Word: maori
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Once Were Warriors" is the carrion call to the carcass of Maori culture; and its vision means to shake you to the core...
...scene sequencing. Emotions come from the gut, unconscious of reason or purpose. The characters only know that life is rotten to the core, and that only good people can make it seem any better. It's just that simple; it's movie making by people who understand what destitute Maori relate to, and for precisely this reason, "Warriors" has been a smashing success...
...because director Lee Tamahori's film shows why people who hurt each other still stay together-for love, oh, toxic love. But Warriors, written by Riwia Brown from a controversial novel by Alan Duff, also has the lure of ethnographic exoticism: Jake and Beth, their kids and friends are Maori, members of New Zealand's indigenous people...
Once they were warriors, indeed, and fought the British to a standstill. Today, in the city slums, Maori males are dispossessed chieftains whose search for manhood leads them to modern variations on tribal traditions. The film is a social tragedy, observed in love and pain. It's also a study of class animosities within a race. Beth was a princess of the Tainui tribe, and the elders disapproved of her marriage to Jake, who comes from "a long line of slaves...
...Jake's fists, when too much liquor primes the rage within him. Why, then, has "Once Were Warriors" become New Zealand's all-time homemade hit? TIME critic Richard Corliss says director Lee Tamahori's film combines "toxic love" with "the lure of ethnographic exoticism." The characters are Maori, dispossessed chieftains and princesses now confined to gray city slums. "The film is a social tragedy, observed in love and pain," Corliss says. "'By the end, 'Once Were Warriors' has left an ache in your heart, a hole in your...