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Mad Max
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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 RE: Mad Max (in reply to Ricardo)
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I'm disappointed Mel did not go off on him and act super crazy.
I think Mel is basically a OK guy, but he was drinking way too much and running his mouth. It did not help that his second wife was quite vindictive. Mick Jagger said that fame does not sit lightly on anyone shoulders. His 2nd wife waited until he got drunk and was saying bunch of stuff he probably did not really mean and then she leaked it to the pubic. Or the police leaked it. I suppose she had had enough, but she was no angel, she was manipulative and narsty too. His first wife actually took him back, which she did not have to do at all, so it says something about his character.
Mel ain't the sharpest tool in the shed, but he did make a few good movies. The best was in The Bounty when he was going to stab Anthony Hopkins....you know the scene?
The other movie that was a total flobber flop, was Water World, but Kevin Costner bummed up what could have been a super Dude eating beer and chips flick. The sets were really good, but some of the story and camera work fell just short of it being a cult classic like Bladerunner, but not as good. All I can say is Frak, bring back Battlestar Galactica or B-5 I want cylons and vorlons.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Nov. 25 2014 0:49:12
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Mad Max (in reply to estebanana)
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In my opinion, Mel Gibson's finest role was in 1982's "The Year of Living Dangerously," directed by the Australian Peter Weir. The film was set in Indonesia in 1965 and concerned events leading up to the overthrow of Sukarno. It was a superb film. Gibson played an Australian journalist in Jakarta, Sigourney Weaver played a British Embassy official, and Linda Hunt was excellent as an Indonesian journalist named "Billy" Kwan. Great movie, occasionally shown on television's Turner Classic Movies. I recommend it to anyone should you get a chance to see it. Even if you have seen it, it is worth a second look.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Nov. 25 2014 2:14:48
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Mad Max (in reply to gj Michelob)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: gj Michelob
But also, as director, Mel Gibson did some sophisticated work:
"Apocalypto"
I spent six weeks walking in the jungle in Yucatan and northern Guatemala in 1961. There were still no roads, and very few people spoke any Spanish at all. My two friends and I hired a guide and translator about our age, early twenties. It was wonderful. The Mayans were warmly friendly, hospitable and humorous.
A few years later I spent two years in Honduras and Nicaragua as an employee of an Agency of the U.S. Government. The first year was spent training the Central American military. Then we went into combat. I was an "advisor" to a force that was supposed to be stamping out communism and driving out the Cuban cadres among the local people on the Caribbean coast. In fact I was the youngest company commander. The Cubans were about as hard to find as weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The villagers were just trying to protect their homes and families, and doing a pretty good job of it. I resigned, sickened and disillusioned.
When Apocalypto came out some forty years later Larisa and I still lived on the tiny island of Roi-Namur at the north end of Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands, in the central Pacific. The little movie theater had a roof but no walls. It was cooled by the trade winds in the evening.
We went to see Apocalypto. The depiction of the Mayan villages was very realistic, and brought out strong memories. After the first half hour of savage violence, as the city people kidnaped, murdered and raped the vilagers, Larisa turned to me and asked, "Are you ready to go?"
I replied, "Yes, I'm beginning to identify with the bad guys."
RNJ
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Date Nov. 26 2014 3:37:01
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estebanana
Posts: 9351
Joined: Oct. 16 2009
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RE: Mad Max (in reply to Ricardo)
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I should rephrase, Gibson seems different now, and I did not mean he was not intelligent.
I liked the Lethal Weapon movies, he and Danny Glover were a classic two cop team.
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Have any of you ever seen the film Vanishing Point? Speaking cars related to the protagonist. Well I owned a Honda 90 and a 73' VW bug with surf racks bolted to the top, that was my high school ride. So I can't talk about muscle cars, I've never owned one. But when I was in college I worked at a four star resort on the California coast, a very exclusive joint. I was a valet and I was able to park the most expansive sports cars on the road. Once in a while when things were slow and the upper management guys were off at the bar we would take turns pulling out a Ferrari or Lambie and take in on the Pacific Coast Highway for a drive. In retrospect, that was a bit mental, but most of the cars were leased and well, you only live once.
We used get into discussions about the clutches and the differences between driving the various sports cars. It was fun, but I liked my bug better and my Opel Kadet wagon was hands down better than any of them.
_____________________________
https://www.stephenfaulkguitars.com
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Date Nov. 26 2014 5:20:10
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gj Michelob
Posts: 1531
Joined: Nov. 7 2008
From: New York City/San Francisco
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RE: Mad Max (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
We went to see Apocalypto. The depiction of the Mayan villages was very realistic, and brought out strong memories. After the first half hour of savage violence, as the city people kidnaped, murdered and raped the vilagers, Larisa turned to me and asked, "Are you ready to go?"
I replied, "Yes, I'm beginning to identify with the bad guys."
RNJ
I had a similar reaction, the first time I watched it, Richard. It is, however, the unvarnished and in-your-face realism with which Mel Gibson brought back to life ages of time we cannot relate to, nor ever fully appreciate, that was revolutionary.
He gave us a first taste of his novel way to recount history in Brave Heart. The concept influenced many directors who began to detail violence and death realistically in their films in order to be more faithful to the story they were telling.
A compelling example of the influence Brave Heart had is certainly Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan; during the landing of the US soldiers in Normandy, I really felt bullets whistling over my head and blood spilling over my Pop Corn.
