[mercurygirl]

Interesting. He really is a brilliant and charming person. I haven't read up on his church and specific beliefs, but it seems certain that he has internalized TEOTWAWKI and is pretty bitter about it, in his own way.

I wouldn't turn down lunch with him, or maybe a madcap tequila binge in Malibu.

[coyote]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ElijahJones', '"')Train up a child in the way he should go and he will not depart from it when he is old."

That is a famous proverb and probably more insightful sociologically than we usually give it credit. It is hard to overcome the attitudes handed to us by parents. It is hard to out live the pain they cause in our lives. It is hard to overestimate the value of the good they do for us.

[BlisteredWhippet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Revi', 'A') friend who is Jewish said he would never go to see a Mel Gibson film. I forgot about all the controversy surrounding the Passion of the Christ. Even going to this new Mel Gibson movie can offend certain people. I guess the Maya are offended because none of the main characters are from the Mayan region. They are mostly Mexicans from around Veracruz where most of the movie was made. It's hard not to generate controversy when you make a movie like this.

[mercurygirl]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ElijahJones', 'H')mm, is it the money or the good looks, or the midnight jew bashing that attracts you the most?

[seahorse]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'H')e has huge balls.

[Revi]

I read two reviews of the movie where the reviewer had not even seen the movie and was panning it. I talked to a friend who had seen it and hated it. I respect his viewpoint much more than the critics who never saw the movie. I think a little controversy is good for a movie. This controversy has nothing to do with the actual movie, however. Gibson shouldn't have said and did any of the things he did. He should have let his movies speak for themselves. Sometimes celebrities get in the way of their own creations.

The movie is the best depiction of the classic Mayan period I have ever seen. That alone is reason enough to go see it. When the Mayan cities went down they were abandoned and not repopulated for 1000 years. Guatemala just exceeded the population that was there in Mayan times. It bodes badly for civilizations. When they fall they fall hard and fast. Rome did the same thing. Rome went down to a city of 40,000 from over a million in it's heyday. They were grazing cattle where the games were held. Some of the games are still being held. The Spanish bullfight is descended from the Roman games. I wonder if they will be holding Nascar a hundred years from now...

[Zardoz]

Kenneth Turan's review in the L.A. Times:

Another bloodbath, Mel Gibson’s "Apocalypto" doesn’t miss an impalement or a dismemberment.

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')ho knows what violence lurks in the hearts of men? Mel Gibson knows, and he just can't resist putting every last ounce of it on screen. He also can't resist pulling those bloody, still-beating hearts out of human bodies and putting them up on screen as well. And that's just the beginning...

Despite a genuine talent for taking us to another time and place, a gift that under other circumstances would be worth experiencing, Gibson has made a movie that can be confidently recommended only to viewers who have a concentration camp commandant's tolerance for repugnant savagery.

Mountains of hacked up corpses, exit wounds spewing fountains of blood, spears shattering teeth, warriors literally beating each other's brains out, it's all here in living and dying color.

Perhaps even Gibson himself doesn't know what deep need is satisfied by putting this kind of brutality on screen. But no one who's seen the disemboweling scene in "Braveheart" or the torture and crucifixion in "The Passion of the Christ" (not to mention the Gibson parody on "South Park") can doubt that need is there...If ever there was a filmmaker congenitally unable to resist shots of severed heads bouncing, bouncing, bouncing down the side of a steep pyramid, this is the man...

...Gibson unblushingly intends "Apocalypto" as a clarion call warning modern man to watch his step or risk following the Mayas into decline and near-extinction. To this end he opens the story with a famous quote from historian Will Durant about the fall of Rome: "A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within."

This is all well and good, but the reality of "Apocalypto" is that this film is in fact Exhibit A of the rot from within that Gibson is worried about. If our society is in moral peril, the amount of stomach-turning violence that we think is just fine to put on screen is by any sane measure a major aspect of that decline. Mel, no one in your entourage is going to tell you this, but you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem. A big part.

