"Mad Mel and the Maya"
Racist or no, I'm too curious not to see it now.
PeakOil is You
Apocalypto; New movie on civilizations by Mel Gibson
Re: Apocalypto; New movie on civilizations by Mel Gibson
by mercurygirl » Thu 14 Dec 2006, 17:00:39
Seems MG has not shown proper respect to his subject, according to this:
"Mad Mel and the Maya"
Racist or no, I'm too curious not to see it now.
"Mad Mel and the Maya"
Racist or no, I'm too curious not to see it now.
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Re: Apocalypto; New movie on civilizations by Mel Gibson
by threadbear » Thu 14 Dec 2006, 17:17:20
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mercurygirl', 'S')eems MG has not shown proper respect to his subject, according to this:
"Mad Mel and the Maya"
Racist or no, I'm too curious not to see it now.
"Mad Mel and the Maya"
Racist or no, I'm too curious not to see it now.
Me too, but you couldn't pay me to watch Gibson's other movie, the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre.
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Re: Apocalypto; New movie on civilizations by Mel Gibson
by oowolf » Thu 14 Dec 2006, 17:29:20
Isn't this a MOVIE? Did someone mistake a movie for a cultural anthropology dissertation? Mel Gibson=C.B. DeMilleXM. DeSade?
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Re: Apocalypto; New movie on civilizations by Mel Gibson
by BlisteredWhippet » Thu 14 Dec 2006, 18:18:00
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mercurygirl', 'S')eems MG has not shown proper respect to his subject, according to this:
"Mad Mel and the Maya"
Racist or no, I'm too curious not to see it now.
"Mad Mel and the Maya"
Racist or no, I'm too curious not to see it now.
I'm not an expert, but I have climbed the steps of the ancient Mayan pyramids. I have walked through the Yucatan jungles. I have plumbed the depths of the caves in that area (although not that far, its like invading someone's house when they're home and the lights are off). I have spoken with the natives of that area. I was taught a little of the Mayan language. I have studied the Mayan and Aztec civlizations.
That said, I think I have some perspective.
This guy:
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Earl Shorris', '
')Gibson has tried to sell the movie as an allegory, using the fall of Maya civilization to limn the war in Iraq. But it is not about Iraq, and the end of the Maya classic period took place many centuries before the period Gibson chose for his film. The only profound meaning one can take away from the film is that there is an intimate connection between racism and violence. The message of the production is that the Maya are unacceptable people; we do not want to look at them as they are now, and we despise them for what they were then.
... is a gob-smackin' moron. This guy's "review" is nothing more than a self-rigtheous hachet job.
First of all why "try" to sell allegory as allegory? I doubt "Earl" has the foggiest idea of the concept of allegory. Apocalypto's allegory is that the characters and situations tell a story about human nature. It is "Art", not Historical Docudrama.
I've been reading the criticism, and overwhelmingly, the negative commentary brings in all the extraneous BS, Mel's comments, the Studio's comments, the commentator's comments. Who said what about the film is irrelevant. I went in and judged the film on its own merits.
As far as accuracy goes, I've said it before, and I'll say it again: the movie is as good a guess as any as to the accuracy of its portrayal of an unafilliated group of hunter-gatherers. Every review I read hammers home the point that these people were "Mayan", an identification that cannot be made at all from the movie. The identification of the "Maya" was made by a production executive, and tossed around outside of the production, which probably damaged the film's reputation as much as Mel's DWI, but so what. Thats like saying "Guernica" is not authentic because Picasso was a boozer. This is character assassination and political correctness imitating art criticism, which is mostly those things anyway. The cultural pirate is the reviewer and anyone else who pretend to police the media and art as regulators of the public imagination and discourse.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', '
')Gibson has tried to sell the movie as an allegory, using the fall of Maya civilization to limn the war in Iraq. But it is not about Iraq, and the end of the Maya classic period took place many centuries before the period Gibson chose for his film.
Where does he get the claim that Gibson "tried to sell the movie as an allegory about Iraq"? This is making hash with an artist's public musing, his own extrapolations from the allegory of civ. collapse. The beauty of allegory is that its construction can imply multiple meanings. This guy has decided that he has sniffed out the "real" meaning, and it is simply that Gibson is a racist opportunist, a cultural revisionist, and a distorter of history. He is a fucking idiot. The injustice here is that he gets paid to write his empty-headed slander.
Forget Mayan culture. The Yucatan is peppered with Mayan, Aztec and even more ancient Olmec artifacts. But the reality is (and something that the mainstream cannot understand is that there were other people living in the forest, on the coast, who didn't necessarily create gigantic stone monuments. The "Civilizations" were built around agriculture, and the forests were inhabited by tribes and other people.
"History", the idiot's guide they sell in public school to defenseless children, imagines homogenous populations. They imagine the Aztecs simply swallowed the Mayan culture whole. Various "historical" texts and TV documentaries use this kind of language: "The mayan culture mysteriously disappeared..." or "the culture disappeared..." To think no Mayan or mayan-dialect speaking hunter-gatherers survived or even thrived after the Aztecs arrived on scene? They disappeared, yet 100,000 mayan-dialect speaking people in Mexico today? The Yucatan rainforest is an enormous area capable of supporting 100s of autonomous groups of hunter-gatherers. They probably spoke similar dialects.
Everybody wants to apply their own standards to the artist. Too gory, not realistic enough. Mel's a pirate, a cultural cannibal, a race-baiting hater, etc. America expresses its innate mental retardation, giggling at half-naked men. Apocalypto is pearls before swine.
It just might be true that I "Get it" because of my experiences. someone who hasn't been where I've been, know what I know, isn't going to appreciate all the things in the movie. I have friends, I consider them pretty smart, but they aren't going to appreciate it. They haven't climbed the pyramids. They haven't talked to the natives. To them, the movie is a an entertainment spectacle, the underlying themes mere props. I'm talking about "city folk"... the "civilized"... the membership-holders of the Earth-destroying civilizations. The more "educated" among them look past the entertainment and props and levy their analytical guns at a piece of art, equally idiotic.
I'm talking about people for whom running through a forest that they know intimately, from an invader who wishes to do them bodily harm is a fantasy. For me, that is memory. That is my childhood. (Not the forests of the Yucatan). In this, the story is well-portrayed.
The animism of Jaguar Paw, his knowledge of the his natural surroundings, again alien to Euro J-C cultural "normals". In the last year I've built an open fire and cooked meat on a stick for a midnight feast, under a starry sky. Most of the population will not understand the real level of meaning this movie holds.
Take a look at this review:
http://blogher.org/node/13438
and note how contrasted it is with the Nation's reviewer.
Did they see the same movie?
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