sageb1
05-05-2004, 02:07 AM
This movie is not "Aragorn" meets Lawrence of Arabia. I see it as a man of two cultures finds himself during a long grueling race a world away.
Moreover, this is not a real review; this is a critique and may be spotty in detail because I just saw Hildago today.
So I might be biased about this film, considering that it was reviewed April 22 and within a week it's in the low-budget movie theatre in my neck of the woods. It was $2.50 Tuesday.
In Hildago, Viggo Mortensen gets top billing. He's a published poet, author, and actor.
The only review of Hildago I viewed was from the National Post, and it portrayed Mortensen as being somewhat humble and low-key about this movie.
It didn't dawn on me until I saw the movie why...
The cultural lens that Hollywood views the world is a distorted one. It's all about making money at the expense of truth, especially when Disney is involved.
Hence you have most of the characters speak English, with the actors playing Arabs speaking the King's English and Victorian mores dominating the behavior of the main character Frank Hopkins. When Sioux or Arabic is spoken there are subtitles.
At the start of the film, Hopkins is part of Wild Bill Hickock's cowboy show, along with Sitting Bull and Calamity Jane. He is challenged by a wealthy Arab prince to participate in a horse race from Iraq to Damascus Syria. After many adventures on the way, the race ends.
According to the story line, Hopkins turns out to be half Indian, his mother a Lakota Sioux and his father of British ancestry.
The African slave trade is shown, and dead customs such as the buying of a slave boy (African), and comedic abuse of the boy. This resulted in laughter from the audience. Indeed, everytime the child was abused or called names, the audience laughed, hopefully nervously. The man assigned to help Hopkins turns out to have been a thief and had the option of having a hand cut off or helping Hopkins, who is treated rudely as an American. Hopkins takes it all in stride.
As well, we had a view of Arabic custom and a proper respect of a young Muslim woman by Hopkins.
In one point of the film you have the leading arch-villanness compare Hopkins heritage to his horse, one of the many wild mustangs of the Badlands in South Dakota.
Apart from the racist undertone of the film, which was condoned and even endorse over 100 years ago, the film does have a quality to it that seems to echo with Tom Cruise's Last Samurai.
It appears that Hopkins was a witness to the massacre of Sioux Indians that became a government pogrom, including corralling wild horses, stealing land from them and starting the cultural genocide instituted by residential schools.
At the beginning of the film his Souix blood brother, a medicine man, tells him "You are lost."
The best part of the film is when Hopkins embraces his heritage.
He begins that final leg of the race trying to beat a vain Arab prince who has won previous races, the hand-picked Arab rider the villanness has hired to ride her fullbred Arabian, and Hopkins.
At this moment in the film the audience is quiet.
Me, I am silently thinking "Yes! Hopkins is no longer lost. He's found his roots!"
I also liked the scenes with the Sheikh's daughter and Hopkins, because that is authentic behavior for cowboys.
Mortensen, who is a natural for languages - he knows Norwegian - learned to speak Lakota Sioux. According to the Lakota technical advisor, he carried that off with believability.
Yet this film actually would serve as a conversation piece for people to bring up as challenging those Hollywood myths about the Indian Wars.
Overall though, this movie is a work of deliberate fiction, probably to sell the Wild West theme at Disney's trademarked Disneyland, Disneyworld, DisneyJapan and EuroDisney.
Questionable is Hopkins being in Hickock's Wild West show.
http://www.thelongridersguild.com/hopkins.htm
Me, I feel Hopkins would have been too busy delivering mail. The scene in the movie could only be plausible by rationalizing Hopkins, on witnessing the latter part of the Indian Wars where white men hunted buffalo and scalped Indians with full approval of the US government, turned to drink and riding with the Wild West show.
The author of Custer Died for Your Sins, Vine Deloria, a Sioux, debunks Hildago. It turns out that Hopkins' Indian ancestry is a myth, similar to "Chief Red Fox" and Jamake Highwater.
http://www.thelongridersguild.com/deloria.htm
After reading Deloria's denunciation of the film I am inclined to believe that maybe Hopkins never delivered mail at all. He just wanted to get his 15 minutes of fame.
Gee, this makes me glad I went to a budget movie theatre rather than the chain omniplex theatre - I saved myself over $10 CAD. I was watching a hoax being milked by Disney for cheap.
So I have my doubts that the horse race from Persia. Iraq wasn't made a kingdom until 1932, after being adminstered under a League of Nation mandate by Great Britain (now the UK).
At the imaginary timeframe Hopkins gives, it would have been part of the Ottoman Empire, which broke up after World War I, due to intrigue by Britain and France, who played various Arab princes against each other until the Empire collapsed.
