Posted on 07/17/2024 2:34:07 PM PDT by mowowie
I liked it—compelling story and good acting.
oh then get lost with your ignorance.
Watched it the other night, after the announcement. Plenty of cussing, in case that offends. Love the story, although it was a bit long. Nonetheless, it was a good way for me to introduce our future VP to my lady and kids.
Who says it is BS? Post who says it is BS.
There are a couple of significant differences. First, Vance wrote his because he was so outside of the "norm" at Yale that a classmate, on hearing parts of his life story, urged him to write it. Vance thought that writing it might help the overlooked woes of poor white communiites devastated by the Clinton-onward outsourcing of our manufacturing to China, and also that the Ivy League and similar elites might consider taking a chance on poor whites.
By contraast, Obama's self-serving book was part of a "strategy" to help him con his way into the presidency, and supposedly was not even written by him, but by Bill Ayers, a hardcore anti-American leftwing communist operative who was part of the cabal working to install Obama as our 3-term president. The rest of their plan was to also include two terms for Hillary, giving them ample time to totally overthrow the Constitution.
Obama's motivations could not have been more opposite than Vance's gratitude that the American Dream was still there enough to have propelled his upward climb. His book expressed his concern for that Dream's endangerment.
Oh, lets see some off that. My great aunt Nellie said it was all true.
Thank you all for the replies
Anything by Ron Howard is probably not worth your time. It’s probably hateful and slanderous to the right knowing Ron’s leftwing politics.
I read the book when it came out. My people are from the Appalachian region of western WV bordering on eastern KY. My folks took the Hillbilly Highway (rt 23) to Ohio in the early 60s, and that is where I grew up. I’m a proud hillbilly.
The book is widely liked, and got very good reviews. Ron Howard thought it was worthy of a film.
Yes. We liked it. How close to reality? Not my story so.......
I remember that I watched it. I remember that I did not turn it off.
I recalled that Glenn Close gave a good performance.
I recall nothing else about it.
“...and their pride surfaced in denial.”
Your comment, and Vance’s story reminds me of the song “Tobacco Road” on Jefferson Airplanes first album (when they were more folk rock, and with Signe Anderson.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lva9kHMheQg
I was born in a dump
My momma died and my daddy got drunk
Left me here to die or grow
In the middle of Tobacco Road
I grew up in a rusty shack
All I owned was a’hangin’ on my back
Lord knows how much I loathe
This place called Tobacco Road
Cause it’s home
The only life I ever known
And the Lord knows I loathe
Tobacco Road
I’m gonna leave and get me a job
With the help and the grace of God
I’m gonna save my money, get rich I know
Bring it back to Tobacco Road
Honestly never heard of the film til Vance was announced for VP
We listened to the audiobook. Basically enjoyed the story. Not exactly riveting, but still interesting.
Saw it and enjoyed it. Exceptional portrayals by Glenn Close (grandmother) and Haley Bennet (sister). It is an exceptional story of abject failure to self determined success. Because the book was written several years ago, it is hard see. It as self serving.
MHO
Saw the film a couple months ago, and will watch it again.
Every freeper should read the book and watch the movie as a matter of basic situational awareness. Otherwise you are going to spend the next several months watching a lot of stuff going over your head.
The book was excellent, and the left hated it because the left hates truth. The movement of Appalachian whites — largely Scots-Irish with a residual hillbilly culture around the edges — into lowland city jobs, largely in the industrial midwest and upper South, is an interesting story. It bears some important similarities the first and second great migrations of rural black people from the deep south to northern factory jobs after WWI and WWII. The cultural backgrounds of these two populations were quite different, but both involved the transplantation of southern rural subcultures into northern urban settings.
These great internal migrations were reasonably successful as long as the factories were booming. But then began the great hollowing out of American manufacturing and the emergence of the rustbelt. Healthy working class communities got hammered — white as well as black and including the ethnic Irish, Polish, Italian, and other European immigrant communities as well as the internal migration from the south. What happened when the factories closed? Some adapted well, some didn’t, and some of the ancestral cultural patterns turned out to be maladaptive in the new, education based technocratic economy. That’s the story JD Vance set out to tell, which is why his book was entitled Hillbilly Elegy, not My Family Story.
It is a very good autobiography from a young man, in stark contrast to Barack Obama’s contribution to the genre, which was an orgy of gazing into the mirror to worship himself. Vance actually had insightful and intelligent things to say.
The left hated the book because Vance violated the dogma of the victimhood fetish. The sociological and economic shifts underlying the collapse of these working class communities are acknowledged and explored, but Vance’s story is one of triumphing against those odds. His family background? Two generations of alcoholism and drug abuse, with grandparents and parents who had been hard workers and good people but had been crushed by adversity and self-medicated into trouble. Vance himself skirted with bad companions and potentially serious trouble as a teenager, but he credits timely intervention by some pretty tough mentors for straightening him out. He joined the Marines, went to college, and then off to Yale Law School. In the movie, I thought his sister emerged as the most sympathetic character in the story. She was a bit older and knew a bit more than did JD about the demons lurking around the family dinner table. She resolved to get out as soon as she could. She found a good young man in high school and committed to him, and he stuck with her. She married right out of high school, they both went to work, they built a family, and the movies shows them living in reasonable small town, middle class comfort. I hope they’re still doing well.
The underlying message is that even poor people have moral agency and are responsible for their choices. Living clean and working hard pay off. Good choices, good companions and good character pay off. Being poor isn’t an excuse; it just means that wealth doesn’t give you a get out of jail card and buy you second, third and fourth chances. Straighten up, fly right, and be grateful to the people who are willing to help.
The left hates this message with a passion. Because the left is evil. And because conservatives embraced it as a truth message that the struggling American underclass needs to hear.
Read the book.
You should see the movie as a matter of situational awareness. I suspect Ron Howard was trying to dodge the political stuff, as the book had created a firestorm among the devotees of the Victimhood Cult on the left. Howard chose to focus on the substance abuse and family trauma issues, which are real and important, but this resulted in an oversimplification of a very sophisticated book. I suspect Ron Howard also got caught up in trying to produce an Oscar bait film for Amy Adams and Glenn Close, but that’s another story. (Somebody give those ladies an Oscar already!!! They’ve both earned it several times over, and they will both get a lifetime achievement Oscar if the Academy doesn’t do the right thing now.) The movie is not as good as the book, but put your big boy pants on, invest two hours, and watch it so you can call out the nonstop lying that the left will be doing about it for the duration of the campaign. At the risk of spoilers ... well, ok, no spoilers, but grandma, grandpa and mom are the grandparents and parents from hell. They might have all have been fine, in a robust working class way, if the rustbelt thing hadn’t crushed the family economically, whereupon grandpa let alcohol take over. As JD was growing up, his grandparents, now elderly, seemed fine. He liked and respected them but harbored a furious resentment towards his mother. In the film’s biggest reveal, his older sister finally sets him straight. She was old enough to understand some of what their mother’s life had been like, and she tells JD to feel sorry for their mom, not himself.
I would show this movie in every inner city school in America, just to show the at-risk black and hispanic kids that white people do dysfunction better than they do.
I’d show them Winter’s Bone as well, and for some of the same reasons. Whatever you think of Jennifer Lawrence now, watch Winter’s Bone.
Probably not. These people love Daniel Woodrell, his stuff is pretty warts and all. Now admittedly he casts his books as fiction, but realistic fiction.
People can read what they want, I don’t care. I just answered a question. When it came out I saw a lot of flack, and of course its revival is bringing it all back around. Thus my answer.
As if Vance was not there to live events as well.
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