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THE "FEEL BAD" MOVIE OF THE YEAR! Grim depressing tale of modern day hillbillies in Missouri who have been cooking meth for years and its aftermath. It's has a gritty documentary-like feel with almost no background music. Jennifer (Hunger Games)
Lawrence lives with her catatonic mother and takes care of her 2 younger siblings. Her father was a meth cooker who had been arrested and skipped bond, so the family house is about to be repossessed unless she can prove that her father is dead. She walks around to all her paranoid, hostile, deadbeat relatives (they found some REALLY ugly actresses) who refuse to talk. Finally one of them forces her to take a ride and tells her that her father blew up in a lab explosion, but she checks it out and finds weeds have been growing through the wreckage for about a year. She eventually finds the scary grandpa Thump (who looks like an evil Kenny Rodgers). They take her to garage and beat her up, but eventually she is led to her father's corpse in a dark swamp and chainsaw's his hands off "because if you just turn in one hand they'll figure he cut off his hand to get out of going to jail--they know that trick" and gives them to the sheriff in a plastic grocery bag that says "Have a Nice Day." There are scenes at the high school where all the kids learn is how to take care of a baby and ROTC training. Army recruiters are everywhere. There hasn't been this kind of an unflinching look at the no-future third world in our own backyard since Gummo. The whole thing kind of reminded me a bit of a Harry Crews novel only darker. It's probably one of the scariest films I've seen in many a moon. It was nominated for 4 Academy Awards. I'll never forget the Oscar party that year at the local art theater where the executive director went dressed like a meth head in honor of this movie. Absolutely compelling.
