The tragedy that is Mel Gibson
Mel Gibson. First he makes that awful movie. Then he gets drunk and drives, gets caught, makes a bunch of anti-Semitic and sexist remarks.
Are you in the habit of declaring, “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” when you get pie-eyed? Or simply of muttering, “Fucking Jews”? Or of asking your arresting officer, “Are you a Jew?” (Here Gibson revealed an anti-Jewish bigotry so all-consuming that he couldn’t even get his ethnic stereotypes straight. The Jews control international banking, Mel. It’s the Irish who control the police.)So here’s Christopher Hitchens going after Mel:For good measure, Gibson turned on a policewoman observing his meltdown and said, “What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?”
There’s a lot to dislike about Gibson. He is given to furious tirades against homosexuals of the sort that make one wonder if he has some kind of subliminal or “unaddressed” problem… He has told interviewers that his wife, the mother of his children, is going to hell because she subscribes to the wrong Christian sect (a view that he justifies as “a pronouncement from the chair”). And it has been obvious for some time to the most meager intelligence that he is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred.Oh, and while Mel is trying to apologise to the Jewish community, what about an apology to the policewoman for that sexist remark? Blech.
Update: Hitchens is really going after Gibson with hammer, tongs and characteristic bile, but for some perspective and context on his own attitudes, I was looking for the Vanity Fair article that Hitchens wrote some time ago… I had written about it in an earlier post. Here’s the article. Blech.
And how about this? Now he says that he is willing to meet with Jewish leaders and work towards forgiveness. What a sham!
Comment by Nithya — August 2, 2006 @ 4:13 pm
He’s sick. I also wonder whether he plans to apologise to the policewoman. Bleh.
Comment by Uma — August 2, 2006 @ 4:17 pm
so the guy got drunk..and had made a movie before he got drunk.. how does that make the movie bad?
Comment by kuffir — August 3, 2006 @ 4:13 am
Why is “The Passion of the Christ” an awful movie? While I claim on knowledge of the Gospels and cannot judge whether the movie was anti-semitic or otherwise, I can definitely say this: it is a single-minded movie that is extremely well-executed. Gibson had a vision of suffering, however masochistic, and he brought it to the screen, warts and all. Isn’t that what auteurs do? Whatever one thinks of the violence and the floggings, the movie is one of the most interesting that I’ve seen and I admired Gibson for bringing it to the screen.
I don’t understand this urge in the US media to go back to the Passion and scrounge around for hints of anti-semitism now that we know for sure, that Mel is an anti-semite (I mean, did anyone really doubt that?). Whatever the state of Gibson’s warped mind or whatever darkness lurks there, he has translated it to the screen faithfully. For whatever its worth, you have to admire his film.
(I found Braveheart awful and I think Mel is a better actor than he is a director — but Passion is probably the only film of his that I found interesting).
Comment by shreeharsh — August 3, 2006 @ 2:29 pm
Kuffir, the movie was bad before this. It didn’t need help from Gibson’s recent ugly behaviour for me to regard The Passion as a puke-inducing torture-fest.
Comment by Uma — August 3, 2006 @ 2:43 pm
Sreeharsh, I don’t know much about the US media, or about the Gospels or the Jewish faith, and none of that has come into my response to the film. As far as I’m concerned, I just can’t handle watching two hours of just torture and warts-and-all, and that was what it looked like to me. Did I miss something? Maybe. But I can live with that.
Comment by Uma — August 3, 2006 @ 2:47 pm
Well, the violence was a bit much, even with my high thresholds — significantly higher than yours, I’d say. I enjoyed Kill Bill and loved — yes, loved! — Sin City. :-) And while I neither “enjoyed” nor “loved” the Passion, I admired its single-mindedness.
Comment by shreeharsh — August 3, 2006 @ 4:04 pm
Hey, I loved Kill Bill 1 & 2. Those were witty-violent. Not puky-violent like The P :)
Comment by Uma — August 3, 2006 @ 4:16 pm
uma,
i saw the movie six months ago - around that time i was helping a friend with a script for a movie based on the book of revelations.. so i was reading up a little, and i found the movie very realistic, and more true-to-life than many other movie versions..please remember, two thousands years ago..things were more barbaric than we assume in the middle east..and everywhere. and jesus comes across as very human in the movie and not a confident miracle-maker.. if your objection is to the violence, my objection to the other films on the subject is they seemed to skirt around very important issues, gloss over them.
Comment by kuffir — August 4, 2006 @ 4:55 am
The only Mel Gibson movie I liked was Ransom. Regards Braveheart - I only had this comment. I thought BR Chopra’s version of the MAhabharat was more viewable. I cannot imagine that a movie like Babe lost to this junkpile
Comment by Nikhil — August 4, 2006 @ 10:03 am