Realism. Not for the faint of heart -which I doubt it'd be your case, really, after the stories you shared here 
_____________________________
gj Michelob
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Date Nov. 26 2014 15:35:41
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Mad Max (in reply to estebanana)
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I mentioned earlier that my favorite Mel Gibson film was "The Year of Living Dangerously." I should expand on that a bit, because, in addition to Gibson's superb role as the Australian journalist, Sigourney Weaver's British Embassy official, and Linda Hunt's dwarf Indonesian journalist, what really brought everything together tightly was the work of the Australian director Peter Weir. Peter Weir orchestrated scenes in that film that were filled with menace and foreboding. He had a knack for creating an ominous atmosphere. Another film in which he created such scenes of foreboding with an ominous atmosphere was "Picnic at Hanging Rock." Peter Weir was truly a master craftsman when it came to directing.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Nov. 27 2014 19:21:15
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BarkellWH
Posts: 3458
Joined: Jul. 12 2009
From: Washington, DC
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RE: Mad Max (in reply to Richard Jernigan)
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quote:
We went to see Apocalypto. The depiction of the Mayan villages was very realistic, and brought out strong memories. After the first half hour of savage violence, as the city people kidnaped, murdered and raped the vilagers, Larisa turned to me and asked, "Are you ready to go?"
The Spanish were about as cruel as they come when it came to dealing with the indigenous people of Mexico, Central, and South America. They literally practiced genocide, sparing only those they forced to work the silver mines. Unlike the Spanish (and in contrast to much of the "politically correct" thinking today), the United States Government never implemented a policy of genocide. In spite of certain individuals and groups who were out to kill indians (The "scalp-hunters" along the borderlands, so well-depicted in Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian," being an example), the U.S. Government policy, bad as it was, was always to herd various tribes onto reservations. When the Indians objected and fled the reservations (Geroimo being a good example), the army would then hunt them down. But there was never a policy of extermination as the Spanish practiced in Latin America.
I was assigned to both Honduras and Chile, and I have traveled a good deal around Mexico, Central, and South America. I am always struck by the attitudes of the governing and controlling elites of most of these countries. To be called an "Indio" remains a slur. Mexico is quite a bit different than the rest of Latin America. By and large, pride in their Indian heritage cuts across class lines in Mexico. Mexicans are not entirely free of prejudice, but there is much less of it than in the rest of Latin America. Even in Honduras, which is 90 percent mestizo, there is little pride exhibited in their Indian heritage.
I would summarize the contasting attitudes toward the indigenous indian heritage in most of Latin America and in Mexico by noting two examples that manifest themselve publicly: In Mexico City, along the Paseo de la Reforma, there is a statue of Cuauhtemoc, the last Mexica (Aztec) ruler in Tenochtitlan before defeat at the hands of Cortez. In the central plaza (the "Plaza de Armas") in Lima Peru, there is a stature of Francisco Pizarro, the conquerer of the Inca Empire.
Bill
_____________________________
And the end of the fight is a tombstone white,
With the name of the late deceased,
And the epitaph drear, "A fool lies here,
Who tried to hustle the East."
--Rudyard Kipling
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Date Nov. 27 2014 20:50:46
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runner
Posts: 357
Joined: Dec. 5 2008
From: New Jersey USA
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RE: Mad Max (in reply to Ricardo)
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The always thought-provoking Jared Diamond has some very thought-provoking observations on genocide in human history and the relationships between diverse groups, in his books The Third Chimpanzee and Collapse. Over the course of the millennia, I venture to think that nobody's hands are quite clean, and so I do have a problem with films such as Braveheart which serve to re-open centuries-old wounds--the memories real or fake of asymmetrical violence between peoples--that hinder feelings of shared humanity. I recall reading during the horrors of Bosnia and of Kossovo, that the Serbs continued to be haunted by their defeat at the hands of the Ottomans at the battle of whatever some 900 or whatever years ago, and that "explained" their several atrocities against their former next-door neighbors. Europe, now at the pinnacle of its modern era of economic and social integration, is backsliding into ethnic and linguistic fragmentation again, with the sundering of Czechoslovakia a while back, the almost-victory of the Scottish nationalists, the murmurings of the Welsh, the Catalans, the only grudging survival of a unified Belgium, etc., etc. What the world really needs is far fewer languages (do we really need to restore a viable Cornish-speaking population in Cornwall?), and far less obsession with "ethnic pride and diversity". For all its absurdities, there was something humane about the Latin-speaking Universal Church of the Middle Ages and pre-religious-war Europe when an Erasmus could write for and be understood by his peers all across the continent. International science provides a modern counterpart, as very diverse researchers today engage in large joint enterprises. I pen this as an Anglo-French-Irish-German 100% American.
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Date Nov. 28 2014 10:13:37
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Richard Jernigan
Posts: 3430
Joined: Jan. 20 2004
From: Austin, Texas USA
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RE: Mad Max (in reply to BarkellWH)
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I am not nearly as familiar with U.S. government policy toward genocide as I am with attitudes of "Anglo" Texans of my great-grandparents' generation, and of the resulting Texas government policies, both as a republic and as a state.
These attitudes still had some echoes during my youth. I knew a Texas Ranger captain who proudly wore his grandfather's badge. The iconic lone star set in a circle was made, as was the tradition, from a silver five-peso coin, taken from the first Mexican the grandfather killed.
One of my father's best friends, also a Texas Ranger captain, had a low opinion of the one mentioned above, saying he had contributed to difficult racial relations in south Texas.
You will note that there are very few Indian reservations in Texas, and the few which exist are very small.
RNJ
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Date Nov. 29 2014 4:21:06
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) about my vision of Austrailia has always been based on this movie (Road Warrior especially, the second one). Checking out youtube I think it is funny some people were REALLY freaks for that movie. 
Like this guy who made a museum in a town with only 51 people! 
