On the Quality of Things, #21
Fuck You America, and your Questionable Taste

by Wade Stuckwisch
illustration by Jacob Chabot

Before I get to the reviews for this month, let me take a moment to air the shit list I've been compiling for the last couple of months.

1) Fuck you to every critic who panned Tideland!

Film critics tend not to be the vanguard of standards of social decency, as their livelihood derives from considering an art form that tends to value artists who push boundaries and redefine social taboos. It surprises me, then, how many of the commentators' complaints found in the near-universal critical egging of Terry Gilliam's most recent film Tideland could be distilled down to "the film was too dark and disturbing." A.O. Scott of The New York Times in particular called the film's depictions of drug use, death and adolescent sexuality "unjustifiable," a stance that appeals to me as shamefully reactionary. Given some of the inconsistencies in the description of the plot common to many of the reviews that I read, I have to wonder if many of these reviewers even sat through the complete film, or if they did, if they were so busy plumbing their vocabulary for negative descriptive adjectives that they ceased to pay attention to the screen. Every critic is obviously entitled to pass his or her moral judgment on a film, since the vigor of so many films derives from the moral perspective that they embrace, but the majority of the criticisms of Tideland seemed facile and driven by knee-jerk distaste, or at best a gross misunderstanding of Gilliam's intentions, rather than a genuine, thoughtful assessment of the film's moral universe. It's fine to object to a film's subject matter, but to reject a film simply because it involves a child in peril and chooses to embrace a fanciful perspective-- albeit a morose one--rather than become a weepy, maudlin tragedy shows a disregard for Gilliam's unique talent, at best, and a reactionary closed-mindedness at worst.

2) Fuck you to every "serious" critic who thinks they can spoil plot twists!

Recently I was perusing reviews of the (at that time) soon-to-be released film Fur, the "imaginary portrait" based on the life and work of photographer Diane Arbus, when I stumbled upon Andrew Sarris's commentary on it. Sarris, in discussing the exclusion of Arbus's real-life 1971 suicide from the film, not only chose to give away the ending of the film, but also revealed the suicide of a fictional character in the film, by name, purely in passing. I know I shouldn't call one of the most important voices in the history of American film criticism a cunt, but… Sarris, you cunt, you spoiled it! Film is a time-based medium for more reasons than the physical need to arrange sequential shots on a continuous strip of celluloid, and two of those reasons are suspense and the element of surprise. I recall how, in my undergrad years, a professor of mine gleefully related how a student chided him for "spoiling" the endings to films like The Passion of Joan D'Arc and A Man Escapes, an anecdote made more amusing by the fact that any viewer should already know the ending--from history, in the case of the former, and from the title in the latter example. (Actually, I think I recall the student in the story being Frank Black in his UMass years.) There's a substantial difference between that scenario, however, and my complaint with Sarris's review: that difference is audience. I realize that Sarris probably does not feel compelled to self-censor observations that he feels are essential to his thesis, and I know the New York Observer is not doubt more interested in publishing Sarris's reviews in advance, for an audience considering whether to see the film, than for the smaller audience interested in reading Sarris's views afterwards. Still, a modicum of courtesy towards the members of the viewing and reading public that relish the element of surprise would not just be appreciated, but seems fundamental considering the review's timing. Also, if actual important reviewers like Andrew Sarris respected the "spoiler alert" rules more common among plebian internet message boards, perhaps the legion of self-important reviewers who think that they possess a voice as important as Mr. Sarris's, but in fact write for, say, a small regional newspaper or alternative weekly, would not follow his bad example in an effort to make themselves look or feel more significant than they are.

3) Fuck you to the movie studios for scheduling all the good movies in Fall!

