I found the offerings impressively bad, as though some schlock curator from an Ivy League cinema studies department was called upon to select the dreckiest soft-porn screwball comedies ever made

I’ve never studied film at an Ivy League school, but I did take film classes at a school just up the road from one, and I take offense at the suggestion that soft-porn screwball comedies are somehow an anathema to the cinema.  A world without Jewel Shepard is a world I don’t want to be a part of.  

In fairness, that Slate review came out when the service was brand new.  Title selection and quality has greatly improved since then.  Sure, there’s still loads of stuff like The Double-D Avenger, but there’s also a metric tonne of quality flicks, the type of movies that even the fuddiest of Princeton fuddy-duddies would have no problem adding to his syllabus.

In addition to fourth-rate titty flicks, there’s Eisenstein, Herzog (including Auch Zwerge haben klein angefangen, which took me forever to find back in the days of VHS), Hitchcock, Kubrick’s finest (Paths of Glory and A Clockwork Orange), and a handful of kickass Westerns.  In 10 minutes of browsing through genres, I found about 37 movies that I would legitimately like to watch now.  And isn’t that what the “Watch Instantly” service is all about?

Earlier today I configured my Xbox, Again? to work as a media center extender capable of watching Netflix streams.  The UI is painfully slow (I don’t know if that’s the fault of the plugin, Vista, or the miserable service I’ve been getting from Cox), but after queueing up some movies online, I can sit down in my faithful recliner, Osama bin Loungin’, kick back, and enjoy quality movies at any time.  More importantly, now I can watch Real Genius at my leisure, without having to dig out the old laserdisc player. That’s worth my Netflix subscription right there.

The basic premise of the article is that although Apocalypto is a well-shot, action packed film, director Melvin Gibson presents a one-sided view of the most violent and sensational aspects of what was actually a multifaceted and dynamic society. The author also uses the word ‘hellavuh’.

Now some of you idiots might be saying, “But Shawn, that isn’t how you spell ‘helluva’.” That’s what I thought as well. One would think that an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at one of the most anthropological of all ACC schools (University of Miami) and the editors of Archaeology would know how to spell helluva. I mean, it’s in the freakin’ OED. Look it up. Although, honestly, the entry for ‘helluva’ is pretty weak, not even worth reprinting. But it’s interesting to note that the entry for ‘helluva’ contains a reference to Ezra Pound, which is quite fitting considering this a blog post concerning a Mel Gibson film.

Anyway, getting back to the porn angle. The author writes:

To think that a movie about the 1,000 ways a Maya can kill a Maya–when only 10 years ago Maya people were systematically being exterminated in Guatemala just for being Maya–is in any way okay, entertaining, or helpful is the epitome of a Western fantasy of supremacy that I find sad and ultimately pornographic.

Here is the author is making a common fallacy, confusing exploitation with pornography. Considering that Apocalypto is basically just Logan’s Run, but with all the white people replaced by indigenous folk with all sorts of wacky shit poking through their faces, it’s perfectly justifiable to claim that Gibson is exploiting the Mayan culture. He’s taking their imagery, history, language and identity and using it to dress up some typical Hollywood trash with the hope that some poor saps will mistake it for High Art. But that certainly doesn’t constitute pornography.

To put things into more geometrical terms, pornography is a square and exploitation is a rectangle. Pornography is, by its very nature, exploitative, but exploitation is not necessarily pornography. People really need to learn the difference. Humping on camera is pornography. Speaking Yucatec Maya dialects for no other reason than to get people talking about how realistic your shitty action movie is, that’s exploitation. When Mel Gibson starts making movies called “Aporkalypto” or “Acockalytpo”, then every Assistant Professor at every once-great football school can rightfully call him a pornographer. Until that day comes, he’s just a director of simple, if well-shot, films.

Speaking of well-shot films, check out the IMDb page for Apocalypto‘s cinematographer Dean Semler. Simply put, his has been a remarkable career, shooting everyone from My Jenny to James Coburn. He even managed the impossible feat of keeping all of Vin Diesel’s massive, action-packed forearms in frame during the filming of xXx. Truly, Dean Semler is one of Hollywood’s forgotten titans.