt like it didn't remember a thing.

http://www.movieweb.com/news/23/15923.php

[webheart]

I saw it. I liked it. There were a couple of really glaring inconsistencies (solar eclipse in the daytime, yet full moon that night (LOL!!) and the captives cross the river one way, yet the escapee crosses the river in the same direction on the way back), but it was brilliantly executed. It had good action, and I'm sure some historical narrative to it. It may well have been about the Aztecs, since it was the Aztecs who Cortez encountered, although the Maya were the inhabitants of the jungles of Guatemala and the Yucatan peninsula. But that doesn't matter, it was the best movie of the weekend in my opinion. Thanks, Mr. Gibson, I hope you enjoy my $9.00.

[FFIGHTER]

Imagine that, a movie that is not based on fact. What will they think of next?