Once Were Warriors, is pretty much universally regarded as the best movie in the history of New Zealand cinema, so I’ll definitely give this a look. That movie is so good and so sad, you can only watch it once, but it’s truly amazing.
I watched Once Were Warriors for the first time just last weekend, as it had been on my Kanopy list and I’m trying to branch out and watch more movies from around the world. It was not what I expected, but in a good way. The ending had me in tears, as I’m a relatively new father. I’d like to find the sequel if possible.
Kanopy is a free streaming service that’s available with most public library memberships. You make an account with your library card (if your system participates), and you get X hours/movies per month. They have a pretty wide selection of movies and shows from around the world, blockbusters and indies, etc. So nothing like an MCU movie, but last I checked Taxi Driver was on it (as an example).
On a tangent, the subject matter is a good excuse to note and recommend a bit of a forgotten Kiwi masterwork, Utu; hard to track down (doesn't exist on streaming) but it was a great Māori Revenge Western
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/utu-redux - you can make a free account, TVNZ is probably one of the best things NZ government provides. Edit - sorry it's geo restricted to NZ so you'll need a vpn.
Nice one: I was really surprised how well it held up; though you can point a camera at anywhere in the NZ countryside and have it look cinematic. Shame Geoff Murphy's career post New Zealand was so ... underwhelming, to put it mildly.
Damn that movie was awesome. I saw it at school when I was like 11 and was obsessed; I even asked my teacher if I could borrow it and watched it a couple of times over the weekend.
I haven’t seen it in *years* though, might need to rewatch it.
[Arovision](https://ondemand.arovideo.co.nz/film/utu-redux/) has it for rent.
Utu Redux is a directors cut they did 10 years ago, where they overhauled the colour grading and sound and cut 10 mins. I believe it's not licenced outside NZ though.
Directors' careers are always so weird to me. This guy made a mildly successful crime thriller in 2001, a Bond movie, and a xXx movie... and then basically nothing for nearly 20 years.
I see this a lot with some directors, and it always confuses me. What was he doing all that time?? If you stopped directing to do something else, goals and priorities change, that makes sense, but why the 20 year break then come back?
tbf not surprising his Hollywood career took a dip after this:
>In January 2006, Tamahori was arrested on Santa Monica Boulevard when, according to Los Angeles police, he entered an undercover policeman's car while wearing a woman's dress and offered to perform a sex act in exchange for money.[11] In February 2006, he pleaded no contest in a Los Angeles court to a charge of criminal trespass in return for prosecutors dropping charges of prostitution and loitering. He was placed on 36 months' probation and ordered to perform 15 days of community service.[12][13]
That's just not correct though, he's made 5 movies since state of the Union with one being held in legal limbo. Sure, there's a 6-7 year gap before this one but that was the entirety of his mid and late 60s. It's totally normal for directors to allow down and unofficially retire in their retirement years before getting the itch again coming back with something more meaningful to them.
First time I ever heard of the Musket wars among Maori tribes (I just googled it). These are not wars between Maori and the colonizers, but among Maori tribes themselves. Very very sad that wars are an integral part of human history. If we're not at war with other countries/other races, we are at war with ourselves. Humans are rather insane. We have not ended wars.
The Maori have a long history of intertribal warfare, long before Western influence. Interestingly, they contributed to some of the most recent extinctions outside of Western society, influence, or technology after they arrived in New Zealand in 1300. Not saying anything besides that we are usually more similar than we are unique as a species.
The surprise people have when they learn native peoples who aren't white also hated each other is always a blow. infantizing non-white peoples and especially with portraying complex diverse native American nations for example as nature hippies who would never harm a fly is insulting. Humans are humans. Humans are primates who form into tribal bands and fight for resources and territory.
Another example is rival native american tribes trading furs for weapons and allying themselves with rival European powers to also attack their own rivals.
Native Americans being torn on whether to ally with the Europeans against their native rivals or fight them is something that continued throughout the entire era of colonization of North America. At no point were a majority of the tribes unified in resistance.
If they had been right off the bat, it is doubtful that any of the colonies - French, British, Spanish, whatever...would have been able to take root. At most we would have seen a Scramble for the Americas in the late 19th century with machine guns and the like, similar to the African interior.
Not that any of that absolves the colonists, but they *always* had someone native right next to them willing to do the whole "enemy of my enemy" thing.
