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Mr_sausage wrote:I think the point was that artists who converted to religion (or lost and came back to it with increased fervour), as opposed to being religious from the start, suffered from artistic decline.

Exactly. We were talking about "born agains". And while it may not be the case every single time, I'm pretty sure there's a pattern.

The Invunche wrote:Exactly. We were talking about "born agains". And while it may not be the case every single time, I'm pretty sure there's a pattern.

I think that it is mostly because they tend to alienate their audience who doesn't share their views

I disagree. It's not that the audience doesn't share the views. It's that the born again will try to force his views on the audience by preaching now that he has "seen the light".

Kinda like Mac users.

miless wrote:

The Invunche wrote:

Mr_sausage wrote:I think the point was that artists who converted to religion (or lost and came back to it with increased fervour), as opposed to being religious from the start, suffered from artistic decline.

Exactly. We were talking about "born agains". And while it may not be the case every single time, I'm pretty sure there's a pattern.

I think that it is mostly because they tend to alienate their audience who doesn't share their views

I think the pattern Invunche talks about has more to do with the new faith working against their artistic instincts. Since they were not working from, nor significantly influenced by, that religious perspective from the start, it makes switching to it artistically constraining. So what tends to happen is the artist replaces invention with didacticism, and begins to work on what is essentially someone elses project.

To put a perspective on it: can a life long athiest newly converted really make Catholic centred movies as would, say, Martin Scorsese?

Yeah, thanks for elaborating/explaining.

This one's for Fletch...

'Law & Order' is putting on a Mel of a show

Mel Gibson might never have imagined his drunken-driving arrest would lead to this: being immortalized - fictionally, of course - in an episode of "Law & Order."

No one involved will say it, but there are some striking similarities between an episode being produced this week, called "In Vino Veritas," and Gibson's recent drunken-driving troubles in Hollywood.

"'Law and Order' is fiction," said a show spokesman yesterday after the topic was revealed.

In the episode, Chevy Chase plays a TV celebrity who is pulled over for drunken driving while wearing blood-soaked clothes. The star's religious prejudices come out after his arrest.

Just saw this movie. Cinematically, it looked like a National Geographic Documentary (not in a particularly good way). I still have no idea how this film was shot? 35mm? DV? I don't know. This is not to mention the myriad cuts, hand-held shots, and steadi-cam shots that Gibson uses to not very good effect.

That said, it's one hell of a crazy movie, and if Mel pisses off any particular group, it'll be PETA. More thoughts later.

Saw it at the same screening and I'm not exactly sure whether I'm supposed to be saved or disturbed... probably both, which is vaguely the same feeling I came away with after seeing "The Passion of the Christ". A not-to-be-excluded motif of the Gibson experience is of course throbbing ethnic drums somewhat akin in effect to a bullet slowly boring through one's skull. I'll bet some group of people, though probably not the academy, will award Gibson for depicting just about every death on-screen with an equal amount of sado-masochistic, imaginative flair, though maybe imaginative isn't the word since the cliches run the gamut. So let's just say they'll award the vigor. Stay tuned... a review for this one at some point : )

...and yes, definitely, there will be bloody PETA revenge at some point.

Hoberman weighs in with a perfect summation of this bloody spectacle : )

I can't wait for Armond's take on Dreamgirls.

Is "Apocalypto" Pornography?
by Traci Ardren

A scholar challenges Mel Gibson's use of the ancient Maya culture as a metaphor for his vision of today's world.

Traci Ardren, an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami, knows the Maya well. She has studied Classic Maya society for over 20 years while living in the modern Maya villages of Yaxuna, Chunchucmil, and Espita in the Mexican state of Yucatan. Her credentials include contributing to and editing Ancient Maya Women (2002) and The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica (2006). Ardren's reaction to the new film "Apocalypto," follows. Scholars are well aware that some aspects of Maya culture were violent, but Ardren finds fault with what she sees as a pervasive colonial attitude in the film.


With great trepidation I went to an advance screening of "Apocalypto" last night in Miami. No one really expects historical dramas to be accurate, so I was not so much concerned with whether or not the film would accurately represent what we know of Classic period Maya history as I was concerned about the message Mel Gibson wanted to convey through the film. After Jared Diamond's best-selling book Collapse, it has become fashionable to use the so-called Maya collapse as a metaphor for Western society's environmental and political excesses. Setting aside the fact that the Maya lived for more than a thousand years in a fragile tropical environment before their cities were abandoned, while here in the U.S, we have polluted our urban environments in less than 200, I anticipated a heavy-handed cautionary tale wrapped up in Native American costume.

