His personal life was a shambles and he has said any number of antisemitic, racist, and misogynistic things.
And yet, in other ways he’s a genius. I have never seen a “phoned in” Mel Gibson acting performance. Check him out as Hamlet in the 1990 movie of that name. Yes, Hamlet. Shakespeare.
He also directed the controversial but well-made movie The Passion of the Christ (Mel is some stripe of evangelical Christian). However, his masterpiece is Apocalypto, a movie about ancient Mayan Mexico on the eve of the arrival of the Spaniards. I’m convinced that in the long term it will come to be regarded as one of the most creative movies ever made if only because not one word of English is spoken in it, not even by a narrator. PLUS, no subtitles, either.
If you haven’t seen it and you love movies, you should. It’s free if you subscribe to Amazon Prime.
He helped to produce a four part documentary about child trafficking, a business (yes a business) that is estimated to be half again as big as the airline industry.
That Hollywood has a pedophilia problem is plausible in that more than one child actor has made the claim. Corey Feldman has said as much as have Rose McGowan and Elijah Wood.
If this documentary is right, even those former child actors mentioned above have no idea of the scale of the problem.
Ackshuyally, Mel Gibson is a Trad-Cath (Traditionalist Catholic, pre-Vatican II Theology, doing Masses in original Latin,) as was his Father Hutton Gibson. Hutton was also a Holocaust Denier, so in this case, the fruit/nut/flake doesn’t fall far from the tree.
Coming from a Trad-Cath, I’d say an exposé of child sexual abuse in Hollywood is probably a Tu Quoque Pot on the phone to Kettle.
You’re correct about Mel being an old school Catholic largely influenced by his nut case father. I remember now, but thanks for correcting the record.
I’ll be holding my opinion on the documentary until it comes out. Normal skepticism. HOWEVER, with actual former child actors claiming they experienced pedophilia in Hollywood, it seems likely that there’s at least some there there. I think the only question regards the scale of the problem.
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