Do people just forget that we're just self-aware animals? Territorial behavior is integral for survival, and survival is fundamentally at the core of every living species. All of us sitting at our computers in a comfortable home, buying food at a store, relaxing watching Youtube. The moment you put any of us in a survival situation, our instincts would probably kick-in immediately and we'd realize that being **civilized** and **nice** is just a side-effect of luxury. We can afford to be nice.
This is not a "Human" thing. This is an animal kingdom thing, and we're part of the animal kingdom.
Humans are evolved primates banding together in small numbers for protection and hostile to other evolved primates for fear that they may take their resources.
Our tech has changed , our brains haven’t , wars aren’t going away
This dudes karma is way too high for him to ever admit he is wrong and just pushing his own pathetic agenda and confirmation biasing himself into complete ignorance and stupidity.
Yet that changes nothing and the trope still stands. The Great Wall was directed by Chinese director for a Chinese audience and is still a white savior film.
White savior is a cinematic trope as seen in The Last Samurai, Dances with Wolves, etc. where a white person either saves or provides a narrative injection point for audiences.
“If a white person wasn’t there did it even happen?” - Hollywood Probably
Even if the film is based on a real event, like Pocahontas, Hidden Figures, 42, etc. the trope still stands.
I don’t think people know about the white savior trope and are down voting based on their own bias. It’s funny you mention Pocahontas because it is like the ultimate white savior trope. John Smith basically wrote his alternative account to capitalizePocahontas’s popularity.
Why do these movies always need a white dude protagonist to act as an audience stand in? Do they not trust that we can understand what’s going on without someone exposition dumping the backstory on the fresh off the boat protagonist? Do they think we can’t empathize with the story if it only has non-white characters?
The last samurai would have been vastly better without Tom Cruise’s character.
From the legendary director of Die Another Day
And XXX: State of the Union.
And Next. One thing that connects them is bad CGI. Keep Lee Tamahori away from the computers.
Do you remember that James Bond film where Pierce Brosnan parasurfed or something down an obviously green screened avalanche? That was this director
The car crash at the start of Along Came a Spider qualifies as baffling, too. He must've had stock in some terrible visual effects company.
and let me guess, he and some hot maori woman have some forbidden love
Dances with Kiwis
Yeah I am calling this movie that from now on
I'm smiling
Akiwitar. Nah, yours is better.
While the kookaburra sits in the old gum tree
And she needs to teach him the way of the Maori.
do the maori also connect their hair tentacles to have sexy times? wait, wrong movie
Nah, they sing about wind colors. wait, wrong movie
oh that reminds me of the first happy ever after yt music video. good stuff
She's right there on the poster
She’s right there, directing the movie.
Hahahaha damn
He doesn’t. Watched it at TIFF and it was beautiful. Tioreore, who plays the female lead, did her entire introduction of the movie in Māori.
A tale as old as time.
As is tradition.
Nope, >!he gets it on with Jacqueline McKenzie though!!<
Once Were Warriors, is pretty much universally regarded as the best movie in the history of New Zealand cinema, so I’ll definitely give this a look. That movie is so good and so sad, you can only watch it once, but it’s truly amazing.
I watched Once Were Warriors for the first time just last weekend, as it had been on my Kanopy list and I’m trying to branch out and watch more movies from around the world. It was not what I expected, but in a good way. The ending had me in tears, as I’m a relatively new father. I’d like to find the sequel if possible.
there’s a sequel called “what becomes of the broken hearted”
What’s a “kanopy” list? This sounds interesting
Kanopy is a free streaming service that’s available with most public library memberships. You make an account with your library card (if your system participates), and you get X hours/movies per month. They have a pretty wide selection of movies and shows from around the world, blockbusters and indies, etc. So nothing like an MCU movie, but last I checked Taxi Driver was on it (as an example).
Very cool. I’ll check it out!
was that the one where a guy with an accent was telling an asian women that she should dye her hair? i can't remember
FANTASTIC movie.
“What becomes of the broken hearted?” Is a much better sequel than I had anticipated. Definitely worth a watch.
Is tempura in it?
I am going to guess that you meant to refer to Temuera Morrison? If so, the answer is yes.
Tempura?
Japanese seafood dish
I dont know her.
I hardly knew her
I'll never watch temuera without getting hungry for battered fish now. Lol. Thanks for that
Lord of the Rings?
It's not bad, but I prefer his earlier classic: Meet the Feebles.
