There was also a test in that class today (Mesoamerican Art;) I bluffed calling something being from El Tajin being from Monte Alban, to hopefully squeeze in more points if I got it right, but I looked it up and of course I totally got it wrong. It even had the typical El Tajin double-edged scroll design; I'm such a dunce sometimes...
So! You know that order I talked about a week ago, saying it'd take from one to two weeks to get here? It took one week. I spent a lot of time cleaning my room today, and now the room is uncluttered, but still with its space very much taken up. I hate being vague about this, but it still doesn't feel the time yet to make the announcement. Maybe tomorrow.
Tarzan and the Valley of Gold isn’t awful, but it’s one of those ones that are really easy to make fun of. I actually liked the groovy 1966-ness of it all; the title sequence with all the colors and everything was pretty awesome. Having the character of Tarzan existing in the 1960s instead of the 1910s/1920s isn’t really that strange; it’s no more strange than having James Bond movies set in the present day, for example. David Yeats’s The Legend of Tarzan released last year had the character in or past his prime, set the year that he was born in the books; we’ve got at least two Sherlock Holmeses going on set in the present day right now, so why not with Tarzan?
The poster depicts Tarzan taking down a helicopter with a bolo with live grenades tied on; that was a pretty good way to kill a helicopter I guess but I don’t know why the poster artist thinks that that’s the iconic kill in the movie when there’s an assassin who’s taken out with an eighteen-foot bottle of Coca-Cola. I think I’ve seen that somewhere before, or maybe it was just that obvious what was about to happen next, because as soon as I saw all the pieces set up I was all, yup, that’s what they’re going to do. I also enjoyed the scene where Tarzan killed all those dudes with the Styrofoam stalactites. Or the scene where the villain dies slowly in quicksand made of gold dust, that was a good death.
Was I supposed to be talking about the Mesoamerican aspects of the film? Because I just can’t get over how weird yet strangely boring this movie is. The treks through the jungle, Tarzan swings, Binky (I think was the chimp’s name) swings, it’s the kind of scene that you put into a movie because you took all that time to shoot it (Tarzan doesn’t swing on vines, in the original books.) Like how the watch explodes, that whole scene how we watch the whole thing with them going outside and setting the watch down and everything, better filmmakers only need to imply that kind of thing; oh we’re outside, we must have gone outside. They did have good filmmaking techniques back then, I’ve seen it, but this film is just a home video with a slightly bigger budget and marginally marginally marginally better acting. Or what’s the deal with the tiny dog? Did they just want to show how heinous the bad guy is, willing to explode a teacup poodle? And Nancy Kovac was probably supposed to be a love interest, but she and Tarzan hardly spend two scenes together… so I’m assuming Jane’s still around somewhere, and she’s just for the audience.
Mesoamerican-wise, anyway, the lost hidden city in the mountains is Teotihuacan, playing the part of the lost city, whatever its name was; the central plaza of the city is depicted by the Plaza of the Moon. There were two chac mools, one out of stone, one out of gold, both based off of the same real-life chac mool, one from Tlaxcala if my research is accurate. There are some Aztec-inspired interior sets we see, lots of nice skulls and things, albeit with the occasional ridiculous Mayan-style glyph (I noticed a numeral, two bars with five(!) dots, so that was pretty entertaining.) But the solid gold door is still, clearly, just spray painted gold. I mean, the gold in this movie is pretty fake: it’s apparently very light there, they can move it so easily to put it into a big pile like that, and it hardly weighs down the transporters at all. I mean, cheesy special effects, we get it, and I really don’t hate this movie, but, light Hollywood gold is a pet peeve of mine.
So I watched Kings of the Sun- and I really liked this movie. I have no idea how realistic the situation it depicts is, though I don’t much doubt that it’s made up. Metal swords, it’s a neat idea but I doubt it, even for post-classical Maya (where would they mine? Where would they get the idea to mine? How would they get a hot enough heat to smelt ore? Etc); I think we’d know if there really were a Maya settlement in mainland North America as depicted in the movie. And the fact that the two tribes happen to both speak English, that was weird; they didn’t even try to explain that, the way that they explained how the Teotihuacan-ites spoke English in the Tarzan and the Valley of Gold movie. But other than that, I enjoyed it a lot.
The drama is dramatic, and the cinematography is just gorgeous. The blacks get really rich. There’s this one scene where Black Eagle is in his cell, and his shadow is cast long and dramatic one way, then he moves to another wall and his shadow is silhouetted against the other wall; I’ve got no idea how they did that lighting. I noticed how they did the lighting in one of the early scenes, where they’re making their way through the interior of the pyramid (because Maya pyramids are now all about interior space and hidden back doors, apparently,) where they move from one chamber to another and the light “comes on” in the next room they go to.
Yul Brynner’s basically reprising his King and I role here: he folds his arms the same, he squats down forcing everyone else to squat down with him the same, he even dies at the end the same. George Chakiris was apparently in West Side Story, and now that I know that he does look familiar.
The pyramid isn’t as big in the movie as it is in the poster, and the final battle, though it makes sense, the fact that they fight on the pyramid just seems like something they put in to make the trailers look awesome. The costuming is pretty good, though not as good as we’d have today- it’s more like a homemade fan costume that you see at sci-fi conventions, but the costuming was probably killer for its time.
Mesoamerican culture-wise- they blow on conch shells a lot; that’s something I see enough that I’m going to start assuming that’s something they actually did. There are shields made of wood, and also the rich people (I’m assuming is how it breaks down) get special shields woven from reeds. The materials make sense, since even in this movie the only metal they’ve got is those fancy swords; wood would have mostly rotten by now so I’d imagine that the designs painted on the shields are fanciful, though I did notice one had a rabbit head and I have seen that as a military emblem, so there must be some base in reality. George Chakiris’s character Balam is against human sacrifice, which seems kind of modern-day-sensibility and un-Maya-ish of him, but by now the civilization’s so collapsed that his character motivations for that kind of thing make sense, and there were probably at least a few kooks like him back then.
As far as the representation of Mesoamerican art goes. There’s a stela carved in the film, a big squarish one with the picture on the front and the writings on the sides, which is like the 3D stelae from Copan. I noticed one of the guy’s headdresses was one of the Remojadas sculptures, the dancer face with three eyes and two noses, probably depicting movement.
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