Oh, My: Mel Gibson's Latest Tape Kinda Just Gets Worse and Worse Even Without Racial Slurs

Andy Levy noted that Mel Gibson, in real life, hyperventilating on the phone, delivers a sort of Mel Gibson-ish performance. Again, it's the neck-vein-popping roaring.

This sucks. I really liked Mel Gibson from the first time I saw him in The Road Warrior, through Lethal Weapon, through Hamlet. I even sort of liked Edge of Darkness. Even lame efforts like Conspiracy Theory, I dutifully turned up in the theaters, and thought, eh, not great, but it's Mel Gibson, so there's that.

I dug him more, sort of, when he turned out to be conservative. Although I realized later that he wasn't really a conservative at all, but some type of odd reactionary and general contrarian rejectivist.

But this is as pathetic as it is repellent.

All the talking heads on tv focus on the repulsive nature of it, and I guess that's the right way to focus, but it's the pathetic nature of it, his impotent howling in jealous childish (girlish?) rage, that kills his career.

You can play a hero if you're an asshole in real life. You can't play a hero anymore if you're a whiny, self-pitying, emotionally-unstable freaking-out huffing and panting manbitch.

A hero can be a dick, but he still has to be masterful. He still has to be in control, in control of his own shit, in control of things generally.

You can't be a hero if you're, like, a screaming, pathetic retard.

*Not a fan of The Passion of the Christ -- not Gibson's fault, but in that movie, Jesus is structurally the hero but in terms of actual action on screen, he's passive. I know that Gibson is sort of bound in terms of plotting here. I realize this seems an odd criticism to lodge, because the source material says what it says, and you can't bring in William Goldman or Tom Stoppard for extensive uncredited rewrites.

I know that when you consider the religious aspect of it, he's actually being very active, and the most active a person could possibly be, but that's all either internal in his mind or from external sources, i.e., you have to be informed by external sources (the Bible) what's going on here, the trade of pain for man's redemption.

It's not really on the screen, so, like, evaluating as if it were any other movie, which is the only way I can evaluate it, I offer the weird opinion: The hero was too passive; every active action is taken by someone else, things are done to him, not by him.

Again, I know how odd that sounds, but that's my take on the movie, not on Jesus himself, nor the Biblical story.

Doctored? Oh, please.

Allah's exit question:

. Exit question: Is this pushback about the tapes being doctored really just Mel’s way of planting a tiny enough seed of doubt in the public’s mind to save his career? E.g., “Honey, I don’t want to see the new Mel Gibson movie. Didn’t you hear those tapes?” “But baby — he says the tapes were doctored.”

Every conservative should know this trick, because whenever we get something on tape that hurts a liberal, the "independent analysis of the tapes says they may have been doctored" crap starts up.

The ACORN tapes? May have been doctored, you know. Edited.

They just claimed that about some other tapes a year or two before the ACORN tapes, but which tapes escapes me. (Please remind if you know.)

It's a silly talking point spun up to inject the smallest scintilla of doubt.

In most cases, this stuff speaks for itself, and it really doesn't matter if the tapes were "edited" or something.

There is one case it does matter, very much: When Whore-Chooch says that Gibson had punched her, knocking out teeth, and he does not dispute it, but says "You deserved it."

Now, in that exchange, yes, if she said something else entirely, that would get Gibson off the hook for that one thing.

But just that one thing, because he's obviously saying this stuff. You can't doctor up a whole sentence; the cadences and pauses and such would not be right, the words would not join together properly. It would sound like you stitched different words together.

As for why she sounds so crisp: Because she hired up a private eye specializing in divorce work to rig her up nicely to record Mel. Jeeze Louise. The woman has money (Mel's), so she can afford not to skimp on state's evidence.

Alternately: She is a recording artist, or a wannabe, so she has access to some good recording equipment and an engineer to rig it, right?

posted by Ace at 04:30 PM

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