If you’re off on your travels and you hear someone in front saying something like,
“golly, gosh, I’m agog!”
it’s not Bertie Wooster but Dan Cruikshank on location for ‘Adventures in Architecture’. Half man, half Muppet, he causes unintentional hilarity frolicking across yet another foreign vista, alternately making jazz hands and enunciating his glee at a pillar, pyramid or slum. This TV series is un-missable and has made me consider selling Casa Sangue and travelling the world. Maybe not… I don’t mind displacing the rest of the Sangues but I wouldn’t want to upset Twiggy.
Each episode is themed; my favourite so far was the one on death in which Cruikshank led us breathlessly through India, Guatemala, the Czech Republic and Italy and showed how places and building reflect how societies views death.
Go here to enjoy the Cimitero Monumentale di Staglieno, Genoa, in Italy The site is in Italian but this doesn’t matter; hover over one of the labels on the plan then follow the link to the photo pages – you will never have seen anything like the monuments to the dead in this extraordinary temple to the Gothic. The sheer beauty and self-indulgent almost kinky representations of various tableaus of death would feed any pre-pubescent, or indeed middle-aged Goth.
(This place, by the way, can go on the proud to be Italian stack.
More Gothic horror to be found in the Sedlec Ossuary, a Christian chapel in the Czech Republic where some crazy carpenter recycled the contents of overcrowded cemeteries. You couldn’t make this up…
Then Cruikshank took us to the banks of the Ganges where Hindus cremated their loved ones in a chilling, to modern eyes, but beautiful ceremony. It brought home how anaesthetised we are to death in our society. In Mamma Sangue’s time, family members laid out their loved ones and sat with them until the funeral – we’re one small step from Tescos doing even that for us.
Finally, Cruikshank visits Guatemala and the site of an ancient Mayan temple where he mimed with spit-spraying relish the ancient, horrific blood rites. I was so impressed/horrified by his graphic description of human sacrifice that I re-thought whether or no not I should watch Apocalytpo…I’ve always been a bit too scared of it having read some awe-struck reviews with grudging respect paid to Mel Gibson’s fascination with brutality. I really get squicked by decapitation as I’ve mentioned more than once in my film reviews such as in the abysmal Kingdom of Heaven. Why would you need to see such a thing? Fortunately I came to my senses.
Apocalypto
Mel Gibson…what can you say about a man once so beautiful revealed to be seriously ugly on the inside by his grotesque, anti-Semitic comments? He’s no longer a draw to see a movie for me and I haven’t seen anything linked to him since the fabulous and very silly Braveheart.
Apocalypto is one of the most exciting films I have ever seen! It tells the of an ordinary, Mayan villager and his fight to escape the clutches of a kind of tatooed, ruthless press-gang whose sole purpose is to provide an endless supply of bodies for sacrifice to angry Gods in a time of disease and famine. Sent into the jungle to harvest men and women, these characters are so good at what they do and so accomplished in the art of killing that you get the feeling they did their work for love not money. There has been some discussion about how historically accurate this is and how routine the scale of slaughter depicted in Apocalypo actually was but, thanks to Braveheart, we know better than to believe any of this as fact. What we have is an utterly gripping, bloody, violent, funny and beautifully shot story.
And, get this, its in Mayan dialect with sub-titles. I wonder what the popcorn audience made of that? With an uncomprising, meticulous attention to detail, Gibson brings the ancient world horrifically and savagely to life. These people are ‘real’ and the distance provided by the language maintains the illusion that we have somehow actually travelled back to the time of the conquistadors in the 16C. Gibson went to great lengths to cast indigenous actors for the key roles including the delightfully named and rather hot Rudy Youngblood. You’ll see some of the scariest villains ever too. And who knew that, as the subtitles reveal, ancient Mayans at play conversed like guys in a dug out?
If you have a strong constitution, see this film; I can promise you a spectacle.
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