i just saw a great movie guys
Oct. 3rd, 2010 08:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
intertribalCalled Winter's Bone. Here's the trailer, and yes, it's as good as the trailer advertises.
Yes, I realize I'm way late on this one (it was a Sundance winner, came out in June), but that's how it rolls in Nebraska. The trailer pretty much tells you what it's about - Ree, a seventeen-year-old girl in the Missouri Ozarks, is the de facto caretaker of her younger brother and sister (who are the de facto caretakers of a zoo of dogs and cats), because her mother is non-responsive/drugged up/a non-entity and her father is a missing meth chef. Her father put the house and the family's woods up for bond, and if he doesn't show up for his court date, the government takes the property. So Ree has to go find him - either find him and drag him to court, or (more likely) find proof of death. Obviously she has next to nothing going for her: she has no car, no money, and no one will tell her anything. But Ree is tough - not foolhardy, just aware of how severe the stakes are.
This movie could have easily slid into a sort of, "oh my God look at how terrible poverty is" or "oh my God look at how cruel these people are" exploitation flick. It doesn't. People live by a particular clannish code, and that code necessitates that things be taken care of in a certain way, but people are neither evil nor helpless, and they bend the code when they both can and want to. Family was neither here nor there, I felt - it was more a question of will. It turns out that Ree does have allies - her young best friend, already married to an asshole and mother of a baby, and her creepy but ultimately caring drug addict uncle Teardrop. There's also a shady sheriff, passive aggressive neighbors who may or may not be child molesters (if you've read the Laura Ingalls book The First Four Years, they're like a more extreme version of the Boast couple), cattle auctions, musical family reunions, a sisterhood of enforcers, and an interesting question of whether Ree should sell the hundred-year-old woods on the property (she has a dream/vision of the woods being cut down, and squirrels running from the wreckage, like she and her siblings being chased from society). There's also brief glimpses of the life Ree could have led had she been born into a better situation - the kids with more "normal" lives at the high school she's dropped out of, the junior ROTC, the Army (she wants to join because the poster advertises $40,000).
I was terrified for Ree, but the ending was actually less bleak than I expected it to be (which was appreciated, in this case - and no, no rich grandpa drops out of the sky and adopts them all into his mansion - things are still bleak, just not as bleak). I strongly recommend those of you who are into Southern gothic type stuff see this (the writer of the book this was adapted from, Daniel Woodrell, apparently calls his stuff "country noir").
Yes, I realize I'm way late on this one (it was a Sundance winner, came out in June), but that's how it rolls in Nebraska. The trailer pretty much tells you what it's about - Ree, a seventeen-year-old girl in the Missouri Ozarks, is the de facto caretaker of her younger brother and sister (who are the de facto caretakers of a zoo of dogs and cats), because her mother is non-responsive/drugged up/a non-entity and her father is a missing meth chef. Her father put the house and the family's woods up for bond, and if he doesn't show up for his court date, the government takes the property. So Ree has to go find him - either find him and drag him to court, or (more likely) find proof of death. Obviously she has next to nothing going for her: she has no car, no money, and no one will tell her anything. But Ree is tough - not foolhardy, just aware of how severe the stakes are.
This movie could have easily slid into a sort of, "oh my God look at how terrible poverty is" or "oh my God look at how cruel these people are" exploitation flick. It doesn't. People live by a particular clannish code, and that code necessitates that things be taken care of in a certain way, but people are neither evil nor helpless, and they bend the code when they both can and want to. Family was neither here nor there, I felt - it was more a question of will. It turns out that Ree does have allies - her young best friend, already married to an asshole and mother of a baby, and her creepy but ultimately caring drug addict uncle Teardrop. There's also a shady sheriff, passive aggressive neighbors who may or may not be child molesters (if you've read the Laura Ingalls book The First Four Years, they're like a more extreme version of the Boast couple), cattle auctions, musical family reunions, a sisterhood of enforcers, and an interesting question of whether Ree should sell the hundred-year-old woods on the property (she has a dream/vision of the woods being cut down, and squirrels running from the wreckage, like she and her siblings being chased from society). There's also brief glimpses of the life Ree could have led had she been born into a better situation - the kids with more "normal" lives at the high school she's dropped out of, the junior ROTC, the Army (she wants to join because the poster advertises $40,000).
I was terrified for Ree, but the ending was actually less bleak than I expected it to be (which was appreciated, in this case - and no, no rich grandpa drops out of the sky and adopts them all into his mansion - things are still bleak, just not as bleak). I strongly recommend those of you who are into Southern gothic type stuff see this (the writer of the book this was adapted from, Daniel Woodrell, apparently calls his stuff "country noir").
