Screw it, I'm watching Beyond Thunderdome
Here's a link and an excerpt about Mel Gibson's newest movie:
In order to make a bad idea seem poignant, Mel Gibson has to make it startling. Granted, I'm only judging based upon the Passion of the Christ, but would anyone have found it meaningful if it wasn't basically Mortal Kombat in Aramaic? Hell, Tarantino (sort of) released the same movie over winter break this year. It was called Hostel, and critics weren't exactly thrilled with it - "Silly, bloody nonsense that should appeal to hormonally challenged teens," according to Boo Allen of the illustrious Denton Record Chronicle. Stick Jesus and Pontius Pilate into it though, and you have a Baptist blockbuster flick.
Mel Gibson isn't alone in his methods. Go into any fiction class, or for that matter read some bad fiction in general. Even when a bad author has a good idea, the story will invariably end in murder, or rape, or torture (or alternately the story is about boy-girl college relationships, take your pick). Uncreative people go for bombast, always. The thing is, you need to be able to tie your themes together or else you've wasted a good idea. And, using bombast or shock-tactics as a crutch prevents you from actually tying anything together.
Example: so, you've got a story. A young German mysteriously becomes a gigantic beetle. And you've got a killer twist - it's because his mother was sexually assaulted, and as a young boy he had to watch! Guess what, Kafka, your reader is going to say, "Wow, never saw that one coming," and then he's never going to think about it again.
This isn't to say that you can't write a good murder story, of course. It's just that when you tackle ideas like that, you need a delicate touch, something bad writers and Mel Gibson both lack. And adding to it, Mel Gibson has taken the whole "what a shock!" idea to a new level, in which the entirety of his story is fraught with violence and dark import. And thus we have the Passion of the Christ, a 3 hour paean to masochism itself.
But hey, who knows. Maybe Apocalypto will bring Mel Gibson back to the heights he reached with Lethal Weapon, or at least The Patriot. And I doubt it can be worse than What Women Want.
"I wanted to shake up the stale action-adventure genre," Gibson told Time for a story on the magazine's Web site. "So I think we almost had to come up with something utterly different like this."Personally, I think that something in Mel Gibson's psyche snapped, and now he's convinced that he can make important films. It's not that I don't like art movies. The problem is that Mel Gibson's idea of an art movie is Mad Max written in a different language, with religious overtones.
"Apocalypto" is set in pre-Columbian Mexico and is being shot on the fringe of southern Mexico's rain forests. It addresses the end of civilizations and contains warnings about environmental degradation and political fear-mongering.
In order to make a bad idea seem poignant, Mel Gibson has to make it startling. Granted, I'm only judging based upon the Passion of the Christ, but would anyone have found it meaningful if it wasn't basically Mortal Kombat in Aramaic? Hell, Tarantino (sort of) released the same movie over winter break this year. It was called Hostel, and critics weren't exactly thrilled with it - "Silly, bloody nonsense that should appeal to hormonally challenged teens," according to Boo Allen of the illustrious Denton Record Chronicle. Stick Jesus and Pontius Pilate into it though, and you have a Baptist blockbuster flick.
Mel Gibson isn't alone in his methods. Go into any fiction class, or for that matter read some bad fiction in general. Even when a bad author has a good idea, the story will invariably end in murder, or rape, or torture (or alternately the story is about boy-girl college relationships, take your pick). Uncreative people go for bombast, always. The thing is, you need to be able to tie your themes together or else you've wasted a good idea. And, using bombast or shock-tactics as a crutch prevents you from actually tying anything together.
Example: so, you've got a story. A young German mysteriously becomes a gigantic beetle. And you've got a killer twist - it's because his mother was sexually assaulted, and as a young boy he had to watch! Guess what, Kafka, your reader is going to say, "Wow, never saw that one coming," and then he's never going to think about it again.
This isn't to say that you can't write a good murder story, of course. It's just that when you tackle ideas like that, you need a delicate touch, something bad writers and Mel Gibson both lack. And adding to it, Mel Gibson has taken the whole "what a shock!" idea to a new level, in which the entirety of his story is fraught with violence and dark import. And thus we have the Passion of the Christ, a 3 hour paean to masochism itself.
But hey, who knows. Maybe Apocalypto will bring Mel Gibson back to the heights he reached with Lethal Weapon, or at least The Patriot. And I doubt it can be worse than What Women Want.
