Word: tamahori
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directed by Lee Tamahori...
With its relentless banality and gritty despair, director Lee Tamahori's debut film marches on with a mission irrespective of effete artistic considerations. There is no elegant dialogue or complex 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...
This is a fatal, familiar tale. Why then has Once Were Warriors become New Zealand's all-time homemade hit and the vanquisher of Jurassic Park at the nation's box office? Partly 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...
...frustrations of living on the dole in Auckland, New Zealand, leave their scars -- as do 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...
...frustrations of living on the dole in Auckland, New Zealand, leave their scars -- as do 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...