Mel Helps Scotland Become Free

By Restless [Originally on goofyblog 5.22.07]

The Roxie on 16th near Valencia has a rolicking free-for-all on Academy Award evenings, or it used to. Come in with your friends and neighbors, even bring a bottle in a sack and laugh and cat call and boo or cheer the stars and the ceremony itself.

The last year I went there, Mel Gibson was up for something, so it surprised me that the Roxie crowd hated him enough to roundly boo him every time his name was mentioned. It was well before his drunken disintegration. I figured he must have said something homophobic somewhere, somehow.

A year or two later came The Passion of the Chist and if you caught even one of the interviews Mel was giving to promote the movie, you could tell that he had gone passionately crazy. At the time it came out, I was in a pretty religious area of the U.S. and I could witness whole churches and families going to see this “work” en masse, then maybe even going again.

I didn’t go, but a year or 2 later, when I rented it, I couldn’t bear to watch even the first 30 minutes. Yet, the movie made hundreds of millions and since Mel produced it on his own, he kept a large chunk of that. Last month, I caught Apocalypto off a pirate video stream and was surprised and impressed. A taut well-shot, acted and, especially, directed, bit of filmmaking it was.

Another film he did particularly welll was Braveheart. In fact, it’s such a great film, it might change history. Now comes this from the New York Observer, this week’s edition:

Last week, the Scottish National Party became the largest party—by one seat—in the Scottish Parliamentary election.

Credit for this development belongs, in no small part, to Mel Gibson—and to Braveheart.

Twelve years ago, when the epic adventure movie was first released, Scotland was a nation in name only. It was part of Great Britain, governed from London, with a London-based member of Parliament as secretary of state for Scotland. (He was booed at the premiere of the film.)

Since then, the Scots have established their own Parliament through devolution, giving them local control over disbursement of public money for things like health care, police and economic development.

Braveheart—a rollicking film that is the most prominent specimen in a genre in which Mr. Gibson covers himself in the blood of Englishmen—has helped take this a step further, transferring a calibrated campaign for local control of some spending to a cry for actual independence.

The Gibson-directed epic, released in 1995, was a creative reimagining of the story of William Wallace, the Scots warrior who, seven centuries ago, led his bedraggled army of rebel Highlanders to victory over the better-armed forces of the English king.

For many of today’s Scots, Mr. Gibson’s movie has become the definitive reading of their history.

Link.