Movies and Shit:
Apocalypto: When movies first were thrust before the public the most exciting movies were the documentaries shot in exotic locales that nobody actually knew anything about. Picture makers sent back images of tigers, snakes, natives, crocs, huge fish, and every other "nature" creature. Once we had all seen every mysterious sight we lost the major original reason we had for going to the movies. Yet the only ingredient every movie must have is the one that takes us to heretofore mysterious places, both the inner mysteries of the mind and soul as well as the out of body mysteries of time and place. Think about it: Godfather, Star Wars, Titanic, Lion King, and a ton of other recent hits all of which in one way or another transport us to exotic lands; ones that take us to strange and different places, both within our minds and outside. The immense popularity of computer games can be directly attributed to the unique way in which we are transported directly into a land of our imaginations. The formula continues with Mel Gibson's new movie, Apocalypto, a movie that takes us into the unknown world of the Maya, their human sacrifices, ritual slaughter, and the unknown reason for the end of the most advanced civilization in the Americas. Variety, the industry trade paper, in praising the movie has the following phrase featured in the opening sentence of their positive review....

...the picture provides a trip to a place one's never been before, offering hitherto unseen sights of exceptional vividness

If Mel's new movie succeeds it will owe it to a return to the primal ingredient of the original picture business. It takes us

on a trip to a place we've never seen before.

Get ready for an advanced civilization that created massive structures in impossible to reach places, yet they did it without any known pack animals (horse, buffalo, or donkey) and one in which nobody had invented the wheel. They had an advanced agricultural system, one that invented genetic engineering (corn), used terraces on hillsides and rotated crops, but had no way to use a plow other than human power. Their civilization used canals to flood irrigate and transport water to the insides of their houses but hadn't developed the arch; they had priests carve copious inscriptions of their view of their history but had an illiterate population. Get ready to meet all that. And in a classic chase movie. I can't wait.