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NAFPS Reviews of Nuage Related Films

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educatedindian:
I did report the negative review I referred to. It was an extended racist rant and pretty defamatory of Looking Horse and others.

That's one more thing anyone can do at IMDB, get pulled the worser reviews. There's a category called Irrelevant. Strictly speaking, racist and defamatory are not TOS violations. But a review that doesn't even refer to the film is. That's what got the negative review TOSsed.

ETA: One can also rate the film without a review, or rate the usefulness of a review.

Sparks:

--- Quote from: educatedindian on April 15, 2018, 03:57:14 pm ---This thread can also be for reviews of accurate and worthy films. I included Spirits for Sale.
--- End quote ---

For background purposes there are several threads about Spirits for Sale:

http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=1119  (Main thread …)
http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=560
http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=1529
http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=1790
http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=1935
http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=2020
http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=2111
http://www.newagefraud.org/smf/index.php?topic=2332

The often referred to site www.spiritsforsale.com has been replaced by
http://www.folkejohansson.se/folkejohansson.se/SPIRITS_FOR_SALE.html

educatedindian:
A few people included bits of truth about the 2012 hoax in their review of the film.

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1190080/trivia?ref_=tt_trv_trv
The doomsday theory sprung from a Western idea, not a Mayan one. Mayans insisted that the world would not end in 2012. The Mayans had a talent for astronomy, and enthusiasts found a series of astronomical alignments they said coincided in 2012. Once every 640,000 years, the sun lines up with the center of the Milky Way galaxy on the winter solstice, the sun's lowest point in the horizon. The last time that happened was on December 21, 2012, the same day the Mayan calender expired. The modern doomsday myth was bolstered by several ostensibly scientific reasons for a disaster, including a pole shift, the "return" of Planet X or the Sun's sinister counterpart Nemesis, a galactic, planetary, or other celestial alignment, global warming, global cooling, a massive solar flare, or a new ice age. None had any basis in respected science. For example, the "galactic alignment" between the sun, Earth, and galactic center happens every December. The best alignment was reached in the 1990s, and was accompanied by its own set of doomsday theories. Alignments since then have been increasingly poor.

The title refers to the end-date of the 13th b'ak'tun of the Long Count calendar, used by the Mayan Meso-American civilization. In their creation myth, we live in the fourth "attempt" at creating the world, while the third attempt was dismissed as a failure after its own 13th b'ak'tun. Though Mayan documents contain no such information, a popular myth stated that the calendar "ended" on that date, and certain religions predicted an apocalyptic event on that date. The Long Count calendar can express dates from about 3000 B.C. (their date for the creation of the world) to about forty octillion years in the future. It's almost impossible to express that date in a mortally comprehensible fashion.

The film's title plays upon the myth of the Mayan calendar ending in 2012. It actually ends in 3770 and doesn't predict any end of the world. New Age hoaxers claimed the calendar ended in order to make money. Mayas never claimed that and were annoyed by outsiders pestering them with questions about it.

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Bios I've tried to post there.

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John Colbert AKA Lightning Bear was born in Houston, Texas in 1947 and from there moved to California. His first work in film was with a production company doing commercials and travel logs for the Mexican government. He spent 6 months traveling through Mexico, him working as an actor, precision driver, diver and boat handler. In 1965 after leaving the company, a Scottish friend and him, decided to go to Hollywood. He met Spanky McFarland who was once on the "Little Rascals". He was producing and directing at Universal Studios at the time. Colbert pretended he was American Indian and told McFarland that his name was "Lighting Bear." Spanky offered to help him and got him into SAG. Spanky said that the best position was in stunts.

After returning from Vietnam in the 70s he had the chance to work with Richard Harris on the film "A Man Called Horse" which later helped get him on Star Wars. It was during preproduction and production of the "Return of a Man Called Horse" that he traveled to England. A friend from England was working as a model maker on Star Wars at Elstree Studios. He took Colbert with him and helped get him work as a Stormtrooper and Biker Scout.

