Dances with Kevin

                                                          Crazy Horse by Diana Plater

The world is divided into those who love Kevin Costner and those who don’t.

One friend describes him as “an archetypal spunk” but then she admits to a partiality to honey-hued hair on boys.

Others think he is a super dag and a bad actor.

I’m somewhere in between on this one.

While researching a recent story I watched Dances with Wolves again and I loved it.

A film adaptation of the 1988 book of the same name by Michael Blake, it tells of a Union Army lieutenant assigned to an abandoned army post who finds himself alone and beyond civilization. Only a wolf and some roving Lakota Indians provide distractions, as the back of the DVD cover puts it.

Winning  an Oscar for best picture, apparently it was responsible for reigniting the western genre in films when it came out in 1990. Three hours long it was also pretty entertaining, funny, sad and moving. And I liked the way Lieutenant Dunbar danced around the fire and rode his trusty horse.

At least he attempted to make it a bilingual movie – with much of the movie in  Lakota.

But one Native American activist and actor described it as Lawrence of the Plains.

He said a woman taught the actors the Lakota language, which was a problem because Lakota has a male-gendered language and a female-gendered language. So some of the Indians and Costner were speaking in the feminine way.

 This brought on a flood of giggles by male Lakotans everytime they saw the movie in local cinemas.

Really, you can’t win.

Well old Two Socks, the wolf, loved him.

But Kev’s $100 million Dunbar Resort in Deadwood has also been surrounded with controversy since the early 90s when he and his brother Dan first proposed it.

The project hinged on a change in state gaming laws. The state of South Dakota voted to raise the betting limit at Deadwood casinos from $5 to $100 and reportedly gave the brothers $14 million to develop their plan.

It was to be built on land next to the Black Hills National Forest and would have had a golf course and a railroad right of way. But Native American groups view the Black Hills as sacred, the resort as desecration, and said the land was deeded to the Lakota in treaties.

Also previously in these states only Indian reservations had had the rights to run casinos - a way to boost the local economy.

Despite spending millions, Costner's resort has never materialised.

Still he does have his small casino, Midnight Star, in Deadwood and the staff  think he’s a good guy and pretty laid back, despite all the troubles and bad reviews over the years..

All over the walls of his casino are memorabilia, costumes and props from his movies including the one I loved because it was just SO kitsch – The Bodyguard. Oh Whitney, how far have you fallen since then?

The night we visit it’s quiet with only a table of card players - probably playing the Dead Man's Hand, I think to myself. Upstairs a barmaid tells me Costner comes “about twice a year”.

“He’s kinda mellow and down to earth,” she says.

And you could tell that was all she wanted to say on the subject of Kevin Costner.