Moreover, this is not a real review; this is a critique and may be spotty in detail because I just saw Hildago today.
So I might be biased about this film, considering that it was reviewed April 22 and within a week it's in the low-budget movie theatre in my neck of the woods. It was $2.50 Tuesday.
In Hildago, Viggo Mortensen gets top billing. He's a published poet, author, and actor.
The only review of Hildago I viewed was from the National Post, and it portrayed Mortensen as being somewhat humble and low-key about this movie.
It didn't dawn on me until I saw the movie why...
The cultural lens that Hollywood views the world is a distorted one. It's all about making money at the expense of truth, especially when Disney is involved.
Hence you have most of the characters speak English, with the actors playing Arabs speaking the King's English and Victorian mores dominating the behavior of the main character Frank Hopkins. When Sioux or Arabic is spoken there are subtitles.
At the start of the film, Hopkins is part of Wild Bill Hickock's cowboy show, along with Sitting Bull and Calamity Jane. He is challenged by a wealthy Arab prince to participate in a horse race from Iraq to Damascus Syria. After many adventures on the way, the race ends.
According to the story line, Hopkins turns out to be half Indian, his mother a Lakota Sioux and his father of British ancestry.
The African slave trade is shown, and dead customs such as the buying of a slave boy (African), and comedic abuse of the boy. This resulted in laughter from the audience. Indeed, everytime the child was abused or called names, the audience laughed, hopefully nervously. The man assigned to help Hopkins turns out to have been a thief and had the option of having a hand cut off or helping Hopkins, who is treated rudely as an American. Hopkins takes it all in stride.
As well, we had a view of Arabic custom and a proper respect of a young Muslim woman by Hopkins.
In one point of the film you have the leading arch-villanness compare Hopkins heritage to his horse, one of the many wild mustangs of the Badlands in South Dakota.
Apart from the racist undertone of the film, which was condoned and even endorse over 100 years ago, the film does have a quality to it that seems to echo with Tom Cruise's Last Samurai.
It appears that Hopkins was a witness to the massacre of Sioux Indians that became a government pogrom, including corralling wild horses, stealing land from them and starting the cultural genocide instituted by residential schools.
At the beginning of the film his Souix blood brother, a medicine man, tells him "You are lost."
The best part of the film is when Hopkins embraces his heritage.
He begins that final leg of the race trying to beat a vain Arab prince who has won previous races, the hand-picked Arab rider the villanness has hired to ride her fullbred Arabian, and Hopkins.
At this moment in the film the audience is quiet.
Me, I am silently thinking "Yes! Hopkins is no longer lost. He's found his roots!"
I also liked the scenes with the Sheikh's daughter and Hopkins, because that is authentic behavior for cowboys.
Mortensen, who is a natural for languages - he knows Norwegian - learned to speak Lakota Sioux. According to the Lakota technical advisor, he carried that off with believability.
Yet this film actually would serve as a conversation piece for people to bring up as challenging those Hollywood myths about the Indian Wars.
Overall though, this movie is a work of deliberate fiction, probably to sell the Wild West theme at Disney's trademarked Disneyland, Disneyworld, DisneyJapan and EuroDisney.
Questionable is Hopkins being in Hickock's Wild West show.
http://www.thelongridersguild.com/hopkins.htm
Me, I feel Hopkins would have been too busy delivering mail. The scene in the movie could only be plausible by rationalizing Hopkins, on witnessing the latter part of the Indian Wars where white men hunted buffalo and scalped Indians with full approval of the US government, turned to drink and riding with the Wild West show.
The author of Custer Died for Your Sins, Vine Deloria, a Sioux, debunks Hildago. It turns out that Hopkins' Indian ancestry is a myth, similar to "Chief Red Fox" and Jamake Highwater.
http://www.thelongridersguild.com/deloria.htm
After reading Deloria's denunciation of the film I am inclined to believe that maybe Hopkins never delivered mail at all. He just wanted to get his 15 minutes of fame.
Gee, this makes me glad I went to a budget movie theatre rather than the chain omniplex theatre - I saved myself over $10 CAD. I was watching a hoax being milked by Disney for cheap.
So I have my doubts that the horse race from Persia. Iraq wasn't made a kingdom until 1932, after being adminstered under a League of Nation mandate by Great Britain (now the UK).
At the imaginary timeframe Hopkins gives, it would have been part of the Ottoman Empire, which broke up after World War I, due to intrigue by Britain and France, who played various Arab princes against each other until the Empire collapsed.