What I saw was much worse than this. The thrill of hearing melodic Yucatec Maya spoken by familiar faces (although the five lead actors are not Yucatec Maya but other talented Native American actors) during the first ten minutes of the movie is swiftly and brutally replaced with stomach churning panic at the graphic Maya-on-Maya violence depicted in a village raid scene of nearly 15 minutes. From then on the entire movie never ceases to utilize every possible excuse to depict more violence. It is unrelenting. Our hero, Jaguar Paw, played by the charismatic Cree actor Rudy Youngblood, has one hellavuh bad couple of days. Captured for sacrifice, forced to march to the putrid city nearby, he endures every tropical jungle attack conceivable and that is after he escapes the relentless brutality of the elites. I am told this part of the movie is completely derivative of the 1966 film "The Naked Prey." Pure action flick, with one ridiculous encounter after another, filmed beautifully in the way that only Hollywood blockbusters can afford, this is the part of the movie that will draw in audiences and demonstrates Gibson's skill as a cinematic storyteller.

But I find the visual appeal of the film one of the most disturbing aspects of "Apocalypto." The jungles of Veracruz and Costa Rica have never looked better, the masked priests on the temple jump right off a Classic Maya vase, and the people are gorgeous. The fact that this film was made in Mexico and filmed in the Yucatec Maya language coupled with its visual appeal makes it all the more dangerous. It looks authentic; viewers will be captivated by the crazy, exotic mess of the city and the howler monkeys in the jungle. And who really cares that the Maya were not living in cities when the Spanish arrived? Yes, Gibson includes the arrival of clearly Christian missionaries (these guys are too clean to be conquistadors) in the last five minutes of the story (in the real world the Spanish arrived 300 years after the last Maya city was abandoned). It is one of the few calm moments in an otherwise aggressively paced film. The message? The end is near and the savior has come. Gibson's efforts at authenticity of location and language might, for some viewers, mask his blatantly colonial message that the Maya needed saving because they were rotten at the core. Using the decline of Classic urbanism as his backdrop, Gibson communicates that there was absolutely nothing redeemable about Maya culture, especially elite culture which is depicted as a disgusting feast of blood and excess.

Before anyone thinks I have forgotten my Metamucil this morning, I am not a compulsively politically correct type who sees the Maya as the epitome of goodness and light. I know the Maya practiced brutal violence upon one another, and I have studied child sacrifice during the Classic period. But in "Apocalypto," no mention is made of the achievements in science and art, the profound spirituality and connection to agricultural cycles, or the engineering feats of Maya cities. Instead, Gibson replays, in glorious big-budget technicolor, an offensive and racist notion that Maya people were brutal to one another long before the arrival of Europeans and thus they deserve, in fact they needed, rescue. This same idea was used for 500 years to justify the subjugation of Maya people and it has been thoroughly deconstructed and rejected by Maya intellectuals and community leaders throughout the Maya area today. In fact, Maya intellectuals have demonstrated convincingly that such ideas were manipulated by the Guatemalan army to justify the genocidal civil war of the 1970-1990s. To see this same trope about who indigenous people were (and are today?) used as the basis for entertainment (and I use the term loosely) is truly embarrassing. How can we continue to produce such one-sided and clearly exploitative messages about the indigenous people of the New World?

I loved Gibson's film "Braveheart," I really did. But there is something very different about portraying a group of people, who are now recovering from 500 years of colonization, as violent and brutal. These are people who are living with the very real effects of persistent racism that at its heart sees them as less than human. To think that a movie about the 1,000 ways a Maya can kill a Maya--when only 10 years ago Maya people were systematically being exterminated in Guatemala just for being Maya--is in any way okay, entertaining, or helpful is the epitome of a Western fantasy of supremacy that I find sad and ultimately pornographic. It is surely no surprise that "Apolcalypto" has very little to do with Maya culture and instead is Gibson's comment on the excesses he perceives in modern Western society. I just wish he had been honest enough to say this. Instead he has created a beautiful and disturbing portrait that satisfies his need for comment but does violence to one of the most impressive of Native American cultures.

Traci Ardren is an assistant professor of anthropology at the University of Miami.

http://www.archaeology.org/online/revie ... lypto.html

I don't understand her use of the word "pornographic," since she never bothers to explain what she means by this. Does she mean by pornographic merely graphic and exploitative? Surely she cannot mean that the movie seeks to stimulate pleasure through the graphic depiction of certain taboo acts since she repeatedly concludes that the movie is not pleasureable to watch. Except, that is, in its visual beauty, but surely she is not accusing good cinematography of being pornographic?

Frankly, the term is so confusing in her article (and used I think only once beside the title) that I can't help but think she is doing her own bit of rhetorical manipulation by counting on the negative reaction the connotations of "pornographic" are sure to produce in the reader.