Back in spring, I would be bored and looking to see a movie, or ineffectivelly trying to get some girl to sleep with me by warming her up with a couple of informal movie dates, but I couldn't because there was nothing good in theaters. I mean NOTHING - not anything remotely watchable, not even at the independent theaters. Do you really think I'm gonna pay more than $4.50 to see Firewall"? Or lure a girl home for "just coffee" after House of D? I know that spring is historically a down time at the box office, and all the studios want to schedule their smaller films by big-name independent directors in the fall to position them for awards season, but is that any reason to cock-block people like me from February to April? I submit to you, Hollywood, that there is NO justifiable reason for that! Now, suddenly, there are at least two movies every weekend that I'm interested in, and because I can't afford more than two $10.50 movie tickets a week, I'm forced to pick and choose, or I am left without the financial means to woo a woman of the world. Please, save The Science of Sleep until March! Just because Hero was number one at the box office as an October release doesn't mean Fearless won't do well in February! I can accept that there are a remarkable number of interesting films being produced by a bumper crop of exciting filmmakers new and old this year, and I know I should probably be celebrating rather than griping, but if spring starts to suck again the instant the Oscar nominees leave theaters, I'm sending my hooker bills to the major distributors. Maybe the reason the box office is always lower in spring is because there are so many SHITTY MOVIES in theaters…

Fuck it, review time.

The Last King of Scotland: Something disturbed me about this film, and it wasn't necessarily Forrest Whitaker's remarkable performance as Idi Amin, or the reality of Amin's slaughter of one and a half million Ugandans-it was the remarkable similarity between this film and Scarface. Imagine Scarface as told from the perspective of Tony Montana's brother, and you've got The Last King of Scotland in a nutshell. Perhaps if the film had not been based on true events, I would have been less demanding of a more thoughtful, probing portrait of the characters and the events depicted, but 1.5 million deaths will do that to a film. It's not a bad movie, and entertaining by its own right, but as a portrait of Amin's dictatorship it feels facile. (If you're in the mood for a truly challenging portrait of post-colonial Africa, I highly recommend that you rent Lumumba instead.)

The Science of Sleep: I think the highest praise that I can heap upon Michel Gondry's thoroughly enjoyable film about a confused dreamer is that it is remarkably unpretentious. Other critics may write pages on the film's debt to Surrealism, but the film's real currency is Gondry's unswayable dedication to his love of dreams and his own unfettered imagination. The film's handmade feeling, in its primitive animation techniques and special effects, communicates a simple, child-like affection that's hard not to fall in love with. Gael Garcia Bernal's boyish charm is perfect as the film's hero, a man so enamored with his dreams that he can no longer distinguish them from reality. That central conflict makes the eccentricities of the plot so natural that any head-scratching moments of, "is this reality, or this a dream?" are forgotten as quickly as, well, a dream. The Science of Sleep has the feeling of a craft project lovingly created as a gift of affection-a novelty in the prohibitively expensive medium of feature film-and even though Gondry's affection is perhaps self-reflexive, as an audience we should be flattered that we are the recipients of such a lovingly crafted charm.

The Departed: Do yourself a favor: if you can, see The Departed before you see the Hong Kong police drama that Martin Scorcese's remake is based on, Infernal Affairs. The razor-sharp twists and turns of Infernal Affairs rank it, in this reviewer's opinions, among the best police thrillers produced anywhere in the world. The Departed faithfully copies the plot and many of the most successful set pieces of Internal Affairs almost to the letter, even mimicking some of the locations with Boston standing in for Hong Kong, but the focus of The Departed is the characters of the story rather than the thrills. Even as I enjoyed Scorcese's reverse engineering of the original, I found myself nostalgic for some of the white-knuckle intensity of the cat-and-mouse game found in Internal Affairs. Considered on its own, however, The Departed is a fascinatingly grim look at the thin line that separates the criminal's desperate need to survive from the cop's easy claim to authoritative power. Scorcese's off-kilter direction resolutely refuses to remain invisible-it's virtuosic, without a doubt, but also occasionally distracting. The characters in The Departed are painted with a pallete knife rather than a fine brush: the twitchy homicidal mania of Jack Nicholson's crime boss veers between the unsettling and the idiosyncratic, and Mark Wahlberg's abusiveness as a tough-as-nails cop occasionally strays from believability. It's a tribute to Leonardo DiCaprio's abilities that he can be the focus of all this wild energy and not crumble under the strain, and his effort to maintain his sanity undercover is contrasted beautifully by Matt Damon's all-too-easy charm as the IA cop who works for the mob. The resulting world of desparate violence and murky morality is something akin to the strung-out world of Bringing Out the Dead, but with a much more focused story to prevent it from flying off the tracks. In spite of its eccentricities, one has to respect the crazy-after-all-these-years attitude of Scorcese as a director who remains unafraid to take risks. In a way, the film's style parallels the world that its characters live in, which could come crashing down on anyone's head at any given moment. And when trouble does come falling from the sky… well, I don't want to give anything away. I'll let the important critics do that.

