Mexico Also Thinks Mel Gibson is Crazy

By our guest blogger, Maria Biondolillo

Recently, Mel Gibson wrote a dumb script about a criminal (played by Mel Gibson) learning to survive in a Mexican prison with the help of a 9-year-old boy. For some reason, somebody (probably Mel Gibson) has decided to finance the making of this creepy film, entitled "How I Spent My Summer Vacation."  It currently is being shot in Veracruz, Mexico.

Mexicans are not very happy about this--in fact, more than 300 demonstrators showed up to protest the film in late December. The reason? In order to shoot this opus, Gibson is forcing a bunch of prisoners to get transferred elsewhere.

Gibson is fixated on having his NAMBLA propaganda set at Ignacio Allende Prison, a real prison where actual criminals are busy not being allowed near 9-year-old boys. In order to make his film set in a real prison more realistic, Gibson has decided that less-real prisoners need to be around.

Truly, this man is the heir of Cassavetes, and a credit to the rich tradition of cinema verite.

This is like that time Werner Herzog was shooting "Aguirre, the Wrath of God" on location in the Peruvian rainforest,  the film sets all got flooded out and Herzog just incorporated it into the movie. Except that Gibson is even more hardcore because he is separating 300 or so inmates from their families so that they can be shoved into an assortment of far flung, overcrowded Mexican prisons located God knows where.

For a variety of reasons, this is not a fun development for the prisoners. A Mexican prison under the best of circumstances is hardly a Holiday Inn, but at least at Ignacio Allende, the prisoners all knew each other. At their new prisons, how are the prisoners going to be able to distinguish the chill bros from the murder-happy bros? Also, the prisoners' families no longer will be able to easily visit them, which means that they will no longer have reliable sources for food and clothing (I told you already that Mexican prison is not like the prison Martha Stewart enjoyed.)

Members of the prisoners' families who still like them are picketing the hell out of Mel Gibson. In response, Mel Gibson's publicist explained that the moving of the prisoners is just some random thing that the Mexican government did that has nothing to do with Mel Gibson or the fact that he asked them to do precisely that.

So, the takeaway is that Mel Gibson just screwed a bunch of Mexican prisoners. I guess it was their own fault for not having any savvy 9-year-old boys around to advise them.

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