Sad news, indeed: Ed Limato, fierce protector of disgraced movie stars and legendary thrower of extravagant Oscar pre-parties, and longtime agency partner ICM have begun the painful, messy process of ending their relationship of nearly two decades. Reports DHD's Nikki Finke on the announcement of the split she promises will be "a mess":
Mel Gibson's ongoing love affair with the indigenous peoples of Central America—whose untold histories are ripe for adaptation into factually iffy, hyperviolent big-screen adventures—continues. Not only has the Apocalypto director extended the borders of his Malibu empire to include a home on Costa Rica's Pacific coast, but he recently sat with the country's President to pledge his financial support for their native Indians:
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:
According to the Panama Tourism Bureau, the go-to source for breaking news about Mel Gibson's career, the director's search for a location in which he can continue to ply his trade without the interference of the bedeviling Jews who denied his Mayan-language masterwork Apocalypto the Oscar recognition it so richly deserved has landed him in their fine country, where a refreshingly open-minded Gibson was even willing to hear pitches for his next project from Panama's leading crooner:
PrivacyWatch celebrity sightings are submitted by our readers, and are posted several times a week, so send them in immediately: Today might be your last day on Earth, and you don't want to move on to the Next Life with lingering regrets! Submit yours to tips[AT]defamer.com (please put "sighting" or "PrivacyWatch" in the subject line) and let everyone know about the time you saw the Canter's cashier inspecting a taut-faced Tim Allen's possibly counterfeit currency:
· 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!
Stashwax has beef with Saturday Night Live (well, more than the rest of us do, anyway.) They've served the venerable comedy show with a cease and desist order, saying that Lorne Michaels et al ripped off the concept of their video in which antisemitic dialogue was overdubbed onto a recut Braveheart trailer; the SNL sketch employed a similar tactic, but with footage from Apocalypto. We watched both and, while similarities exist, they strike us as more of the "Mel Gibson and the word "sugartits" are inextricably linked now, and no one has the patent on associating Jews with bagels" variety, not the "actionable" variety. But we'll let you be the judge — it's what you're best at. Both clips are after the jump.
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]
At the end of a year in which it would take the revelation that Mel Gibson actually engaged in human sacrifice during the shooting of Apocalypto to top the scandals the Jew-impugning, sugar-tits-slandering star has already weathered, this recent British tabloid report about an Australian woman's claim that Gibson knocked up her hitchhiking mom in the back of a station wagon thirty years ago will probably play more as image rehabilitation (hey, what healthy, horny guy wouldn't pick up an ovulating damsel in distress who needed a ride?) than scandal. Notes Rush & Molloy:
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.
Paris Hilton's publicist quashes rumors that she and Britney Spears like to engage in hot, celebutard-on-poptard action, thereby reducing public interest in their shenanigans by at least 80 percent.
Making a socially conscious studio film with an indie sensibility is just so much harder when the paparazzi won't let you get a plate of curry without harassment.
· And speaking of harassment, Superman Returns producer Jon Peters' rep calls the lawsuit with all the naked bear-hugging and boyparts-exposing allegations "frivolous."
Here's a way to protest Mel Gibson, but see Apocalypto anyway.
· This is only the second best 911 call of the day.
Pour yourself a steaming cup of the weekend box office numbers, still the only reliable cure for an office holiday party hangover:
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:
It's been literally hours since we've considered the plight of the soul-searching/ hand-wringing/hair-tearing Academy voters who are trying to determine whether they should punish Mel Gibson for the paranoid, tequila-liberated thoughts about Jews he expressed on that fateful night in Malibu by withholding awards nominations for Apocalypto, or whether they should ignore such outside concerns and celebrate the directorial artistry necessary to movingly depict the graphic removal of ancient Mayans' faces. In today's NY Times, Sharon Waxman gives us a fresh opportunity to contemplate the Oscar dilemma, even getting a Actual Jewish Person to go on the record about the matter:
Variety today launched its new, online-only "Pushy Question" feature, in which various industry types are invited to offer anonymous opinions that might otherwise be too honest for full attribution in a respectable trade paper without career repercussions. The inaugural query (our paraphrase): "So, Apocalypto is kind of good, but how fucked is Mel Gibson with the Jews who run the Academy Oscar voters?"
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]