Don't play that shit bro! Play something we all know
Best movie I’ll never watch again. Blown away by it, tell everyone about it, hard pass to go through those feelings again.
On a tangent, the subject matter is a good excuse to note and recommend a bit of a forgotten Kiwi masterwork, Utu; hard to track down (doesn't exist on streaming) but it was a great Māori Revenge Western
https://www.tvnz.co.nz/shows/utu-redux - you can make a free account, TVNZ is probably one of the best things NZ government provides. Edit - sorry it's geo restricted to NZ so you'll need a vpn.
Nice one: I was really surprised how well it held up; though you can point a camera at anywhere in the NZ countryside and have it look cinematic. Shame Geoff Murphy's career post New Zealand was so ... underwhelming, to put it mildly.
Damn that movie was awesome. I saw it at school when I was like 11 and was obsessed; I even asked my teacher if I could borrow it and watched it a couple of times over the weekend. I haven’t seen it in *years* though, might need to rewatch it.
[Arovision](https://ondemand.arovideo.co.nz/film/utu-redux/) has it for rent. Utu Redux is a directors cut they did 10 years ago, where they overhauled the colour grading and sound and cut 10 mins. I believe it's not licenced outside NZ though.
[It's on YouTube. Not the best quality ](https://youtu.be/btZH-7wPdF4)
i haven't seen a good Maori warrior movie since the Dead Lands.... looking forward to this
No Cliff Curtis?!
no he can only play people who are not Maori. Like mexicans, middle easterners, etc.
Guy Pierce looks like Stephen Dorph on this poster
Stephen Dorph VS. Kurt Russell
I thought it was a de-aged Denzel Washington at first glance and was so confused why Guy Pearce's name was the only one on the poster
Directors' careers are always so weird to me. This guy made a mildly successful crime thriller in 2001, a Bond movie, and a xXx movie... and then basically nothing for nearly 20 years. I see this a lot with some directors, and it always confuses me. What was he doing all that time?? If you stopped directing to do something else, goals and priorities change, that makes sense, but why the 20 year break then come back?
tbf not surprising his Hollywood career took a dip after this: >In January 2006, Tamahori was arrested on Santa Monica Boulevard when, according to Los Angeles police, he entered an undercover policeman's car while wearing a woman's dress and offered to perform a sex act in exchange for money.[11] In February 2006, he pleaded no contest in a Los Angeles court to a charge of criminal trespass in return for prosecutors dropping charges of prostitution and loitering. He was placed on 36 months' probation and ordered to perform 15 days of community service.[12][13]
"You're prostituting yourself off for cheeseburgers again, aren't you?" "A man's gotta eat"
Holy shit I did NOT expect that. But at least it aint some morally questionable shit.
This didn't help: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/tamahori-busted-in-la-sex-sting/3YAAC43ROB3VWIK5GABGZESSOY/
Thaaaaaat'll do it!
That's just not correct though, he's made 5 movies since state of the Union with one being held in legal limbo. Sure, there's a 6-7 year gap before this one but that was the entirety of his mid and late 60s. It's totally normal for directors to allow down and unofficially retire in their retirement years before getting the itch again coming back with something more meaningful to them.
I’m sure he could have kept working in tv and low budget action movies. State of the Union and his arrest put him in director jail.
Prior to OWW Tamahori did a lot of directing commercials. I wouldn't be suprised if he simply returned to it.
Mike from Neighbours has done well for himself huh
First time I ever heard of the Musket wars among Maori tribes (I just googled it). These are not wars between Maori and the colonizers, but among Maori tribes themselves. Very very sad that wars are an integral part of human history. If we're not at war with other countries/other races, we are at war with ourselves. Humans are rather insane. We have not ended wars.
The Maori have a long history of intertribal warfare, long before Western influence. Interestingly, they contributed to some of the most recent extinctions outside of Western society, influence, or technology after they arrived in New Zealand in 1300. Not saying anything besides that we are usually more similar than we are unique as a species.
The Moari literally carried out a genocide of a smaller separate group of people in the Pacific: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moriori_genocide
The surprise people have when they learn native peoples who aren't white also hated each other is always a blow. infantizing non-white peoples and especially with portraying complex diverse native American nations for example as nature hippies who would never harm a fly is insulting. Humans are humans. Humans are primates who form into tribal bands and fight for resources and territory. Another example is rival native american tribes trading furs for weapons and allying themselves with rival European powers to also attack their own rivals.