I'm also not sure what to make of her condemnation of the film for showing ancient Maya-on-Maya violence when, apparently, current Mayas are experiencing racial violence from non-Mayas today. Is she saying that condemning the Mayas for their ancient internal violence is immoral since they are now receiving violence from without? I don't see how the issues are related, to be honest, although I do appreciate her concern over the injustice suffered by a group of people in our current time.

However, the article does raise some valuable points, even if it is not totally coherant as an argument (it tends to jump between unrelated points). The best comes right at the end: that the movie is not honest in its aims (not being up-front about being allegorical). Not having seen the movie I cannot tell how true this is; but if it is, it is a great argument.

Mr_sausage wrote:I'm also not sure what to make of her condemnation of the film for showing ancient Maya-on-Maya violence when, apparently, current Mayas are experiencing racial violence from non-Mayas today. Is she saying that condemning the Mayas for their ancient internal violence is immoral since they are now receiving violence from without? I don't see how the issues are related, to be honest, although I do appreciate her concern over the injustice suffered by a group of people in our current time.

I think what she means is that the movie is, in effect, justifying the Spanish conquest. By showing the Mayan people in a historically anachronistic internecine conflict just before the Spanish arrive, Gibson seems to be implying that the Spanish are saving them from themselves. White man's burden, etc.

I'm not saying that I agree with her argument, or that I approve of the use of the word pornographic. But that seems to be the thrust of her argument, and it's one that's fairly common among scholars who deal -- broadly speaking -- with the "postcolonial." In other words, there's an antipathy towards showing pre-Westernized cultures as barbaric, even if they were, because it serves to reinforce the notion that Westernization is always beneficial.

I have yet to see the movie, so I can't really comment on the appropriateness of that argument in this instance.

It also seems that one of her big beefs is in the dumbing down of the Mayan culture for Gibson's greater allegorical purposes. In order to fulfill his apparent message of self-destruction through excess, it would appear that Gibson glossed over the finer cultural points of the Mayan civilization in favor of those that suit his needs (i.e. the barbaric aspects). And while fictionalization of a culture to suit an artist's goals is hardly an uncommon event, the approach that Gibson has taken -- "Look, those Mayans are speaking real Mayan!" -- gives the film a veneer of verisimilitude that is probably more than a little offensive to those who have a strong interest in that which is being caricatured.

Don't know that I would go so far as to call out Gibson on pornographic grounds, but other than that hot-button word, Ms. Ardren actually seems quite rational about bringing an important counterpoint to the table while focusing on the work rather than the lobbing reactionary attacks at Gibson -- an approach that would have been all too easy and entirely unhelpful in creating awareness for her cause.

-Toilet Dcuk

Well, that article is just absurd. I think this person is getting a little carried away.

I'm not as knowledgeable about the Mayan empire as I'd like to be, although I will probably educate myself following seeing this motion picture. What I know is what I learned in High School. Inaccuracies with the film are not apparent to me, nor was I seeking to be educated by buying a $9 ticket to a Mel Gibson movie.

My wife is a Spanish teacher, thus she has a well-rounded knowledge of the history of Hispanic cultures. I was very interested in seeing the film based solely on what I saw in the trailer. I was not interested in any hearsay or gossip. My wife may have been leaning more toward “The Holidayâ€

From DigitalSpy:

Gibson sued for stealing scenes
Monday, January 1 2007, 10:26 GMT
By David Cribb
A Mexican director is suing Mel Gibson, claiming he has stolen his ideas.

Juan Catlett insists that Gibson stole some of his work for his new film Apocalypto, by using scenes from Catlett's film Return To Aztlan.

He claims that the director's manager requested a copy of the 1989 movie whilst Apocalypto was in its filming process.

Catlett has now started legal proceedings against Gibson. Apocalypto opened earlier this month, taking £10 million in the first weekend.

OK, I saw this last night and I'm genuinely scared.

Why is this film being universally praised (and by otherwise sensible people)?

The thing that disturbs me is the praise given to the photography (I'm not even going into plot/editing!). Even calling it third-rate sci-fi channel inspired by Malick, is quite frankly insulting. Either I went and saw a print of a film called Apocalypto made by someone else, or I saw what I saw, whcih was a film that looked like shit.

HA! I've just looked at the cinematographers filmography. The only precedent I could think for a film as ridiculously ridiculous and uncinematic as this was Waterworld. It turns out he shot that as well, along with a string of other classics.

The world has gone mad.

Waterworld is one of the most beautifully photographed films I have ever seen.

I had no issues with the cinematography. In fact, this is the first digitally shot flick that doesn't look like shite. It may be unimaginative, but it isn't ugly.

Barmy wrote:I had no issues with the cinematography. In fact, this is the first digitally shot flick that doesn't look like shite. It may be unimaginative, but it isn't ugly.

I guess you haven't seen Robert Altman's The Company.

I have and it looked all TVish, just like 99% of all digital video "movies".