Dances With Wolves. I am Wind In His Hair. Do you see that I am your friend? Can you see that you will always be my friend?

The special edition of Dances With Wolves was on sale for $10 at Borders so I bought it Friday. I watched it last night and today (it's long, at 3.5 hours) and was reminded of it's quality.

Watching special editions where they've added scenes into the original cut of the movie is always a bit strange for me. I tend to spend too much time thinking about which scenes are the new ones, how did it change. I do this because I want to compare the two, decide which I like more and why.

But with great movies there's really no need to do that. And this is a great movie. Some would call it slow, and it is, but it's not slow in a bad way. The subject of this movie is a different time and a different people. That time and those people existed at a different pace. I get a glace of this when I visit my family in small town Missouri, but I know the reality of the frontier was very different. The way life worked then is so different then the way life works now, it almost feels like if we were to meet there would be as much of a cultural devide as Jon Dunbar had when meeting the Sioux.

If this story was told in a vacuum it would be a mostly happy one. Yes, bad things happen, but the story of two cultures coming to together and understanding eachother, the story of genuine friendship, those are good stories. Unfortunately, this isn't a vacuum and there's a sad shadow hanging over the whole story.

As the viewer watches you may not know how the small story of this movie will end, be we know what happens in the tragic larger story.

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