Once Were Warriors
That intro was from when Leo Laporte, legendary podcaster, exploded during a show, I've saved a copy of the video from the live stream. Leos one of my heros, truly a great man, but as you heard he got very angry during the recording of that show, Im sad for him that he did that and it was recorded by him and others, I feel like paparazzi snooping into his life a bit, just by hearing it. But, its out, and I might as well use it for a random intro.
Hello and welcome to the twenty second episode of Jay Wont darts podcast, where I talk about amazingly sad films such as this one.
This episode, Once Were Warriors, the greatest film that will ever be made in New Zealand, thats not a putdown to my country, but I seriously doubt we will ever top Once Were Warriors, at least in my lifetime.
On rating sites like Rotten Tomatoes, its gotten almost a perfect score, and on IMDB, it deserves to be on the top movies of all time list, it gets held back a bit because people have not heard of it overseas. It gets near flawless reviews everywhere though, and I think its very popular in France, or french speaking countries, on youtube theres many french dubbed versions of the movie! Kinda weird, they keep the Maori language singing in, but then the actors voices are gone, and replaced with totally different sounding people! The dubbed version sounds to me as if its redone by rich white people, compared to the original Maori voices.
Im rewatching the dvd as I type this.
Once Were Warriors is based on a very famous New Zealand Book, by Alan Duff. The story is about the sad life for many Maori people, living poorly in the big cities of New Zealand. Maori people were here before the white settlers arrived, there were periods of war, and many injustices are still said to be about today. According to Wikipedia,
Maori make up just 14 percent of New Zealands population of almost 4.2 million, but they are almost 50 percent of the prison population. Once Were Warriors is basically about that, about the horrible problems that face Maori today in New Zealand. We see gambling, drinking, violence and court, with close gang ties to the family living in South Auckland state housing. The main characters are Jake and Beth Heke. Jake Heke is known as The Muss, Jake the Muss, for muscles, he gets in bar fights all the time, and is known for his fighting. Beth is his wife, she looks after their many children and cleans up the mess made by Jake. Jake often beats up his wife, or anyone who "gets lippy" to him.
I'll play the international trailer, I recorded it from my DVD, you might notice the very annoying buzzing of my speakers, I left it in because it adds a certain texture to the recording :) Ok, well I managed to fix up the speaker wires for later recordings, its just in this trailer clip.
The famous announcer guy says "maoris", you dont say that, Maori, the name itself, and other Maori words dont have plurals, you dont put an s on the end. Its a bit like the word Sheep, you dont say Sheeps even when theres more than one. Theres no such thing as "maoris", its actually an offensive sort of thing to say, its a racial slur "oh those bloody marries are at it again".
A bit my friend Desmond likes is this clip
But one of my favourite bits, is when one of the sons is taken away by the police, since his parents cant look after him, he starts smashing windows at the new borstal, and his teacher gives him a great speech. A taiaha is a wooden spear.
I like that bit, we are the same colour, well, they are both Maori, its weird that the kid calls his teacher "black", as if thats a bad thing and he doesnt have dark skin himself. Also, I dont really count a bayonet, or a spear as hand to hand weapons. A bayonet is a sharp knife on the end of a rifle, for stabbing with. A spear is not hand to hand either. When it comes to weapons, a sword would beat either one really, a sword is metal like the bayonet but longer of course, and so would "beat" the bayonet, and a taiaha is just a piece of wood, it could be broken by the swords blade and strength. Its a great little speech though, and the line about carrying your taiaha inside comes up again later, the point is to be proud of Maori culture, and heritage.
And anyone whos seen Once Were Warriors will remember this song,
No comments:
Post a Comment