[BlisteredWhippet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'W')ho knows what violence lurks in the hearts of men? Mel Gibson knows, and he just can't resist putting every last ounce of it on screen. He also can't resist pulling those bloody, still-beating hearts out of human bodies and putting them up on screen as well. And that's just the beginning...

[Revi]

At least this reviewer saw the movie. I agree, it was gory. The reviewer is right, we like lots of blood and gore on the silver screen. It was the most popular movie in the country for a short while. Gladiator was a bloodbath too. You didn't hear any of this kind of review for it. A very similar movie, really. I don't think that this review will keep anyone from seeing the movie. If he wanted to kill the movie he would have called it insipid, or boring. It wasn't boring.

The thing is, that there is lots of blood and gore going on right now, in the real world. Every American is paying about $10 a week for it. It's called the Iraq war. They are doing it for us. We all need 3 gallons of petroleum a day. We pay people to get it for us. Everyone who flies once a month, lives in a gigantic house, and drives an SUV wants war. They just don't want to see it.

[BlisteredWhippet]

Well put.

Its interesting the extent to which the cultural hoi polloi recognize the gore, but not the grotesque.

Endless stories in the media about Jesus and Christmas with a considerable de-emphasis on the vagaries of the whole pain and suffering aspect.

[mercurygirl]

I know it's old news now, but this just-read review is interesting and well done. I still haven't seen the film.

Apocalypto Review

[Revi]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mercurygirl', 'I') know it's old news now, but this just-read review is interesting and well done. I still haven't seen the film.

Apocalypto Review

[threadbear]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('mercurygirl', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ElijahJones', 'H')mm, is it the money or the good looks, or the midnight jew bashing that attracts you the most?

[Lokutus]

I'm considered a bit of film snob by friends because of my tastes for foreign and indie films. A year ago I saw Malick's The New World and loved it. Mel's Apocalypto is another brilliant film about what so-called "civilization" does to people.

I too read the reviews by PC morons who hadn'r even seen the film.

Go see it. It's the best film of the year. You have to see it on the big screen.

[BlisteredWhippet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Lokutus', 'I')'m considered a bit of film snob by friends because of my tastes for foreign and indie films. A year ago I saw Malick's The New World and loved it.

[Revi]

I thought The New World was excellent. I was watching Nova yesterday and learned something new about the Maya. Their civilization lasted about 1000 years. Their population kept on growning and growing until it suddenly collapsed. There is evidence that they crashed from the peak and trees were growing on the temples within 40 years. Their population went from over 8 million to much less within a generation. That is really scary. I've been to the temples at Tikal. They are surrounded by jungle. There are other cities all over the Peten and in the Yucatan. Uninhabited now.

This bodes very badly for us. When things go down, they go down quickly. The peak of Mayan population was just before the crash, when they were running out of resources, and the cutting of trees to make lime to appease the rain gods was at it's peak as well. The rain gods weren't impressed. It got drier and drier as they cut the forest off. At a certain point nothing worked any more. The whole thing collapsed.

That could happen to us. No matter how many Nascar races we stage the gasoline won't come back. It could go down quickly. We might not escape the fate of the classic Maya. But there are still Mayans around. They didn't live in the big temple cities, but up in the highlands. In the Nova show they showed some of the priests from the highland village of Santiago Atitlan going to the newly discovered site of San Bartolemo to pray to those same gods that still help the corn grow even now.

[Doly]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Revi', 'I')
This bodes very badly for us. When things go down, they go down quickly.

[BlisteredWhippet]

The New World was a great movie, if a bit over-pounded by Mallick's Mallet of Ponderousness. Beautiufl and moving.

In both films, the aspect of agriculture is centrally important to understanding the context and meaning of the character's lives and sense of purpose. Its telling to me that, to the people I saw it with, such visual cues were completely invisible.

The pathology of Westernism was perfectly illustrated in Smith as a man divided against himself.

"Guile, Envy, jealousy, hate... unknown to these people..." A sustainable society hit by the economic bomb, among others. The message is that capitalism is a disease, western values a kind of commicable syndrome.

The movie proves the tokenism of modern "Thanksgiving".