Winter's Bone***

Winter's Bone ***
Director: Debra Granik. With: Jennifer Lawrence, Shelley Waggener, Garret Dillahunt

A very tough to watch movie, the whole film is full of "not very pretty" characters. This movie makes True Grit look like entertainment. The story is of a whole village, macho, lost in the mountain, methane dealing people - everyone in town is in the business - and how unspoken secrets of the "trash" level created tension. All I see is white trash, white trash, white trash... but maybe it really isnt, its mountain people. Reminds me of redneck folks w the banjo playing in the movie Deliverance.

I wouldnt want to go there, I would be afraid of the law taken into their own hand type of rules in such a place. What is very unsettling is that the women are the ones who carries out the tough and dirty chores, bashing unwanted intruders (oh no none of the men touched her, it was I who did the bashing!) And the women goes into the lake, chainsawed the hands off - to help the girl to prove that the father is dead so she could keep the house and carry on with her life - thats the condition and context and thats what they could do for her.

The girl character is courageous and well acted, the brother and little sister are both good kids.

This movie makes me not want to go to any lost mountain town.
I cannot imagine having to live in such tough way of life.

There are chinese movies on village people, mountain people, but usually they are gentle and kind - and in reality they are too. I am so surprised to see these mountain people, and I would not want to get myself into such a context. There will be no getting through to them.

Margaret Cho said on her show that she had driven through the mid-West, the very racist, red neck country and did shows. I imagine these villages might be ones that she mentioned and that she had passed through. I appreciate the difficulties of doing talk shows as an Asian minority in US.

Watching this film shows me the bottom layer of USA - the layer that has little coverage because the people in the film are so unlikable.