WINTER'S BONE

I find your post more interesting than the film...I saw it a couple of weeks ago, and I just couldn't get into it. I found it more dreary than bleak. Someone whose opinions on films I respect a lot picked it as his #1 film of the year on his blog, so I was surprised when I didn't like it.

Pretty much felt like killing myself after I watched this yesterday but thought it was excellent. Ree (sp? I obv haven't read the book or this thread) was excellent and I think I'm sort of in love with John Hawkes. He was incredible! What an actor. I think this was the best movie I've seen in a quite a while tbh.

ok so i was talking to a friend of mine about this movie and how i'd avoided it because i'd heard it was a debbie downer and he was all no it really isn't, it's on some ~real lyfe~ shit but it's hardly melodrama or anything that's gonna leave you shell shocked. his theory was that since the ending is just kinda "welp we're done" and w/o closure (NB I HAVE NOT SEEN THIS) it scans to ppl as a bummer when in fact it's actually just what happens in real life.

also nb my friend is an actual card-carrying poet

Maybe you should see it and then analyze it afterward.

yeah my poet friends love this movie. fuckin' poets.

hardly melodrama or anything that's gonna leave you shell shocked

I'd definitely say that's true. I didn't cry at any point but was really out bummed for a while last night. I think the "real lyfe shyt" it's on is what makes it so bleak. It's just really . . . grim. That said it was awesome and you should watch it just maybe plan to go to the circus or sniff some babies heads afterward or something.

Maybe you should see it and then analyze it afterward.

― reggaeton for the painfully alone (polyphonic), Monday, May 9, 2011 3:35 PM (35 minutes ago) Bookmark

chill winston

I have "issues" w/r/t the unremitting bleakness of it but that's my own baggage - what it's doing totally works.

Yeah John Hawkes, what can you say really? There are so many incredible actors and actresses that Hollywood is just too dumb - too retrograde - to figure out how to use.

chill winston

If I wanted to read people pontificate about films they haven't seen I'd delete my Dr. Morbius greasemonkey script.

Given the amount of real life shit in, you know, real life, I'd be pretty sad if it took this movie to bum you out. Can't remember its name, but there was a great PBS (?) doc out several years ago that focused on two high school kids in rural, poor, mountain Arkansas, and the struggles they went through just to go to school each day.

Think it was "Country Boys," and it was set in dirt-poor rural Tennessee, but same idea.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/countryboys/

Shit, I mean Kentucky. Anyway, this is real-life "Winter's Bone" and available at that site online.

I have "issues" w/r/t the unremitting bleakness of it but that's my own baggage - what it's doing totally works.

otm

Yeah John Hawkes, what can you say really? There are so many incredible actors and actresses that Hollywood is just too dumb - too retrograde - to figure out how to use.

― 40% chill and 100% negative (Tracer Hand), Monday, May 9, 2011 11:16 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

lol he gets run over by a truck 2 minutes after his character gets introduced in Miami Vice

he's gonna be a lot more noticeable soon thanks to that new flick where he plays a cult leader, methinks.

xp haha, wow, sad

i've been saying "cut them thirty year o' timber down to nuuubs" to myself for a couple days now

Thump was creepy as hell in this movie

When you finally see him he looks like a backup bass player in the Charlie Daniels band and somehow that makes him even scarier.

hahaha YES

lol

come to think of it there really wasn't one character other than Ree in the movie where I looked at them and said "y'know, this person has their head on their shoulders, really upstanding individual"...

Her neighbor.

The ones who apparently sit around mournfully singing "Farther Along" to each other all day long??

/RAGE

(sorry)

Wait which ones where that? I meant the lady who took the horse in an brought her the deer meat and vegetables.

Did she sing?

Oh I think you mean the one's who were having a birthday party when they went to talk to Jessup's ex.