Little Children: Best movie of the year, hands down. As an actor, writer/director Todd Field played a role in Stanley Kubrick's final film, "Eyes Wide Shut," and I'm suspicious that he may have stolen a little of the genius Kubrick's fire before he passed away. The subtlety and depth of "Little Children's" studied portrait of juvenile impulses in adult lives makes "American Beauty" look like "Porky's" by comparison. Will Lyman's omniscient narration frames the film with the alienating tone of an anthropological study, which surprisingly works to the narrative's advantage, giving it an edge of dry satire that is often missing in mid-life crisis tales. Still, we feel for the alienated husbands, wives, lovers, mothers and sons of this tale, perhaps because we are told by Field's standoffish direction that we are meant to have sympathy for the people, not empathize with their choices. Tom Perotta (author of the namesake novel and co-writer of the screenplay) has doubtlessly contributed a fine story to work with; the characters and situations depicted illustrate with a mirror's clarity the insecurities of our times and the absurdities of our uncertain navigation of our gender roles, societal duties and romantic impulses. It's certainly not a pretty picture, but it says a thousand very poignant words.

Tideland: If Tideland's ill-wishing critics had their way and the film really was Gilliam's finale, it would make an interesting bookend to the unrelentingly bleak world of his first post-Python endeavor, Jabberwocky. I, however, am not about to try to pound any nails into Terry's coffin; if Gilliam's career has illustrated anything, it would be the ability of am unrelenting artist to always conjure up a resurrection. The fantasy world of the little girl in Tideland, Jeliza-Rose (played marvelously by a young actress named Jodelle Ferland - who knew a loony like Gilliam had the patience to direct children!) comes from a dark place indeed - her parents are both hopeless, crazed junkies, and after her the death of her mother (Jennifer Tilly), her father (Jeff Bridges, as always wonderful) takes her to an abandoned house floating in a seemingly infinite prairie that was once his ancestral home. Jeliza-Rose is abandoned to the fantasy world where she lives with her four dolls, which have been reduced by unexplained circumstances to their heads only. Soon she meets a witch-like character and her brain-damaged son (played by Brendan Fletcher in another of the movie's brilliant performances), and young Jeliza Rose is drawn into their lives as she tries to navigate her way out off the Grimm fairytale forest she has been born into. Gilliam's endlessly shifting camerawork can leave the viewer a little seasick, and it seemed more appropriate to the drug crazes of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas than to Jeliza-Rose's fantasy world and its thin protective shell. There's no denying, however, that only Terry Gilliam could have approached Jeliza-Rose's bleak reality with such unsentimental honesty, or depicted the fantasies that she escapes to with such sincere empathy. Gilliam fully appreciates that all of our favorite fairy tales are moribund and rife with symbols of repressed and fearful sexuality, and he is unafraid to make the sources of those insecurities literal where the story demands it. And there's even a happy ending of sorts, a once-in-a-blue-moon occurrence for a Gilliam picture. Critics be damned - only Terry Gilliam could dive into a sewer and dredge up something so shockingly beautiful without holding his nose with self-righteous indignation.