Colbert also had a company in film and television doing work as the Executive Production Co-coordinator. He produced a show for the Tropicana Hotel called "After Midnight" and worked as a Stunt Co-coordinator and 2nd Unit Director. Colbert also did acting in summer stock, one of which was "West Side Story", playing one of the Sharks, and was able to work with Sean Connery on "Diamond are Forever" in Las Vegas.

In 1993, Colbert went to Germany and impersonated being an American Indian shaman. In 2002, Colbert was sentenced to 15 months probation on seven charges of dangerous bodily injury. Colbert had passed off whippings and mutilations in the genital area of women as "shamanic ceremony and healing." Several of the victims came forward and posted public accounts of what they went through.

In 2003, a warrant was issued for Colbert's arrest in Australia for similar abuse after being exposed by Channel 9 in Melbourne. Colbert fled the country.

He returned to Germany and continued to sell what he claimed was shamanic healing. In 2005, Colbert directed an independent film called "Bad Blood". In 2011, Colbert died in Hanau, Germany. New Age sites in German still often list him as American Indian and a shaman.

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 Cesidio Tallini also calls himself Wequarran Archimedes. He also claims to be: A Native American sachem (leader). The paramount chief of the Ryamecah Confederation. The Governor of the United Micronations Multi-Oceanic Archipelago. The Bishop and founder of the Cesidian Church. Ambassador at Large of Antarctica.

Most others do not accept, agree with, or believe his claims. He is in his forties, unmarried, unemployed, and lives with his parents.

He is a leader in Nemenhah, a group of whites claiming to be a Native American church or university. Many Nemenhah are alternative medicine sellers or have anti government militia beliefs.

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 William Two Feather was born William Schober, of German and Mexican ancestry. He grew up in Los Angeles. In 1997 he claimed to be Apache and started selling New Age versions of Native ceremonies. He claims to be a faith healer, psychic surgeon, and "shaman." In 2018, Schober was involved in an altercation at a New Age gathering. Duncan OFinian was shot four times. Schober was charged with the shooting, but acquitted. Schober remains a controversial figure, especially to American Indians.

educatedindian:
Asa Carter's other film was Outlaw Josey Wales. Wrote this review that was rejected by IMDB, similar to the Little Tree one. Someone's an Eastwood fan, or a Confederate sympathizer. I'll post it on Academia.edu.

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Anyone looking for a simple thumbs up or thumbs down, look elsewhere. I'm also aware that most of those who love this film will go into denial. They'll likely downvote my review without reading it, as will racists. This review is for the thoughtful, open minded, and those interested in accurate history.

Outlaw Josey Wales, the book on which the film is based, was written by Asa Carter AKA Forrest Carter. Carter was not only a KKK member, he was a chapter founder and leader. He was also clearly a violent psychotic. He bombed several Black churches. There's clear evidence he beat a civil rights demonstrator to death with a club. Finally, he led an attack on famed singer Nat King Cole when Cole tried to tour the south.

But his greatest fame came from his writing. He wrote George Wallace's notorious "Segregation Now and Forever" speech, given when Wallace tried to block Black students from enrolling in the University of Alabama. Carter broke with Wallace a few years later, feeling that Wallace, while still white supremacist, was now "too moderate" because he wanted to avoid violence.

Carter invented a new identity. He wrote not only Outlaw Josey Wales but Education of Little Tree. He falsely claimed to be Cherokee, wore tanning makeup, and would go into mock "Indian war chants" in public. None if it worked.

Carter was exposed as a KKK terrorist the same year Josey Wales became a film. Natives and academics denounced Education of Little Tree and Carter as phony the same year it was published. That didn't matter to Hollywood. Disney made Little Tree into a film. Neither Disney not Eastwood ever apologized for enriching a Klansman and making him into a household name until his death.

The more naive would like to believe that Carter changed his ways or beliefs. No, both books and both films are deeply racist. As Native author Sherman Alexie argued, "Ultimately I think it is the racial hypocrisy of a white supremacist." In Josey Wales, Carter seriously claims Native women have sex with horses. In Little Tree, Carter claims that making moonshine is part of Cherokee tradition.

