End of the Spear, a fact-based story of conflict and resolution between a primitive warrior tribe in Ecuador and peace-seeking Christian missionaries (of unidentified denomination) from North America, is inspiring enough to make you wish that the filmmakers had reined in their sentimental excesses.
Robert Driskell Jr.'s sumptuous cinematography (the movie was filmed mostly in Panama) makes every raindrop glisten, every leaf appear translucent and every winding river resemble a flowing turquoise train. That physical beauty notwithstanding, the humane message of the film (directed by Jim Hanon and written by Jim Hanon, Bart Gavigan and Bill Ewing) is undercut by the religio-mythic trappings attached to it, and by an inescapable air of Kipling-esque smugness in its portrayal of civilized whites enlightening rampaging dark-skinned savages. The overawed musical score by Ronald Owen is so obtrusive that it never lets you have a feeling of your own.
The sleek, mostly Latino actors portraying members of the violent Waodani tribe, who achieve peace and harmony with the surviving missionaries after murdering five, are only marginally more authentic than the American Indians played by Hollywood extras in 1950's westerns. Louie Leonardo, the Dominican actor who portrays the tribe's most violent warrior, Mincayani, suggests a less steroidal version of The Rock in his displays of acrobatics and spear-wielding virtuosity.
PHOTO: COURTESY OF DARE TO MAKE CONTACT
Much of the drama revolves around the disagreement between Mincayani and his fellow tribesman Kimo (Jack Guzman) about the identity of Dayumae (Christina Souza), a Waodani woman lost to the tribe who has been living with the missionaries and becomes a bridge between the two cultures. Is she a spirit, as Mincayani insists, or a real person?
The story is narrated by Steve Saint (Chad Allen), a solemn young man who returns to the scene of the massacre decades after the murder in 1956 of his father, Nate (also played by Allen), and four colleagues during a tense first encounter. The missionaries and their families had settled in the Amazon Basin hoping to save the endangered tribe, then known as the Auca, from extinction in deadly intertribal warfare. Because Nate piloted a bright yellow aircraft, which the astonished Waodani identify as "a wooden bee" when it first buzzes overhead, the movie has some gorgeous aerial photography.
End of the Spear is a film of few words and no developed characters. Not even the grown-up Steve (his younger self is played by Chase Ellison), who in the film's mawkish climax meets and reconciles with his father's killer, emerges as more than a solemn, self-important mouthpiece.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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