3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Difficult call to rate this video, a mix of disappointment and excitement, August 25, 2009
This review is from: Honolulu DVD - 100 Years in the Making (DVD)
If I would have to characterize the person who authored the book for this video, I would call this person an over conforming and banner waving American citizen, with just such point of view. I am sure that native Hawaiians are offended by this video, and I was told so in Honolulu by bystanders with Hawaiian ethnicity where I picked it up from the shelf. I earned sour comment and angry looks. To say that Liliuokalani was "residing" at Washington Place, was a bit of an understatement. To mention in intense clipping an apology to American-Japanese during Reagan administration, but to skip the apology to Hawaiian people signed by the congress during Clinton administration, is a massive slip in diplomacy and lack of balance in selection of the material. Showing of long clips of Elvis Presley, or some American Football matches seemed very irrelevant to me and misplaced. In the same time the Royal Hawaiian Band went... unnoticed. I would see as relevant a more detailed analysis what went wrong in the territory/state building code that we have now Waikiki in its macabre form of boring concrete bunkers stacked next to each other in tiny distances. In my first visit to Hawaii I got such a "city view" room by the Lewers Street, what I consider my most traumatic hotel experience of my life: I was looking at a narrow tunnel way up with ugly Friedrich A/C units rumbling and dripping water. I was like being imprisoned in worse kind slums area or watching some dark science fiction vision of the future. Ever since I strictly refuse to even consider any "city view" room no matter what price.
Entire ethnic groups were skipped entirely, foremost the German speaking people who have had an immense influence on the development of these Islands in the Kingdom times and the beginning of the period as a territory. Hackfeld and Berger, please? Of the mentioned a few times Portuguese we know that they used to make bread. Anything else? Based on my own meanwhile 20 years of regular visits to the Islands I could literally compose a long list of interesting trivia entirely left out by this video.
But in the same time this video contains a fair amount of a historic footage, including Edison early films, which we enormously enjoyed to watch. Thus I would say, do not be discouraged by my personal negative opinion. Maybe you disagree and would enjoy the movie by yourself?
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