Hacker Cinema
Winter's Bone
2010 · Film · 101 min
Directed by Debra Granik
After discovering her father put their house up for his bail bond and then disappeared, 17-year-old Ree Dolly must confront the local criminal underworld and the harsh Ozark wilderness in order to to track down her father and save her family.
3 positive1 neutralfrom 4 commenters
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4 comments on Hacker News
> It was wild growing up in that area with the chat piles hundreds of feet tall towering over these little towns.
Especially when the area is extremely flat. Town I lived in (near, but not, Galena), the only places it was possible to snow-sled were man-made, with the only publicly-accessible one being the banks of the sole road overpass for miles around (I wanna say it went over railroad tracks? But it might have been another highway, regardless it had a remarkably long ramp-up to the actual part where it crossed over the other thing, and that left plenty of space for sledding) or if you happened to own land with coal mining strip-pits that still had the huge tailings/overburden pile, like you mention, and had the brush cleared from part of it.
Those kinds of things are practically the only hills of any kind in some counties in the region. Just outside any of those towns you can look down grid-straight rural roads that disappear into the horizon, and it's not hard to find them. It is flat. (Joplin area, slightly less so) Like, it's flat for Kansas. Many other parts of the state are, relatively speaking, blessed with great altitudinal diversity. Not that part.
It's a bit more south-of-Springfield than SE Kansas (or even Joplin) but the film Winter's Bone kinda felt like visiting home. All those familiar, scraggly trees. They really nail the feel of (a particular, more rural-leaning experience of) the area (I think it was actually filmed in Southern Missouri, so that makes sense, but the cinematographic "eye" of the movie really conveys it, too)
(Incidentally, if there's one thing to do in the very-flat part of Kansas that anyone who finds themselves remotely nearby should detour for, it's the Kansas Cosmosphere, somewhat West of the part otherwise under discussion but still the ultra-flat zone. It might be my favorite space exploration museum, and yes, I've been to most of the big ones in the US. It's shockingly good for being so far from basically anything else worth traveling for. If you have kids, hit the nearby Sedgwick County zoo, too, it's nothing special but it's alright and as long as you're there, why not. Area also has a state park built around some sand dunes left by retreating glaciers, which is kinda neat, though the park's a bit weak mostly due to just about everything outdoors being a really ugly in the region and the key feature of the park covering only a small area, and I make that judgement as someone who still feels weirdly at-peace and like things are correct when I visit, but like objectively it's really goddamn ugly, you gotta search to find anything natural that's as pleasant to look at as just your average view out a window many places, and if you turn around to look the other way you're probably back to ugly)
Me as well, and I definitely noticed that her role in "Hunger Games" was basically a young-adult dystopian scifi version of her role in "Winter's Bone" - and I feel her performance in both made each movie.
Thanks, I've added them to my todo list.
First movie I ever saw Jennifer Lawrence in was Winter's Bone [1]. Goodness grace, she's such a heroine in that movie. No wonder she got typecast for the strong female roles.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1399683/
"Rural poor has access to a gas station grocery and hunting/fishing if they're rich enough to afford the accoutrements and the time."
A week ago I watched the movie "Winter's Bone", which depicted grinding rural poverty. As the protagonist (teen girl) split logs for heat, cooked inexpensive meals, and hunted squirrels, I realized I'd grown up very near the same way - and never considered myself "poor", despite our huge garden, wood stoves, etc.
You say "rich enough" for hunting? Hunting license is $9 here in GA. Gun-show rifle was $30. One 7.62x54R round is $0.25. For under $50 and a weekend morning/evening, you can get several hundred dollars worth of meat. Fishing is similarly cheap if you're so inclined. Just because people spend thousands on a sport doesn't mean you have to for sustenance.
As for other sustenance needs: 50 pound sacks of bread flour are $16 at Costco, 100 packets of food garden seeds are $10 at Dollar Store, chicks are cheap at the local farm supply store, and pots/pans for cooking over a fire are a few dollars at Goodwill.
I've lived very close to that lifestyle. Living on a near-zero income is not unreasonable...quaint even.