Year: 2006

Apocalypto, 2006. Directed by Mel Gibson, written by Gibson and Farhad Safinia. Starring Rudy Youngblood, Dalia Hernandez, Jonathan Brewer, Morris Bird, Carlos Emilio Baez, Raoul Trujillo, Gerardo Taracena, Rodolfo Palacios, Fernando Hernandez Perez, and Maria Isidra Hoil. Among many others…

Now showing in theaters around town.

From the sermons of street critic Guy Fresno:

Roll up, roll up! The end is nigh! Behold before you the coming Apocalypto, ladies and gennulmen! Witness the toothy Mayans! Bold and bloody sacrifice! Hearts torn from chests–still beating! Young children sewing up gashes with fire ants! Underwater birth! Roll up, roll up for a spectacle like you’ve never seen before! Unless you’ve seen Southern Comfort, Deliverance, any number of John Ford and lesser westerns, Predator, or… well, anyway, Apocalypto is P. T. Barnum meets D. W. Griffith meets Mad Max! A time is guaranteed for all!

And, behold, innocents, Mr. Mel isn’t merely interested in a night’s entertainment! No, siree, Goodman Gibson is a prophet as well! Yes, Apocalypto, is as arresting as Thomas Cole’s Course of Empire, is nearly as bloated, and is twice as alarmed about the current path our country is taking. Mel takes us on a journey into the deepest parts of the jungle, except that the jungle is the city and the forest is the land of Nod.

Apocalypto is the story of a band of gentle wandering warriors who love to fuck their wives and kill pigs with big huge sticks. The village is a place of idyll, where everyone laughs at the impotent and they pause every now and again to make somber speeches about the nature of fear and responsibility. Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood) is the hero, he’s got a wife named Seven (Dalia Hernandez), a huggable little boy and a baby on the way. Suddenly, the village is invaded by a band of warriors from the city, all tattooed and decked out in skulls, gritting their teeth and scowling like city folk do. They burn the village, rape the women, and tie everyone up to a pole to sell in the big city.

Except for Seven and the boy. Jaguar Paw lowered them into a dry cenote to hide, with the promise that he will return. Of course, he’s carted off to the city. So there’s your plot.

In the meantime, we get a treacherous ride through the wilderness. Fighting a stream. Almost falling off a cliff. Meeting a diseased young girl who augurs the end of times. Finally, our band of ragtag villages sees the hopelessly immoral city-dwellers, get painted blue, and then hauled up to the top of a Mayan pyramid, where they get their hearts carved out, their heads hacked off, and their bodies tossed down steps and into the screaming crowds below.

Awesome, huh? People, you may recall that Gibbson brought us The Passion of the Christ, a heartwarming and appetite-reducing film about the sufferer in all of us. For Gibson’s never content just to show you some guy’s eyes widening as he stares at his own heart, still beating and bloody… no, he’s trying to teach us a lesson in our story. And the lesson is this: there’s no fucking way in hell you can ever make an independent film in Hollywood, not without some serious dough.

Look, look, look. You there, you think you’re gonna write a screenplay and make that thing fly? Think again. Unless you can weasel your way into Sundance, fool, then you ain’t goin’ nowhere. For it’s clear in Apocalypto that the evil Mayans represent the studio heads, foolish souls, with their strange religion and warlike ways, sitting atop the citadel, pulling out the creative soul (hearts) and intelligence (heads) from artists like Gibson and hurling them into the masses below. If the studio heads want art, they don’t look to the villagers and their peaceful, religious ways, but to the freaks in the city, chattering and doing their drugs. Hell, it’s the guys like Gibson, the Jaguar Paws, that get sacrificed!

But Jaguar Paw is able to escape thanks to a blessing from God (in the form of an eclipse, and thank you Mark Twain). Like Gibson borrowing the story of Christ to cement his ability to make epics like Apocalypto, so Jaguar Paw is able to use a blip in the sky to piggyback on people’s shaky faith, and run free. And he gets to suffer, man! Mr. Paw ends up being impaled twice before he can save his wife. In the meantime, he’s able to lure a bunch of the nasties into the jungle, where he lives in harmony and can kill them with snakes, frogs, sliding into second base, and disemboweling with a boar-killing apparatus that Walter Hill invented long ago.

But it’s OK that the movie’s derivative, people! We all borrow from the prophets that walked before us!