I'm going to read this thread later cause I can't stop thinking about this movie.

the lady who took the horse in an brought her the deer meat and vegetables

Oh yeah, forgot about her.

me too. I think it was because with the way the movie would go, i half expected her to turn into a villain and then forgot about her when she disappeared from the movie.

posted these comments in bits and pieces in another thread several months ago. always meant to assemble them here, so...

this is one of the best recent american genre films i've seen. winter's bone aims primarily to capture and, in a way, to honor, focusing on the details that characterize a way of life - and on the sorts of lives that might be lived within that characterization. the film's strength is largely dependent on place and texture, on careful observation more than wild imagination, and for that reason it might not appeal to viewers who demand sleeker and more aggressive thrills.

winter's bone builds its central mystery up from a good documentarian's directness and self-effacement, and i liked the relationship between that approach and the more genre-bound mystery plotting. i loved this movie for its richness, humanism and empathic integrity. i loved too its evocation of the bonds that entwine families and communities, both strong and weak, clear and subtle, the way such bonds both define and contend with our sense of moral obligation. the deliberately rough, pseudo-documentary style might seem superficially flat, but the film's off-the-cuff naturalism allows for an offhand beauty that never feels self-indulgent or showy.

we don't necessarily expect an unusual depth & subtlety of character & theme in a mystery story, or a strikingly personal relationship with place & culture, but that's what i felt i got here. i liked the things this film chooses to pay attention to and the way it pays attention to them. it contrasts the poignancy and fragility of domestic affection - the foolish bubble of innocence and joy we try to build around our families - with the fundamental threat and uncaringness of the larger world in which family exists. i liked that and feel that i don't see it explored anywhere near enough in american cinema. i liked, too, the way winter's bone balances its empathic streak with a hard-eyed look at the sacrifices that this sort of domestic maintenance can require.

this is on netflix instant! its pretty good!

Just finished it. Wow, i fucking loved this movie. Cried like 5 times but then I'm weak that way. Must find book.

i was also thrown by a lot of music that i think of as appalachian ("farther along", "high on a mountain") but i guess hillbilly country extends farther than i'd imagined.

No, my family all come from the South Dakota prairie and my mom and her sibs sing most of these same songs when they get together.

yeah gonna rewatch this in netflix. there's another on there as well by the same director, 'down to the bone'

its "funny," for a drug plague that is reportedly pretty devastating it doesnt seem like there are a lot of meth movies out there. this and breaking bad and...? or am i just not paying attention to the burgeoning meth movie scene

Loved this film, incredibly atmospheric and A+ performances all round.

>Must find book.

My wife bought me the book as a gift, inspired by my raving about the film. It's superb, totally recommend it.

i liked 'down to the bone', the portrayal of heroin addiction here isn't ott like in most films, so it ends up evoking more empathy than gross-out. and vera farmiga is hot.

its "funny," for a drug plague that is reportedly pretty devastating it doesnt seem like there are a lot of meth movies out there. this and breaking bad and...? or am i just not paying attention to the burgeoning meth movie scene

Well, there's Spun and...yeah. Meth's not a sexy or funny drug.

neither is crack, though

i mean youd at least think thered be movies about meth _gangs_ or something

i liked 'down to the bone', the portrayal of heroin addiction here isn't ott like in most films, so it ends up evoking more empathy than gross-out. and vera farmiga is hot.

i think i remember finding post-OD mia wallace uma thurman v attractive in pulp fiction, & am glad that vera farmiga apparently maintained being v attractive even throughout her character's addiction arc in this movie

this movie is a mess structurally and its depiction of poor rural arkansas is pretty ridic. C-

i liked this line from A.S. Hamrah: "In Winter’s Bone, people are poor and dangerous, which is to say they have dignity."

it's rural Missouri, but just across the line from AR.

ozarks whatever

pfft whatever D+

p.s. you're a mess structurally!

:]

so when she gives the hands to the sheriff she says someone dumped them on her porch. why didn't they actually do that? i mean do they just make her fish him out to fuck with her? i feel like i'm missing a plot point here.

they make her fish him out to fuck with her