SEEKING A NEW BEGINNING: MEL GIBSON'S "APOCALYPTO"

The following is a film review and analysis I composed for The Last Ditch in 2007. I am reposting it here to set the stage for my upcoming reconsideration of Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, to be published during Holy Week.

Rudy Youngblood as Jaguar Paw in Gibson's "Apocalypto"

by Andy Nowicki

Mel Gibson's latest movie, Apocalypto, is at the end of its run in theaters. Opening in early December, the film achieved a modest success, raking in nothing close to what The Passion of the Christ made, but still earning somewhere close to Braveheart's overall gross.What makes that modest success extraordinary is the fact that Gibson has essentially become a persona non grata in the film industry since his run-in with a Jewish policeman who arrested him for drunken driving in August 2006. If Passion didn't alienate Gibson from Hollywood's largely Jewish movers and shakers, including the distributors — the men who made Gibson rich and famous, and are now eager to unmake him — then his drunken anti-Semitic tirade on the occasion of his arrest, widely broadcast across the nation afterwards, surely did.

WORLD WITHOUT END

Modern Mayan LARPing the history for tourist dollars.

by Colin Liddell

One of the legacies of the world financial crisis is that it showed how absolutely clueless pundits, politicians, and financial planners can be about the direction we are heading in. This also explains our growing fascination with the mysterious Maya and their reputation for fathoming the distant future by reading the stars and the courses of the planets.

With the great vacuum of ignorance that enshrouds the future, it is not surprising that this long dead civilization with an astronomical bent has been sucked into the role of providing gnostic hints of what is to come. It was either that or Madame Zaza's tea leaves.