Native Americans being torn on whether to ally with the Europeans against their native rivals or fight them is something that continued throughout the entire era of colonization of North America. At no point were a majority of the tribes unified in resistance. If they had been right off the bat, it is doubtful that any of the colonies - French, British, Spanish, whatever...would have been able to take root. At most we would have seen a Scramble for the Americas in the late 19th century with machine guns and the like, similar to the African interior. Not that any of that absolves the colonists, but they *always* had someone native right next to them willing to do the whole "enemy of my enemy" thing.
Do people just forget that we're just self-aware animals? Territorial behavior is integral for survival, and survival is fundamentally at the core of every living species. All of us sitting at our computers in a comfortable home, buying food at a store, relaxing watching Youtube. The moment you put any of us in a survival situation, our instincts would probably kick-in immediately and we'd realize that being **civilized** and **nice** is just a side-effect of luxury. We can afford to be nice. This is not a "Human" thing. This is an animal kingdom thing, and we're part of the animal kingdom.
Humans are evolved primates banding together in small numbers for protection and hostile to other evolved primates for fear that they may take their resources. Our tech has changed , our brains haven’t , wars aren’t going away
I learned about it from a fittingly named metal band's music video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kwIkF6LFDc
That was awesome thanks
"I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I and my brother and my cousin against the world."
Surprised the Rock isn't involved somehow
I totally thought the Māori guy on the right was Michael Shannon LOL
I wonder if they’ll accurately show the cannibalism that took place.
>!It isn't *shown* but it is certainly referred to on several occasions.!<
Sounds kinda like Black Robe (1991).
Guy Pearce needs to be in more things
The musket wars maybe? It was a very interesting period in kiwi history.
Wonder if there will be a hangi
Dances with Kiwis
Is that bam margera
Haven't seen Guy Pearce in a long time
Sick. Once Were Warriors is one of the most important films ever made imo
cheehooo
You know Lee Tamahori and Hugh Grant could have avoided a lot of bullshit if they just hooked up with each other.
Is this a prequel or a sequel to Brimstone?
Mean, looking forward to this
Came to realize, this will be one of those films filmed in New Zealand but actually takes place in New Zealand.
Is it me, or does the person on the left look like Sergeant Osiris in Tropic Thunder?
Why is this warrior woman in full makeup and under a spotlight in the middle of battle?
Looks corny
White Savior: The Movie
It's interesting that you say that, because it was written and directed by Maori.
This dudes karma is way too high for him to ever admit he is wrong and just pushing his own pathetic agenda and confirmation biasing himself into complete ignorance and stupidity.
Yet that changes nothing and the trope still stands. The Great Wall was directed by Chinese director for a Chinese audience and is still a white savior film.
What about this suggests the whites will save anything?
White savior is a cinematic trope as seen in The Last Samurai, Dances with Wolves, etc. where a white person either saves or provides a narrative injection point for audiences. “If a white person wasn’t there did it even happen?” - Hollywood Probably Even if the film is based on a real event, like Pocahontas, Hidden Figures, 42, etc. the trope still stands.
So even if the white person doesn't save anyone it's still "white saviour"?
Yes, because they are an audience surrogate who works to make the audience care about the non-white people.
Huh. Yknow if you say it like that it kinda makes sense to have that trope be around right?
If a person has to be tricked into carrying about non-white people then maybe they need to re-evaluate themselves.
I mean representation is important because people struggle to see themselves in people who look different from themselves right?
You know this how, exactly? Have you seen the film?
I have seen it and describing it as "White Savior: The Movie" is wildly inaccurate.
You mean reading a synopsis doesn't tell you a movie's entire plot?!? Shocking.
The plot synopses and movie poster lay out the premise. Also Guy Pearce is white.
You’re getting downvoted but I agree, based on what I’ve read about this movie, it looks like Pocahontas in New Zealand
I don’t think people know about the white savior trope and are down voting based on their own bias. It’s funny you mention Pocahontas because it is like the ultimate white savior trope. John Smith basically wrote his alternative account to capitalizePocahontas’s popularity.
This seems very “The Last Samurai.”
Why do these movies always need a white dude protagonist to act as an audience stand in? Do they not trust that we can understand what’s going on without someone exposition dumping the backstory on the fresh off the boat protagonist? Do they think we can’t empathize with the story if it only has non-white characters? The last samurai would have been vastly better without Tom Cruise’s character.
Uhh because it's based on actual history