Tags: Indigenous Peoples
C+ |
***½ |
+1-2|
Adults*
Gibson is a consummate filmmaker, and the action is never less than riveting. Yet as the film repeatedly ratchets up the wince factor beyond what seems necessary or appropriate, it’s hard not to feel that suffering has been reduced to spectacle.
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B |
*** |
+2-1|
Teens & Up
Up to a point, there is a level of artistic kinship between
The New World, Terence Malick’s dreamlike origin myth of the American colonies, and another recent, visually poetic meditation on a foundation story: Mel Gibson’s
The Passion of the Christ.
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Recent knock-offs have been especially lame: A 2004 Hallmark Channel
version starring Patrick Swayze shows some initial promise before
losing its way in the second act amid boring plot twists and PC
alternative spirituality (lots of talk about “having faith in the
ancestors,” and the evil, ancient witch Gagool is reinvented as a
benevolent young shamaness!). About Sean Connery’s recent turn as
Haggard hero Alan Quatermain in the almost completely inspiration-free League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, not to mention the 1985 version, a campy Raiders of the Lost Ark wannabe starring Sharon Stone, the less said, the better.
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C+ |
**½ |
+0|
Kids & Up
Lewis would have been left equally cold to subsequent screen
versions of Haggard’s story, all of which give Haggard hero Allan
Quatermain a female foil (who is always, except here, a love interest),
and none of which capture the deathly spell of the mountain tomb
(though the classic 1950 version is the least objectionable on this
point).
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A |
**** |
+1-1|
Teens & Up*
The reputation of John Ford’s
The Searchers as a classic but troubling Western in which John Wayne plays an Indian-hating racist is so widely accepted that it’s a bit of a surprise to discover that the film, and the character, are in fact more complex than the reputation suggests.
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D+ |
** |
-2|
Adults*
In place of Ford’s iconic but Indian-hating cowboy hero, Howard
gives us two white protagonists who are each, in their own ways, the
antitheses of the John Wayne character.
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B+ |
*** |
+0|
Kids & Up*
Highlights include daredevil cartwheeling baboons, the
remarkable partnership of the badger and the honey-guide bird,
and the astonishingly intricate lengths to which the Kalahari
bushmen go to find water. There’s a sequence with the animal
residents of the fertile Kavango flood plains intoxicated on
fermented fruit, and footage of an ostrich mating dance that
strikingly resembles Fantasia’s animated ostrich
ballet.
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C |
**½ |
-2|
Adults
Monte Cristo is also the only one of the three that
knows it’s essentially a comic-book movie, and has appropriately
modest aspirations. Like Road to Perdition, The Four
Feathers feels like a weighty epic, though neither movie
weighs in at more than about two hours, and neither really knows
what it’s about.
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D+ |
** |
-1|
Kids & Up
Take a politically correct morality play about Evil White Imperialists versus Noble Oppressed Minorities Living in Harmony with Nature, dress it up as entertaining family fare with cute animal sidekicks for comic relief and catchy sing-along tunes, and you’ve got one of the cartoons of the late Disney renaissance. Now take away the comic relief and cute animal sidekicks, replace the catchy sing-along tunes with whiny, forgettable Bryan Adams rock anthems, and you’ve got DreamWorks’
Spirit: Stallion of the Cimarron, the story of an indomitable horse’s heroic resistance to domestication.
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A- |
***½ |
+4|
Teens & Up*
From the unforgettable opening sequence, with its stunning depiction of the martyrdom of a silent Jesuit missionary at the hands of equally silent South American natives, the film is shot through with piercing, haunting imagery, pictures of enduring imaginative force.
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