The Prestige: Here's what I like best about The Prestige: when was the last time you saw a movie about two dueling magicians that involves Nikolai Tesla in a pivotal role? One could argue that the dueling performer story has been done more than once, but I have trouble thinking of a movie that mixes artistic endeavor, science fiction and mystery in quite the same way as The Prestige. Plus, the trick ending ("the prestige" is the third act of a magic trick, so it's no surprise that there's a twist ending coming) is no empty trick of screenwriting-it truly redefines and brings closure to the two characters and the struggle that we have witnessed all along. I've seen Christian Bale play an American in so many movies that his thick working-class accent in "The Prestige" seems alien. Still, Bale and his foil Hugh Jackman are fantastic, and clever enough to never let on which magician is truly the most sympathetic. Plus, the story is original and compelling enough that, even when you know you've got it figured out, you'll stay with the film just for the shock of seeing if you were right. And of course, we now know whether Batman or Wolverine would win in a fight (although, in a way, The Prestige reverses Bale and Jackman's roles, with Bale as the reactive working-class scrapper and Jackman as the studious aristocrat). Christopher Nolan's brother Jonathan should write stories like this for more of Hollywood-this town could use a strong dose of Nolan Brothers originality.

Borat! Cultural Learnings of America to Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan: Yeah, it's pretty funny. There were some flat spots, but there's no denying that Sasha Baron-Cohen's Borat schtick, at its best and cruelest, is inspired. Some commentators looking to find fault with the film have argued that too much of the comedy in Borat is aimed at the disenfranchised of America's Deep South, a soft target often exploited by comedians. These critics seem to be oblivious to the fact that one of the movie's funniest gags is at the expense of normally erudite Manhattanites. The sight of New York pedestrians running like startled chickens from an overly-forward Borat, then letting loose a stream of verbal effluence when cornered, is probably one of the movie's most cleverly subversive moments. We New Yorkers so readily accept the permanent state of shell-shock that arises from our mistrustful attitudes as a necessary survival instinct, that we never suspected a comedian like Baron-Cohen might use it to skewer our highbrow image and make us look like paranoid freaks. Before Borat, I never appreciated the irony that New Yorkers are so proud of embracing the international and unusual, yet live in such mortal fear of the Other that sits next to us on the train. It's that kind of subversive social commentary, rather than the fairly standard comic story and vignettes that range from inspired to just plain goofy, that elevates Borat from a funny prank to a potent and timely satire of xenophobia. Baron-Cohen is, to his credit, merciless in his dedication to Borat's sexist, anti-Semitic, 19th century worldview that holds a mirror up to the blemishes remaining in 21st century civilized society. When Borat and his producer/companion arrive at a Florida bed and breakfast run by the world's sweetest elderly Jewish couple, I cringed in fear wondering what sort of horrible misdeed Borat would inflict on these unsuspecting innocents. (Luckily, some sense of kismet must have kicked in, and Baron-Cohen devises a punch line to the sequence that plays on the worst sort of anti-Semitic stereotypes but leaves the innocent lodge owners out of the loop.) Sasha Baron-Cohen has an admirable gift for exploiting the weaknesses in the armor of people's egos, and he always walks a thin line between using that gift for good (as when he exposes the prejudices of an RV of South Carolina fratboys) or evil (as when he dupes a village in Romania into standing in as Borat's twisted version of Kazakhstan). But a prank is a prank, and in the case of a really good, take-no-prisoners prank, the ends must justify the amorality of the means. And Borat is one hell of a great mean prank.