What Carter tried to do in both books was make public admiration and sympathy for American Indians serve the white supremacist, and especially the white southerner and KKK, causes. Josey Wales is a fantasy of a Confederate guerilla as being just like the best Native warriors. In Little Tree, Carter tries to claim white Southerners were heartbroken to see their Cherokee neighbors removed by the Trail of Tears. This is as false as can be. White Southerners were the ones pushing for forced removal. They elected Andrew Jackson to force Natives out of their homelands, and he did so by ethnic cleansing that killed over 20,000.

Again, both Carter books and films were deeply racist, and openly so. Josey Wales the film kept the "Indian women sex with horses" smear. The film is derogatory in spite of Native actor Dan George's efforts to make the film less insulting. Though Carter wrote a number of racist harangues against Natives as "savages" that made it into the film, Dan George undercuts them whenever possible. He delivers such lines with wry humor, sarcasm, or turns them back against white viewers. The one sickening exception is an old white woman's racist rants where she then hypocritically tells George, "No offense meant..." and George has to reply, "None taken."

George's character is named Lone Watie, an obvious take on the real life Stand Watie, a traitor to the Cherokee Nation who signed away their homeland for his own profit, barely escaped execution for his treason, and then spent the Civil War carrying out terrorism on his own people, killing several thousand. But in Josey Wales, "Lone Watie" is remade into a wry elderly curmudgeon.

Both Carter and Eastwood attached a "savage" Indian to Josey Wales to make Wales, a pro slavery terrorist, seem less motivated by bigotry. Confederate apologists have long done this, fabricating myths about "Cherokee cavaliers." There were some pro Confederate Cherokees, slave owners who hated both Blacks and their own Native ancestry and heritage, white wannabes.

Other Natives made a temporary alliance with the Confederacy for strategy reasons. They switched sides back to the US in the middle of the Battle of Pea Ridge, throwing off their CSA uniforms. The Confederacy had a policy of terrorism against Natives such as the Lumbee. One CSA leader, Colonel John Baylor, ordered genocide by mass poisoning against Apaches.

What of the rest of its portrayal of the Civil War? Since the story was written by a Klansman, one should expect it to whitewash the Confederacy and demonize Americans (you know, the Union). And it certainly does, with one falsehood after another.

The film has Wales as a peaceful farmer who only turns terrorist (what are inaccurately called raiders or guerillas) after his farm is burned and family killed. In fact, Confederates were the aggressors. They began the Civil War by attacking Fort Sumter. They also attacked hundreds of federal forts and installations long before Fort Sumter, seizing property and weapons by the ton.

They also carried out systematic terrorism in order to secede by force, since most Southerners were pro Union. This included both Black and white Southerners. The four border states were overwhelmingly loyal Americans and did not secede. Large parts of the Southern states were pro Union: north Alabama; north Arkansas; central Florida; southeast and north Georgia: north and southeast Louisiana; southwest Mississippi; western North Carolina; east Tennessee; central, northeast, and south Texas, and what became West Virginia. Over 300,000 Southerners fought for the Union. Over half of white Southern men dodged the draft, and two thirds deserted the CSA Army.

What about the film's depiction of Confederate raiders? Again, they were terrorists out for profit. The Confederate government and military barely recognized them at best, often repudiating them and regarding them as criminals posing as fighting for a cause. The record of them as outright terrorists is clear. They mass murdered civilians in Lawrence, Kansas, POWs in Centralia, Illinois, and elsewhere.

The film shows such terrorists as being lured into surrendering and then murdered. Actual surrendering Confederate troops were treated with remarkable leniency. They were allowed to keep their weapons to hunt, their horses and mules to ride home, and given Union rations, clothing, and medical care.

Actual raiders/terrorists were often called bushwackers, reflecting their favorite method, killing by surprise, and mostly targeting civilians, including women and children. Few of them surrendered. Instead the most notorious of these terrorists, Quantrill's Raiders, lost all Confederate support after the massacre in Lawrence, Kansas. Quantrill was killed in one of his attacks. His terrorists fought among themselves, split into smaller groups, becoming even more brutal.

