Apocalypto Later

The Mel Gibson mess seems to be getting heavier all around, like fog. People will eventually get sick of it, but they’ll never forget about it. I’ve gotten used to the idea of news stories flaring brightly for a week or two and then going away, but there’s something deeper and skunkier about this one. Fame lasts 15 minutes; memories of racial hatred tend to linger a bit longer.
And that probably means that Gibson’s Apocalypto (Disney, 12.8) may have to push back its release date. April ’07, I’m thinking. Maybe. I don’t know. I’d like to hear opinions. But I’m starting to think that bumping it makes sense.

Mel Gibson giving direction during shooting of Apocalypto (Touchstone, 12.8)

There are lots of indications out there about how deep-seated the public’s anger at Gibson may be over his reported anti-Semitic blurtings, but the thing that got me was a story about Gibson’s troubles (“Mel to Pay?”) in the News & Notes section of this week’s Entertainment Weekly.
I don’t remember any story in this section ever drawing a hard moral line in the sand. Views and attitudes are hinted at left and right every week, but never in a declarative, plain-spoken way. But right after saying that attempts at rehabbing Gibson’s image (including “the Official Talk Show Contrition Tour””) are probably in the works, writer Daniel Fierman concludes with these words: “We’re here to tell you it’s not going to work — at least right now. The violence of Gibson’s [anti-Semitic] words won’t allow it.”
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The words “we’re here to tell you” tells me something is going on. Anything that goads EW editors into growing a pair and actually allowing something to be said in their magazine is a significant seismic indicator. And I’m starting to think there’s no way Disney’s Touchstone division can put Apocalypto (12.8) into theatres only four months from now.
The pre-release p.r. campaign would obviously have to begin sometime around mid October, and no matter how many Larry King and Diane Sawyer confessionals Gibson does on the tube (and he’ll probably have to wait until late September or early October to do these or he’ll look too craven), any Apocalypto interview he gives will turn into a referendum on racism.
I strongly doubt that the Gibson moral rehab effort can work if it’s hurried along. And I doubt it can be managed successfully (if it can be managed at all) over the next two months.

The public needs to chill about this, and the media needs to get sick of writing about it. We all know that as long as editors and reporters think there’s any juice in this story, they’ll keep hammering. Everyone has to get completely bored of dissing Mel-the-bigot — it’s the only way — and that can only be achieved through endless repetition.
The Gibson thing will cool down naturally by the end of this month, but it’ll spark up again like a wounded panther if and when the Apocalypto campaign starts up in the mid fall.
I have an idea that if Touchstone pushes Apocalypto back and lets the boiling water cool down, it’ll be less difficult to release it in early April, or possibly late March. Or maybe a bit earlier. I’m not sure. People are going to bring up anti- Semitism no matter when Apocalypto comes out, but they’ll probably be a bit more tired of it six or seven or eight months from now.
I’m leaving film fanatics like myself out of the equation. I’d much rather see Apocalypto sooner than later. Gibson is a nervy hard-core filmmaker, and I’ve been reading all along that he’s got something to say about parallels between ancient Mayan culture and our own. My vote, personally, is open it sooner, not later. But I’m from Mars.
I was talking with some guys in a video store last night about Apocalypto‘s release, and one guy in his early 40s said he thinks the Malibu racism thing will increase interest in people wanting to see it, and that nobody will give that much of a damn in four months’ time.
I suspect this may be a minority view, but what does everyone think?

Freshly Perverse

In anticipation of Neil LaBute‘s The Wicker Man (Warner Bros., 9.1), yesterday I rented a DVD of Robin Hardy‘s ’73 classic of the same name. (The extended version, of course.) Sharply written by playwright Anthony Shaffer (Sleuth), it has a reputation of being an exceptionally creepy piece. Which it is, although it contains only one big jaw-dropper at the finale. Which there’s no forgetting. And yet it’s far from a horror film.
Boiled down, Shaffer and Hardy’s Wicker Man is a correctly mannered, somewhat dry parlor drama with an undercurrent of female eroticism and faint malice. It’s pretty much all talk and inference, but in the service of something quite strange.

Nicolas Cage, director-writer Neil LaBute during filming of The Wicker Man (Warner Bros., 9.1)

It’s about a rigid, devout, clearly uptight Christian policeman (Edward Woodward) visiting a pagan society on an island off the Scottish coast in search of a missing girl, and his being constantly deceived by the locals in a strangely uniform way. Every last islander is either blank-faced or oddly cheerful, which seems especially weird in view of what they’re all planning. Lo, how righteousness spirals upward to the heavens, contained in a twisting plume.
The Wicker Man wouldn’t work nearly as well without the hammer-like energy and fierce conviction that Woodward brings to his role of Sgt. Howie. There’s no ques- tioning this cop’s intense Christian convictions — he’s all about discipline, rectitude and butt-plug righteousness. And, of course, sexual repression.
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What happens to Howie at the end is what The Wicker man is all about — a metaphor about the fast-eroding influence of traditional Christianity in the face of the newborn spiritual currents of the late ’60s and early ’70s (LSD mysticism, Bhagavad Gita, Tom Wolfe‘s “third great awakening”) and the general shirking of tradition.
What will the metaphor of the new Wicker Man be? Labute wrote the script (naturally), and one of his changes is that the remote island society is now matriarchal instead of patriarchal, as it was in the ’73 film. (In this light, Ellen Burstyn is the new Christopher Lee.) LaBute said at Comic-Con a couple of weeks ago that the film is at least partly about the fact that “women scare me more than men,” or words to that effect.
With men’s social dominance eroding over the last 35 or 40 years, their powers increasingly diluted and on the downswing and guys feeling less and less vital, it seems reasonable to assume that LaBute has made tthe growing stength and independence of women (and the way this has made some guys feel) the focus of his film.

What’s for sure is that LaBute hasn’t made a standard-issue Lionsgate shocker. More assaultive than the ’73 film, but relatively restrained by the standards of 21st Century jolts and gore. And however it turns out, something his and is alone.
In a piece by Charles Lyons in today’s , LaBute says, “Even if there are a few people who are pushing you in saying, `We would love it if this movie was Saw for the first weekend, and it was The Sixth Sense for the next five weeks, you ultimately have just one film that you can create.”
The Wicker Man “probably has a number of scenes that are bloodier than anything in the original,” Lyons reports, adding that LaBute “deliberately exercised restraint in using special effects that, as he put it, provide only a ‘moment’s pleasure.'”
LaBute’s film, says Lyons, “will echo its forebear’s intelligence, even if that means making the contemporary audience work a little harder than usual. ‘If The Wicker Man is a thinking person’s horror film,” says LaBute, ‘that’s great.'”
Like Sgt. Howie, Cage’s cop — called Edward Maulis in Labute’s film — is conservative-minded but more “suave” than Woodward’s character, or so Lyons reports.

This lewd and leering shot is from a scene always mentioned in any discussion of the ’73 Wicker Man — a musical number (yes, a musical number) featuring Britt Eklund, whose singing voice was dubbed by either Annie Ross or Rachel Verney.

One curious thing: Lyon’s article devotes five paragraphs to the fragile ego of Hardy, the original Wicker Man‘s director, specifically his conviction that he was slighted by the producers of the new version when they failed to show him a copy of LaBute’s script and/or declined to let him see the film. Five paragraphs out of 22 — more than 20% of the piece.
The point, I guess, isn’t that Hardy’s feelings are hurt as much as the Wicker Man team doesn’t want anyone knowing what they’re up to.
This seems to be so. The Warner Bros. marketing plan doesn’t seem to include letting guys like me see The Wicker Man early and possibly writing about it. I’ve been trying to get an early peek since early July, but the word all along has been, “We know that you’re a Labute fan but not yet…we’ll let you know.”