Marie Antoinette: I have a tendency to dislike social satires about the very rich, even those considered by many to be classic films. Gosford Park? Boring PBS fodder. Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game, often cited as one of the best films ever made? A few nice shots, otherwise average. That Dogme 95 film, The Anniversary? Despicable, ham-fisted excuse for satire badly videotaped by people with more pretensions than talent. As first I thought that maybe this is because, as the product of a long line of peasants and farmers, I simply despise the upper class and don't want to see movies about them. More recently, however, I've come to believe that my perceived problem may actually be the problem of the filmmakers-they so often despise the subjects of their films so much that they cannot find anything human enough in them to make them believable, and their attempts at satire become easily dismissible polemics based on facile perceptions of the injustice of class structure. Perhaps that is why Marie Antoinette is such a refreshing addition to the canon. Sofia Coppola, herself the offspring of Hollywood royalty, obviously sympathizes with Marie, the young Austrian girl who becomes queen of France. She is portrayed as living in such austere isolation that we understand how little the opulence that surrounds her seems to mean to her, even though it would mean so much to the starving masses of 18th century France. Marie seems too sheltered to even properly imagine the world outside Versailles, and in the film, as we follow her vain attempts to pursue meaning and a sense of freedom, we don't even get a glimpse of the working class until they're at the gates of the palace, ready to presumably take her to the guillotine. Coppola's choices in music and design-a nostalgic throwback to the new wave rebellion of the 1980s-ground Marie Antionette's desires in a modern context that make her much more than a dead history lesson to us. Some may see the poor little rich girl Marie's troubles as trifling, her attempts to break free as impotent and misguided, and her downfall as more deserved than tragic. Coppola's symapthy for the blighted queen, however, has such a fragile honesty to it that it remains compelling no matter what. Also, please note that cinematographer Lance Acord is a genius and possibly one of the most important DPs working today. Y'all better recognize.

Stranger Than Fiction: What does it mean to be in love with a fictional character? It's strange to leave a movie and feel such a strong sensation of infatuation, and know that it's not just for someone that I've never met, it's for a person who doesn't really exist. I haven't suddenly fallen in love with the lovely Maggie Gyllenhaal, I've fallen head over heels for her portrayal of Stranger Than Fiction's love interest, a leftist firebrand who runs a socially conscious bakery. But how could I not love a girl with a full sleeve of tattoos and half a Harvard education who bakes cookies? We're talking spouse material here! But this got me thinking: how much of our love lives are based on lusting after fictional characters, either imagined by clever writers, or brought to life by actors embodying those characters? Does it mean anything, to be in love with someone who doesn't exist? All this has almost nothing to do with Stranger Than Fiction, a movie about a (theoretically) real person who, somehow, discovers that he is unwittingly the subject of a novel that ends with his demise. (It has a lot more to do with Nick Hornby's book High Fidelity, now that I think about it, but that's irrelevant.) The premise raises several questions of plausibility that no one even attempts to explain, and a major plot point introduced later in the film is that the author, Kay Eiffel, must kill the man, Harold Crick, because it is pivotal to what is to be her greatest novel. Screenwriter Zach Helm has doomed himself to fail in that respect, because we can assume that whatever novel the fictional Kay Eiffel is writing is probably not going to actually have the appearance of being a masterwork to the film's audience, especially one that would impress the college English professor that is advising Harold Crick in his plight. (Otherwise, Helm would probably just go ahead and write Eiffel's novel himself.) Luckily, the film is saved by the charm of its characters and the terrific performances by the actors portraying them. The film teems with the type of character details that actors relish: Eiffel (Emma Thompson) butts out her cigarettes by spitting in a tissue and smothering them, the professor (Dustin Hoffman, as insightful and hilarious as ever) compulsively saves and reheats his coffee, and so forth. We sympathize with the frustrated writer even as we worry that there is no way she can simultaneously bring her story and Crick's story (and the movie, for that matter) to a satisfactory conclusion. The film's ending, as you may have guessed, is pure Hollywood, but it's the rare Hollywood ending that's done well. It's an easy movie to poke holes in, but equally easy to enjoy.

