Review: Thank you, Kindlegod!
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 06 13, 2012
Here's the story in a Melshell: Mel says bad things. The world is shocked. He does it again. We're shocked again. He does it a third time. We start to lose interest.The first time we didn't even have any audio. The second time we did, but the girl wasn't allowed to talk about it, due to ongoing legal proceedings, to give us any background information. All we got was the disturbing glimpse of Mel captured on tape. This time, the third time, we get the full story to go with the audio excerpt that went viral. Who, what, when, where, and why.Screenwriter Joe Eszterhas ("Basic Instinct") set out to write a movie about 2nd-century-B.C. Jewish warrior Judah Maccabee for anti-Semitic director Mel Gibson. During the process, Mel displayed several of his unprovoked rampages of hatred and vulgarity, one of which was recorded by Eszterhaus's frightened teenage son.It's not the greatest, juiciest inside-Hollywood story ever told. And Eszterhas comes off a little too pious and perfect for his account to be 100% believable, not to mention his metaphoric description of his writing process coming off as slightly demented. They're both nutty. But having heard unstable Mel go off on those tapes, it's safe to say his account would be far less truthful. Which makes Joe's version truthful enough to satisfy my gossipy curiosity.But here's the real great thing about this "How I Spent My Summer Vacation with Mel Gibson in Costa Rica" essay: It's too long for a magazine article, but there's not enough material to support a full-length book. If "Heaven and Mel (Kindle Single)" had been a traditionally-published book, it would have been padded and stretched out with content that got in the way of just dishing out the dirt we really want, it would have cost $24 instead of $3, and it would have taken so long to reach bookstores that we would have totally forgotten all about this incident by the time we could get our hands on it. So if Mel's nuttiness interests you, this single is absolutely worth the $3 (that's less than the cover price of a single issue of People Magazine).