I thought I would be safe here
So I just saw Mel Gibson's Apocalypto. No, I'm not going to review it, except to say that it was just what I expected – another Braveheart clone in foreign lingo and loincloths, with even more excised body parts dangled in front of their not-yet-dead owners. Enjoyable, on its own terms. However, something unexpected did happen.
In short, the first hour or so of the film included an improvised soundtrack from a colicky bundle of joy, which was being cradled in its mother's arms just behind me. I have to admit, I wasn't expecting many younglings after the Times reported that "there are plenty of disembowelings, impalings, clubbings and beheadings." The title & names of the folks who made it didn't appear immediately at the beginning of the flick (in fact, I don't seem to recall them appearing until the very end), so I wondered if the recent parents were just in the wrong theater. Maybe they confused the tropical jungle with Antarctic snowdrifts, or blood-slicked Mayans with gay ecofascist atheistic emo-penguins.
No such luck: the offending parties stayed even after our protagonist yanked out the heart, liver, and testicles from a fresh kill – non-human, of course, as the humans in the show only had their hearts and heads removed, and only while they were still alive. (I did enjoy the camerawork for the perspective from inside a dropped head hitting the ground.) I had half a mind to turn around, but I didn't think I could accuse them of ruining the show for everyone else who paid the same $9.00 (!) without also commenting on the impropriety of taking an impressionable youth to a movie where blood spurts intermittently from a man's exposed brain. At any rate, the infant's truly pointless wailing came and went, and for some reason the parents finally chose to leave during one of its better-behaved movements. But it sure was a relief when the only sound of babies crying came from the smoldering, corpse-ridden husk of a freshly razed village.