Babel: Babel is a movie with many things to say about people and society, but these are the main lessons I came away with:
1) Naughty schoolgirls must be forced to wear their panties!
2) National governments are bad. Especially the American government.
3) Everyone needs to piss and/or jerk off now and again.
4) It's OK; everything is just a big mistake.
5) Jackals are bad, but guns are also pretty bad too.
6) You can tear a chicken's head off if you grab its neck and spin it around like a wet towel in a locker room towel fight. It's pretty cool!
Babel is a very moving, sensitive portrait of a group of people put at odds with each other by circumstances beyond their control, and probably one of the best and most sensitive films I've seen this year. It's also a far sight better and more mature than director Alejandro González Iñárritu and writer Guillermo Arriaga's last movie, 21 Grams. (21 Grams would have been a better-than-average drama if some dumb assistant editor hadn't dropped all the footage on the editing room floor and then stuck all the scenes back together in the wrong order.) However, I couldn't help but feel like the movie came off a little light, like the feeling you get an hour after a meal consisting of mostly rice. Possibly it's because Lesson #4, the real crux of the movie, seems a little too simple to me. It's not like people don't ever do bad things in their own self-interest, you know. But I don't want to detract from what is otherwise a wonderful, very human film. Go see it, you idiots!

Tenacious D in The Pick Of Destiny: Tenacious D, musically, are an enigma. Are they two guys who get stoned and write funny songs, or they two guys who write funny songs about getting stoned? And how, pray tell, would one translate their "we hit 'record' on the tape deck and when we played it back this is what was there" spontaneity of their songs to the silver screen? Pick of Destiny is that attempt, and while much of the spontaneity of Tenacious D's humor is sadly dulled by the medium, KG and JB remain an amusing pair. There are funny musical performances, dick and fart jokes galore, and amusing celebrity cameos by Dave Grohl (nearly unrecognizable in devil makeup), Tim Robbins, and the reigning king of cameos, Ben Stiller. (Stiller has this way of making any character funny in less than thirty seconds. He's done it so many times, yet it almost always works. How does he do it?) The plot is borrowed from a Monkees episode, but the Monkees never could have pushed the humor to the places Tenacious D takes it. It's crude and childish, but crude in an endearing way and childish without losing its adult edge. It's funny. Not as funny as their albums, but funny. You'll probably laugh.

The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes: Once again, I probably shouldn't attend films that depend on visual lyricism after a long, tiring day, and I probably shouldn't review a movie for which I was constantly drifting in and out of consciousness at the screening. I will say that the film was strikingly beautiful, and will venture to say that I wish the animated sequences had been integrated into the film better and used to greater effect. Also, I will theorize that the reason I kept nodding off was partly due to a lot of long, boring segments that do little to propel the plot. So yeah, if you're looking for The Bourne Identity, this is probably not the movie for you. If you like pretty movies, though, check it out (ideally on DVD so that you can pause the film and get up and walk around when it gets slow).

The Fountain: I would like to put forward a thesis that I formulated while watching The Fountain: Most filmmakers are better storytellers than philosophers. Great films have been made that strive to take on great metaphysical or philosophical questions-a majority of my favorite films probably have that in common-but when a director decides to make a film, or a writer decides to pen a narrative to illustrate a point, rather than drawing up a philosophical tract, that person commits him or herself to telling a compelling story first and foremost. There's a terrific dramatic story in The Fountain, one about a couple struggling to make their love outlive death. There's also a lot of wild metaphysical stuff about the Tree of Life, the ancient Mayans, the Spanish Inquisition and a big weird orb in space, that distracts from that story a lot more than it enriches it. Maybe the elliptical references in the film to ancient civilizations and religious myth are truly necessary to illustrate the theme of eternal life, but, as an audience member, I felt that the smaller story of the modern doctor and his wife's tragic love got buried somewhere in all the time travel and pseudo-metaphysical mumbo-jumbo. Director Darren Aronofsky also breaks another essential primary rule of filmmaking: never, ever include a sequence depicting a character performing Tai Chi unless your film is explicitly a martial arts action film. (I know, man, it did look really cool. But seriously, don't do it. It's silly.) Regardless, the visuals in "The Fountain" are a splendor to behold. Some Mayans in space somewhere ought to build a ziggurat dedicated to Aronofsky and cinematographer Matthew Libatique's considerable talent for creating the film's astounding imagery. The Fountain abandons many of the show-offy signature camera and editing techniques Aronofsky used heavily in Pi and Requiem For A Dream, so if anything, The Fountain is evidence of his prowess as a director, not just as some trendy film school trickster. (Not that I doubted Aronofsky's skills before The Fountain, but you know, there are haters out there.) Clint Mansell, who composed the music for Requiem and Pi, has created a unique score that is both moving and conspicuously absent of techno clicks and pops. It's a legitimately great film, and one that clearly showcases the incredible talents of the people involved, but one that is also checked by its overly ambitions intentions. One more thing-there's a character death that has to be one of the all-time greatest cool ways to kill a guy ever. You'll see.

