Word: smith
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...many historians and aboriginal Americans are at odds over the film's version of the tale. The historical Pocahontas was a child of 11, not a buxom woman of 20, when she met John Smith -- with whom she did not have a romance (though she did marry an Englishman and move to London). "I wish they would take the name Pocahontas off that movie," Shirley "Little Dove" Custalow McGowan, a storyteller of the Powhatan nation and for a time a Disney consultant on the picture, told the Washington Post. On the other side, Russell Means, the Wounded Knee insurgent...
...Indians are very nice people here, which is a nice thing. And yes, the real Pocahontas probably didn't have Tina Turner's posture and Iman's neck. She probably didn't sing Broadway-style songs either or talk to a clever raccoon and a persnickety hummingbird. Maybe John Smith didn't look like Fabio and sound like Mel Gibson (who speaks the role). But this is a movie-a cartoon, for goodness' sake! It is a boy-meets-girl, boy-gets-girl, boy-loses-girl story whose plot is familiar in every weepie affair, from Romeo and Juliet...
...good ones are more than that. Like this one. Pocahontas takes a while to get going, but when it does it becomes a wistful meditation on lost love in what it depicts as the last age of innocence. The lovers Pocahontas (voiced by Irene Bedard) and John Smith are from a gentler, more serious movie era; and so, to its credit, is this film. The picture has its light moments and patentedly adorable characters, notably Meeko the raccoon, a most fastidious glutton with a lot of personality. But Pocahontas lacks the menagerie of cuties that filled The Little Mermaid...
Political arguments aside, this had to be called Pocahontas. It is not the story of John Smith and his Indian girlfriend; it is the portrait of a princess of the spirit. Instead of reducing the historical character to a cardboard placard of goodness, the film gives her an impish curiosity and willfulness. Because she also has a classical heroine's sense of quest, the picture's Pocahontas rises above stodgy old legend into the sky of myth; and there she soars, eagle-like, watching over the land and its contentious people. That's apt for a role model...
...obtained a federal indictment against Arkansas Governor Jim Guy Tucker, accusing him of submitting a false loan application and of conspiring to defraud the irs in connection with a complex cable-TV deal. Tucker denied any wrongdoing. In a separate development, the counsel obtained a guilty plea from Stephen Smith, a former Clinton gubernatorial aide, for conspiring to misapply loan funds. Neither the Tucker charges nor the Smith plea implicate either the President or Hillary Rodham Clinton...