Word: homerizing
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Pirates have plagued seafarers for millenniums. Homer and Cicero noted incidents involving ancient Greek and Roman mariners, and West Europeans weathered Viking onslaughts during the Middle Ages. In the 16th and 17th centuries, monarchs frustrated by Spain's dominance of the Caribbean commissioned privateers to harass the Spanish fleet--helping to usher in piracy's golden age, when swashbuckling marauders like Edward (Blackbeard) Teach roamed the sun-splashed islands, plundering gold and silver...
...film traces a long evening, from four one afternoon to early the next morning, in the lives of three characters: Homer (Homer Nish), a Hualapi who prowls the bars of Main street with his Mexican-Indian pal Tommy (Tommy Reynolds), while Homer's pregnant Apache wife Yvonne (Yvonne Williams) makes meals for the guys, takes in a double feature and muses on her loneliness. "He doesn't ask me if I want to go anyplace, down to the theaters or down to shop," she says in a monotone voiceover. "He usually take me along but he drop...
...Homer is busy at the Ritz Bar, cadging drinks and watching Tommy, a fast-talking Lothario, flirt with the girls. (Tommy: "When I booze I'm not gonna sip on a drink. I wanna drink and get high, That's what drinks are for. ... I don't live that regular life, you know my poached eggs and Ovaltine. As long as I feel strong the way I always do, well, they'll never get me down.") While Homer tries to change his bad luck in a poker game, and Yvonne, abandoned by her husband, goes to a girlfriend's place...
...They're vital and craggy in this film. Faces jump off the screen and leech into your memory. Homer, a round-faced Freddy Fender type, and Tommy, the Valentino wannabe, and Yvonne, despair stamped on her prettiness. At the Ritz, bit players become stars for a second, like the toothless gent sucking on a beer bottle. Mackenzie's sense of portraiture is less stark and sensational than that of his contemporaries Robert Frank, Diane Arbus and Weegie, less hagiographic than the work of his predecessor Edward Curtis (whose photographs of Amerindians provide the film's opening montage). He just knows...
...with many an indie film, the story of The Exiles' making is as strange an adventure as the travails of Homer, Yvonne and Tommy. Mackenzie, born in 1930 in London to an Englishwoman and an American journalist (who ran the Associated Press's London bureau), graduated from Dartmouth College and went to film school at the University of South California. There he conceived his study of Native Americans; he planned to call it Thunderbird, after their favorite wine. He worked out the story with the main characters, whose reminiscences he taped and used as the voiceover narration...