In normal times, America prefers to confine its armed mumbling lunatics to gun show parking lots and Roger Ailes' house. These are not normal times. Now, armed mumbling lunatics are washing up on our nation's beaches, mumbling and armed.

What's your favorite ancient Norse saga? (And don't say Hervarar saga ok Heiðreks—everyone says that!) Well, make room in your heart for the new Mel Gibson-directed viking film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. It should be epic.

Since graduating with honors from his outpatient "ongoing program of recovery" (aka Jewhab), Malibu's Ambassador of Tolerance Mel Gibson has skillfully managed to avoid further embarrasing Don Julio-fueled dust-ups with members of warmongering and/or tit-sugaring minority communities. His Mayan-mutilating masterwork Apocalypto, however, continues to sit like a blowdart in the side of certain Mayan descendants, like professor Alicia Estrada, who earned the auteur's wrath when she challenged his Melicized take on Latin American history at his recent Cal State Northridge speaking appearance:

· Oh, Mel Gibson, you incorrigible prankster! You've inserted a single frame of a guy in a Where's Waldo suit splayed upon a pile of massacred Mayans in Apocalypto (at :02 in the above clip, for those having trouble finding it), kind of like the gag you pulled with the trailer! You so crazy!
· Well, there go all those fun Kim Kardashian golden shower jokes. A pity.
· John Waters dips into Nerve's mailbag.
· Sacha Baron Cohen and Will Ferrell were too big to share the VF Hollywood issue cover with the Stillers of the world, according to Nikki Finke.
· Viggo vs. Pedro!

Mexican director Juan Catlett is suing Mel Gibson, claiming that the director lifted scenes from Return to Aztlan, his own, earlier movie about the end of the Mayan empire, for Apocalypto, allegations obviously orchestrated by Gibson's Jewish tormentors to further impede his already dim Oscar hopes. [Variety]
Pilot pick-up mania! NBC greenlights three drama pilots: a dysfunctional cop show from Dennis Leary and pals, a spy dramedy from The O.C.'s Josh Schwartz, and a new, probably ill-advised stab at The Bionic Woman. [THR]
Dancing with the Stars runner-up Mario Lopez is already reaping the impressive career benefits of not winning the high-rated celebrity waltz-off, replacing the guy from Desperate Housewives for the coveted gig of hosting the Miss America pageant on Country Music Television. [Variety]
THR triumphantly declares 2006 the Year of the Comeback at the international theaters, erasing the bitter memories of 2005, the Year That Too Many Sunny Weekends In Germany Sent Hollywood Into An Overseas Box Office Freefall. [THR]
Adult Swim nerds rejoice: The Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie is getting a March release date on 800
screens. [Variety]

On Thursday night, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger met with Jewish community leaders from all over California to celebrate Hanukkah at the State Capitol, and while photographs from the event seem to show Schwarzenegger generally enjoying himself, things got momentarily tense when he approached the Hollywood contingent and tried to do a little lobbying for a close, yet misunderstood, pal who recently may have said some terrible things he really didn't mean. Unfortunately, even after joining some of his guests in a dance to show good faith, the Governor was politely but firmly told the best they could do for his buddy's "bloody little movie" was an Oscar nomination in a technical category or two, and then only if the friend finally started showing up to some of those healing meetings he promised back in the summer.

Pour yourself a steaming cup of the weekend box office numbers, still the only reliable cure for an office holiday party hangover:

Deep into Friday afternoon or not, it's never too late to burn a post share a video gem with our readers, such as the above mash-up of the trailers of The Last Kiss and Apocalypto into one, Zach-Braffian-fever-dream about a South American road trip we can only assume was cut short when a Mayan priest tore Braff's still-beating heart off his sleeve. To beef up the Braff-bashing hilarity, we're also including, free of charge, this Onion AV Club's list of "Awful Things Zach Braff Is (Probably) Responsible For," which, at three entries, seemed to us woefully underresearched, yet still managed to provoke some lively debate in the comments section over the relative awfulness of Scrubs. Enjoy.