In the end, poor Jaguar Paw has collapsed on a beach, and then, there, in the galleons that have emerged from the foggy sea, we see the influence of Europe, Godless Europe! on the American Film Industry. No, that one doesn’t really make sense, but perhaps Gibson’s trying to test our faith. No one ever the seers are crystal clear.

Brothers and sisters, listen to the message of the prophet! This is independent film, people, the money came right out of Mel’s pocket, and much of that came from you fundies who went in droves to see Christ’s flayed into jerky strips. Behold the black jaguar, chewing off the face of whatever studio films happen to open opposite Apocalypto! Marvel at the baby, the birth of honest filmmaking, in purifying water! Be amazed at the nearly 3-D effects of arrows and spears shooting through the thick jungles, the intellectuals unable to reach the target of the honest souls, as Gibson has done!

Then again, maybe the thing’s just as insane as the looney shouting at you in front of a movie theater.

The Late Show, 1977. Written and directed by Robert Benton. Starring Art Carney, Lily Tomlin, the great character actor Bill Macy, Eugene Roche, Joanna Cassidy, and John Considine.

Who’s making noir anymore? Foreigners, maybe, immigrants from a decaying Russia come to France to ply their trade, or Austrians eager to shake us by the nape of the neck, make us tremble in our sleep. But who gives us the seediness that hides just beneath our well-tended lawns? Or the menace that lurks in every 9-to-5er, the soul who’s tired of the same grift, day after day, and thinks, maybe I ought to try one stab at the good life? Over the years there’s been some little noirs that have come our way, things like Fargo and A Simple Plan, clean and well-lit and brilliantly acted, but they aren’t messy enough, aren’t real. Noir, at its best, got the weariness, the ugliness, the migraine grind of the day. It got that you had to eat, and often you didn’t eat well.

Look at The Late Show. I don’t know how, because this little treasure isn’t available at most Blockbusters and Hollywood Videos. The library doesn’t own it, and neither does Cinema Revolution, though they should. It’ll never play in a theater–we don’t have a repertory theater anyway, and even if we did, this is the last film they’d show. The Late Show is noir. Dark edges and a complex plot whose job it is to obfuscate life for the poor saps who have to endure its vicissitudes. Like 70s films it is a grungy admixture of the goofy, trippy, melancholy, the horrifying and the sad, and doesn’t shirk from the minutiae of life. Our hero does his laundry, has problems with ulcers, gulps Alka Seltzer, and, like the other characters, wonders just what the hell is going on in the world. And why everyone has to make it so damned complex.

Even better: it is about how noir has altered life, how Raymond Chandler and Co. have made Los Angeles in their own image, and, good or bad, we cannot escape.

Art Carney plays Ira Wells, a once great detective and now semi-retired curmudgeon living in a boarding house in L.A. One evening, while watching garbage on TV, his partner stops by with a bullet in his gut, and dies on the bed. At his pal’s funeral, he’s approached by Charlie Hatter (Bill Macy), a grifter friend of Ira’s, who’s there to introduce old Ira to Margo Sperling (Lily Tomlin), a true space cadet, who needs someone to track down her kidnapped cat. Ira has no interest in hunting down lost felines, but of course he gets wrapped up in the case, which eventually involves stolen stamps, affairs, fencing, porno houses, and murder.

Carney is an old man, aching, waddling down the street to wash his clothes in a dumpy launderette, trying to make ends meet. His friend, Charlie, has a seedy office where he wears the hats of talent agent, realtor, detective… anything that’ll land him a lousy buck or two. And Margo is a talent agent, seamstress, one-time actress, the usual L.A. kook. The Los Angeles they live in cannot quite escape its past. The ghosts of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, of Humphrey Bogart and Peter Lorre, wander the streets and the empty homes, infusing the characters conversations, their movements, their dreams.

The movie is funny and has its rough spots: a few too many car chases, a couple of clunky spots of dialogue. But its humor we’re all familiar with, if we’ve ever tried to scrape out a living doing something we don’t like, working the telemarketing lines, knocking on doors, anything with sales. We’re all looking for the grift that’ll make us respectable. Ira stayed respectable for 31 years and all he’s got to show for it is a bad gut and some pennies in the bank. In the end, we’ll all be dead, just a plot in one of the massive graveyards that add some greenery to the city. Maybe that’s the point: be a gumshoe, be a grifter, turn the good life upside down because that’s what life’s all about. Chaos. Whatever happens, in the end, we all find peace.