At war's end, most continued robbery, murder, and mayhem for profit. The best known of these terrorists was Jesse James, who murdered a US Army captain and a mayor after the war, as well as robbing numerous times before his gang was wiped out in the Northfield, Minnesota bank robbery. A pro Confederate newspaper editor invented the Robin Hood myth attached to James's name, but there's no evidence he gave money from his robberies to anyone but himself.

The remainder of the film shows Wales heading west. This again is the reverse of actual history. Most of the Southerners who went west after the Civil War were Blacks, former slaves trying to escape the mass terrorism of white Southern racists, especially by the KKK, the ideological ancestors of Josey Wales's author, Klan terrorist Asa Carter. Carter knew this, and by showing a CSA terrorist as hiding out in the West, he's arguing for White Victimhood, that white racists were the actual ones being persecuted.

Is the film still any good at all? Leaving aside the massive deliberate historical inaccuracies and racist propagandizing, it's fairly dull for an action film, and the worst of Eastwood's westerns. Only Dan George's humor brings any redemption to the film at all.

Absolutely no one should take the film as a true or accurate view of Natives, the Civil War, and especially not Confederate terrorists AKA raiders. There are far more accurate and frankly better films all around on the Civil War and Confederacy.

Please see them instead: Andersonville (Civil War POWs), Free State of Jones (southern Unionists), Friendly Persuasion (pacifists in Civil War), Glory (54th Colored), Jane Pittman (110-year-old ex-slave), Oldest Living Confederate Widow, Pharoah's Army (Civil War border states) Private History of a Campaign That Failed (Mark Twain on Confederate soldiers), Red Badge of Courage (1951), Secret Missions of the Civil War (Confederate terrorism), Union Bound (Civil War POWs), Woman Called Moses (Harriet Tubman)

Thanks for reading this far.
Dr. Alton Carroll
US, American Indian, and Latin American History
Northern Virginia Community College

educatedindian:
Two more reviews added, on Return of Billy Jack and White Buffalo.

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3406608/reviews?ref_=tt_urv
Over two dozen ratings for a film that has zero reviews. Obviously someone went to the trouble to pad those ratings.

Tom Laughlin made some of the worst films of all time, loved mostly by those who want to hear preaching to the converted. His only hit was the original Billy Jack, and that because of blind luck. It happened to coincide with the first wave of martial arts films to be popular in the US.

That's gone in the rest of his movies. All of Laughlin's later films were incredibly preachy, appealing mostly to those who naively romanticized the Weather Underground but never had the guts to join. This film is no exception.

It also features Laughlin's bizarre race baiting: Himself as very obviously white...but playing a laughable stereotype of a Native...while posing as a champion of Natives...yet choosing causes that are far and away from actual Native issues. Got that?

The Billy Jack character is also based on the lies told by a white New Age imposter. John Pope was a retired white railroad worker who posed as Cherokee and had a cult following of white hippies. Among those he fooled were the Grateful Dead.

The film went thru half a dozen changes in subject and script before settling on the cheapest easy target, mobsters and child abusers. And still it manages to be so irritating and preachy that you start to root for the villains.

Thankfully, Laughlin passed away without ever getting funding for a Billy Jack remake. There were plans to get Keanu Reeves to star in it (!?) that were luckily ended by Native protests.

For all but Laughlin's three or four remaining fans, save yourself the pain of watching this.

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https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2203800/reviews?ref_=tt_urv
New Age Imposters Present False Information

The reviews of this title are very low for a reason. Gary "Fourstars" and his wife are NOT Native. They are whites, and the actual Fourstar family have repeatedly asked them to quit using a name they have no right to and quit posing as Native medicine people.

The white buffalo prophecy is very inaccurately portrayed in this film. It's a prophecy solely of a few Plains tribes. The Hopi have nothing to do with it. The actual prophecy states a white buffalo must change to particular colors, not remain white. Most of the "white buffalos" out there are actually buffalo-cattle hybrids bred by the unscrupulous to make money off the prophecy.

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