On Apocalypto's opening day, it's anyone's guess as to whether moviegoers this weekend will have a hearty appetite for Mel Gibson's Grand Guignol vision of a dying Mayan culture, or choose to instead flock to the comparatively benign pleasures of The Holiday, where they'll be spared from even a single instance of Jack Black devouring lovelorn home-swapper Kate Winslet's face. As our early review round-up first suggested, Gibson's isn't a movie for the weak-stomached or faint-hearted, and if a sampling of today's review headlines are any indication, those early warnings of a screen run red with arterial geysers and freshly plucked, still-beating hearts were right on the Mayan-dismembering money:
· Snuff Epic [Indianapolis Star]
· 'Apocalypto' soaks the screen in gore [USA Today]
· Review: Violence overwhelms 'Apocalypto' [CNN]
· Drowning in sea of blood [Edmonton Sun]
· "Apocalypto": Bloody and beautiful [Seattle Times]
· Gibson leads a brutal yet transporting Mayan journey [Boston Globe]
· 'Apocalypto': Bloody lessons [Toronto Star]
· Mayan melodrama: Gibson crafts bloody, breathless tale of doomed civilization [Mercury News]
· Apocalypto: Mel's Bloody New Beginning? [E! Online]
· Rape, murder, mayhem — there goes the civilization [SF Chronicle]
· "Apocalypto": blood, gore and not much more [China View]
· Violent excess mars Gibson's Mayan vision 'Apocalypto' [Int'l Herald Tribune]
· Savage and then some [Dallas Morning News]
· Another bloodbath, Mel Gibson's "Apocalypto" doesn't miss an impalement or a dismemberment. [LAT]
· "Apocalypto": Mel Gibson's latest pretends to care about the fall of man, but it really only wants to impale, flay, disfigure and torture him. Sound familiar? [Salon]

A Defamer operative at last night's cast and crew showing of Mel Gibson's jungle-set gorefest Apocalypto sends in this report, in which the nervous director himself was present to hand-deliver his barbaric, Mayan-flaying baby to the hard workers who helped bring it to the screen:

As Hollywood Jewry continues to debate the prospects of Mel Gibson's Apocalypto at the box office and the awards season beyond, another ancient culture with a vested stake in the director's vision—Mayan descendants—are themselves torn over the prospect of the movie's release. Would Gibson's brutal interpretation of their civilization at its most violent serve to raise cultural awareness, or would it send the world scurrying, convinced that all relatives of the characters on the screen must also by association be members of a severed-head bowling league? The AP takes a look at yet another little known people on the brink of their own Hollywood coming party:

Reviews have already begun to trickle in for Mel Gibson's Apocalypto, and the question on everyone's lips becomes: Will audiences set aside any problems they might have with Gibson's anti-Semitic outburst if the director graphically eviscerates enough Mayans?
[Warning: Some spoilers below.]
· "[A] two-hour plus torture-fest so violent that women and children will be headed to the doors faster than you can say 'duck' when the film opens on Dec. 8...If you've ever wondered what it would be like to see heads and hearts removed without anesthesia, then this is the movie for you." [FOX411]
· "'There are gruesome, lingering shots of people having their faces torn off, their hearts ripped out, and worse,' noted one AintItCoolNews.com reviewer who said he loved the film but was 'shocked' by the violence. 'Mel Gibson may be an anti-Semitic, alcoholic, gore-obsessed maniac, [but] he is obviously an extremely talented director and I highly recommend his 'Apocalypto'.'" [MSNBC]
· "[T]he first thing seen is a freshly detached human head being bounced down the long steps of a towering pyramid toward a frenzied crowd below. Only then does it dawn on the shackled prisoners what's in store for them. At the summit preside dissolute royals as well as a high priest who, time and again, plunges a knife into a man's belly and, while the victim is still alive, tears out his still-beating heart as an offering to placate the gods to end the drought." [Variety]
· He removes pumping hearts from heaving chests, lops off sacrificial heads and bounces them down the Mayan Temple steps. Blood spurts out of an artery at a 90 degree angle. Much of the mayhem and carnage is hard to take. [Risky Biz]
· "[Y]ou'd better not be gore-shy, because Apocalypto is one brutal and bloody ride." [Rolling Stone]

Having completed the final stages of his home-based, outpatient recovery program ("Step 11: Turn off Oprah. Step 12: Congratulations! You are now a sober and tolerant asset to society..."), Mel Gibson has at last emerged from the cocoon-like confines of his Malibu estate and gotten back to business, with two recent appearances in the American heartland in support of his latest extinct language opus, Apocalypto:

The first round of media analysis of How Mel Gibson's Anti-Semitic Tirade Will Affect His Career has arrived, with nearly everyone agreeing that Gibson's capping of his DUI arrest by accusing the "fucking Jews" of being "responsible for all the wars in the world" could possibly have some sort of undetermined negative impact on his future ability to make movies, or on the box office prospects of Apocalypto, his upcoming, Mayan-language adventure flick whose dialogue must now be scoured for hate speech cleverly masked by the Yucatec dialect. (Zero Wolf: "The tribal elders have selected you for human sacrifice. Please report to the altar atop the sacred pyramid in one hour to accept your fate." Jaguar Paw: "You go tell those fucking Jews to kiss my ass. I own this fucking jungle, sugar tits.") A round-up of early analyses and reactions: