Winter's Bone

I watched this movie last night; it's a powerful portrayal of life in the methamphetamine world of the rural Ozarks.  I spent a number of years in St. Louis, and before that a decade in Kentucky, working with many backwoods people, and can testify to the validity of the presentation of the landscape and the lifestyle (and one that is not geographically limited - you can find people like these in the Rockies, the desert Southwest, the rural Midwest and elsewhere).

It's not an action movie, or a thriller, as the trailer might suggest.  It's a picture of a way of life, and one that in this story is almost unremittingly bleak, until a small glimmer of hope for a better future appears in the closing scene.  The acting and editing is superb.


Note: YouTube has made available a new embedding technology, which I've used for this video and the "Antogo" one further down the page -

If you use the new embed code style, your viewers will be able to view your embedded video in one of our Flash or HTML5 players, depending on their viewing environment and preferences. Environments that support the HTML5 video player are listed here on our HTML5 settings page. In instances where HTML5 isn't supported (e.g. our HTML5 player can't play videos with ads), we use Flash.

An additional benefit of the new embed style is that it will eventually allow embeds to work on mobile devices, which typically use a built-in player instead of Flash or HTML5.

The list of supported browsers is here.  Let me know if you have problems viewing these videos (other than the "wandering" placement problem that plagues the Safari users), because I can opt to embed videos using the old-style embed code.