Apocalypto: Apocalypto is a movie, above all, with a TITLE. This is a movie with a name that you do not ignore when you see it on a marquee. This is a movie with a name that springs from the brush, impales you and then says, "You must see this movie, or at least investigate whether it is worth seeing!" If Apocalypto were a car, it would be a car with a very large tail fin and flashy rims that would set off all the car alarms in the neighborhood as it sped by without regard for public opinion. APOCALYPTO! It's such a great name that it could inspire an entire franchise of completely unrelated movies that capitalize purely on the power of the name. As examples:
Apocalypto Now: A disillusioned soldier named Jaguar Paw is asked by his Mayan commanders to pilot a boat into the darkest jungles of Mexico to assassinate a general gone rogue.
Apocalypticon: Based on fragments of an ancient Mayan legend, Gibson creates a visually sumptuous masterpiece with homoerotic overtones about a young slave boy named Jaguar Paw who is fought over by two Mayan warriors.
Apocalyptacus: A young slave named Jaguar Paw is trained to fight in the Mayan gladiatorial arena, but ends up leading a slave revolt against the corrupt Maya.
Apocalypto Jones: Jaguar Paw becomes a swashbuckling archaeologist, only to discover that there are no significant cultures that predate the Maya to discover. Meanwhile, he thwarts an evil Aztec plot to take over the world.
Apocalypto - The Wrath of God: Jaguar Paw, a megalomaniac conqueror, leads a reluctant group of Mayan soldiers into the South American jungle on a doomed quest for fortune.
The Discreet Charm of Apocalypto: A group of six respectable Mesoamerican warriors attempt to enjoy a meal of raw tapir, only to be disrupted by a series of surreal occurrences.
Apocalypdoz: Jaguar Paw, a brutal soldier who takes orders from a giant floating weapon-spewing head, discovers that he is the unwitting tool of a Mayan utopia gone wrong. (Five point to anyone who gets that reference.)
Apocalypto Beauty: Jaguar Paw, middle-aged and disillusioned with his role in Mayan society, forms an unusual relationship with a peyote-dealing youth who lives next door.
Apocalyptopussy: Secret agent Jaguar Paw discovers a plot by a rogue Inca general to roll a giant rock into a strategically important Aztec temple, thereby precipitating a pan-American war!

The movie behind the name, however, was a little disappointing. I give credit to Mel Gibson and his screenwriting partner, Farhad Safinia, for taking up the challenge of creating a film in a pre-modern setting and still creating characters that a modern audience can connect with. There's no sense of National Geographic voyeurism or Hollywood fetish in Gibson's portrayal of Jaguar Paw and his village-you get the sense that Gibson feels at home with these primitive people, maybe even more so than with modern society and its annoying traffic regulations. After the Maya show up, however, Apocalypto plunges headlong into every action movie cliché in the book. The plot could be summarized in barely a dozen words: Blunted is a schmuck (Act 1), The Maya are assholes (Act 2), the assholes get killed (Act 3). Also, there's a historical anachronism in the end that should be blatantly obvious to any grade school student who's studied pre-Columbian Mesoamerican history. ("Pre-Columbian" should be a big hint.) Historical accuracy is probably the least of any interested audience member's concern with a movie like Apocalypto, but the extent of the savagery and the allegorical parallels to modern society just can't compensate for the cookie-cutter nature of the movie's action.

-Published on The Great Hoboes of New York on May 12, 2007. (late because of publisher; not wade)