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Bei-Rout

By Michael Weiss
Posted Friday, Dec. 1, 2006, at 4:38 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

Read more about the polonium-based intrigue. In Slate, Daniel Engber looked into radiation as a contagion.

Temples of doom: Mel Gibson's new film, Apocalypto, depicting the decline and fall of the Mayan civilization, opens on Dec. 8, but a few enterprising bloggers caught advance screenings. Some raved, some booed—all cringed.

Anne Thompson, deputy film critic at the Hollywood Reporter's Risky Business, calls Apocalytpo a piece of "bravura filmmaking," but says Mel is up to his old corporal fetishes: "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. …. One can argue for realism, but on the other hand, the many strokes of luck that spare our young hero's life—and we very much want him to live—stack up a tad implausibly."

Conrad H. Roth at Varieties of unreligious Experience was a bit creeped out, too: "The camera never shies away from the visceral, the sadistic Catholic gaze carried over from The Passion—the hero sheathed in mud, or live ants stuffed in an open wound, or the innumerable piercings and other grotesque ornaments on every face. … It is this unflinching quality, so absent from the usual pussy-hearted blockbusters, that transfixes and enthralls."

Read more about Apocalypto.

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Michael Weiss is a writer living in New York. His personal blog is Snarksmith.
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