Waste of time

This movie is the proof that the world is becoming a sick and dumb place

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

Worth seeing just to witness how winsome it is.

There are a lot of good things about this movie. First, it starts off as a buddy movie. You know how two guys who are totally different are thrown together through circumstances beyond their control, and at first they clash but eventually learn to appreciate their differences and become good friends. The buddy effect of this movie is very believable. Both guys are likable with totally different personalities and played by good actors.Another factors is the "indian-ness". Those of us who aren't Indians have never been exposed to the jokes. In one scene, they walk into a house, and a old cowboy and Indian movie is showing on TV. One guy says, "The only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV is Indians watching Indians on TV." There's a whole genre of jokes that people like me haven't been exposed to.Also a high point is the quality of the actors. One is the breathtakingly beautiful Irene Bedard. She is just plain beautiful, and she plays a very loving, caring, warm young woman, someone you can admire. Another is Evan Adams who plays Thomas, a super-dork Indian who watched "Dances With Wolves" a hundred times so he could master the old Indian medicineman accent much to the annoyance of his friend. His parents died when he was an infant, but his grandmother just loves him so much. That was touching. And Thomas is a story-teller, and most of stories are just weird. I'd love to have a guy like that at a party.But the overall theme of the movie is how a young man deals with a neglecting father. The father leaves when he's a kid. It hurt him, and the movie shows a little of how he trying to overcome.

Really, really good film! They really cover everything in this - life on the reservation, father/son relationships, and a great deal of culture of the Native American way of life. I really liked the relationship between Victor and Thomas and the natural feel that existed between the characters. Thomas was my favorite - his voice, his smile, and the stories he wove. I really enjoyed the Native radio station announcements, especially the traffic reports, and it was a kick to see two actresses from "Northern Exposure" in here! Good music too! I'd definitely watch this again!

The more you try to describe a movie like Smoke Signals the likelier it is that you'll kill it. The story basically is about a son who eventually reaches some understanding concerning his father, who left the family years ago. The discovery and acceptance by the resentful Victor Joseph of his father's own unhappiness plays out in a road trip Victor and his friend, Thomas Builds-the-Fire, take from the Coeur d'Alene Indian Reservation in Idaho where they live to Phoenix to pick up the father's ashes. This sort of story has been so often turgidly overplayed by film-makers searching for "truth" that it's a surprise to find just how touching and humorous Smoke Signals turns out to be. The story may be about a search of discovery, but it's played out against the friction of reservation life in a white world. The humor carries a lot of irony but the dialog and situations are so gentle and natural that the inherent messages don't slam us about. There's no victim card being played here, just some truths told with the kind of underplayed honesty that makes ethnic humor, delivered by those same ethnic people, work not just for them but for those in a white world who are overhearing. Victor Joseph (Adam Beach) is a big, good looking young man who barely gets along, plays basketball and carries a chip on his shoulder. Thomas Builds-the-Fire (Evan Adams) is a scrawny, glasses-wearing young man who tells stories and talks about almost everything. Thomas has been raised by his grandmother. A fire killed his parents and it was Victor's father, Arnold Joseph (Gary Farmer), who caught Thomas, just a baby, when Thomas was tossed from a second floor window. Arnold Joseph was a big man, quick to laugh and quick to hit, maybe not a drunk but close to it. He denied being a hero. One day, when Victor was about 12, Arnold Joseph picked up and left. Victor never forgave him. When word of Arnold's death reaches Victor's mother. Victor decides he must get the ashes, but he doesn't have enough money. "Hey Victor!" Thomas says, "I'm sorry 'bout your dad." "How'd you hear about it?" Victor asks. "I heard it on the wind," Thomas says, "I heard it from the birds. I felt it in the sunlight. And your mom was just in here cryin'." Thomas has some money in a jar and offers it if he can come along. Off they go, hitchhiking, taking a bus, walking. Along the way, while Victor wrestles with his feelings about the father who left him, screenwriter Sherman Alexie and director Chris Eyre give us the kind of edgy smiles that are rare nowadays. "You gotta look mean or people won't respect you," says Victor to Thomas on the bus to Phoenix. "White people will run all over you if you don't look mean. You gotta look like a warrior! You gotta look like you just came back from killing a buffalo!" "But our tribe never hunted buffalo -- we were fishermen," says Thomas. "What!" says Victor, "you want to look like you just came back from catching a fish? This ain't 'Dances With Salmon' you know!" Yes, they return to the reservations with the ashes. Victor winds up learning a lot about himself as well as about his father. He learns a good deal about what Thomas reaches for with all the stories Thomas tells. We learn a lot about the value of a quiet movie with a fine screenplay and skillful direction. We learn about fry bread. And as Thomas says, when the going gets tough, "Sometimes it's a good day to die, and sometimes it's a good day to have breakfast." All the actors do commendable jobs, but Evan Adams is a standout. When he closes his eyes and starts to spin one of Thomas' stories, you don't really want him to stop. Adams has the challenging job of bringing us to the movie's close, emotionally and thoughtfully. "Do we forgive our fathers in our age or in theirs, or in their deaths, saying it to them, or not saying it? If we forgive our fathers...what is left?" Smoke Signals is based on Sherman Alexie's book of stories, The Lone Ranger And Tonto Fistfight In Heaven.

Writer Sherman Alexie's new book, Flight, is his first in ten years, and would be another terrific movie (my review is at http://lakeconews.com/content/view/2580/42/ if you'd like to read it) and ten years between films is quite long enough. :-)Smoke Signals gives us an aspect of Native Americans most of us rarely see, their wonderful humor--possibly what saves us white folks from the kind of violent retaliation we see in other occupied lands. Road movie, rez movie,coming of age--it's all that. It would be perfect for discussion in film classes or community groups, especially if there are native people in the group to talk about their reactions to it.