Wind River (2017) ✦ Member of the Month: Full-Length Watchalong Reaction
Added 2024-11-25 19:30:01 +0000 UTCBig thanks to Marty for requesting this as part of their Member of the Month win for October! This was... heavy. But important. I'm looking forward to your comments, thanks for watching! [Direct link here.]
✦ KL
Comments
Yeah, Jon was fab the short time he was on screen! It was a nice surprise to see him. Thanks for providing your insight into this movie using your personal experiene, I appreciate it and I'm sure others will as well.
kaiielle
2024-11-26 17:32:37 +0000 UTCNo apologies necessary! These kinds of films are important to watch! I'm glad you enjoyed the reaction, thanks again!
kaiielle
2024-11-26 17:31:15 +0000 UTCThis is about what I expected you'd say after briefly mentioning in Discord. And that's cool. Yes, that scene in particular was quite uncomfortable. And I didn't know there was a sequel!
kaiielle
2024-11-26 17:30:28 +0000 UTCEnjoy!
kaiielle
2024-11-26 17:29:07 +0000 UTCAgreed!
kaiielle
2024-11-26 17:29:02 +0000 UTCI love how Jeremy Renner became kind of like the fun uncle to the new additions to the MCU. He and Elizabeth were such an incredible pair in this film. And Jon Bernthal? Even in a cameo role he's a star. I can't imagine losing a child. You spend 18 years watching them grow, getting to know them, becoming so proud of them....and they're gone. It's unthinkable and yet sadly a reality. The whole film is heavy, yes, but one thing that hits incredibly hard is Gil Birmingham's line at the end. He had his face paint on, he was ready to honor the death and memorialize her...except he couldn't in the traditional sense. He was doing it the way he knew how. His line, "I don't. I made it up. There's no one left to teach me." hits so hard. I work in a hotel on a Native reservation. Cherokee used to be a thriving town. It used to be a thriving town with stores dedicated to local crafters, a simulated village with actors showing visitors what the Cherokee village used to actually look like, a museum that was constantly filled with visitors... it used to be a beautiful place full of history and storytelling and vibrancy. Until the casino moved in. Then the tribe started getting greedy. Then they started pouring every cent they made into expanding the casino. Shops closed. Businesses closed. The village and museum are barely operating. The Unto These Hills play gets a quarter of the visitors it used to. All because the Tribe capitalizes on advertising the casino. Every cent is spent on the casino. Not saving their land or their culture or their people. What's even more tragic is the people in Cherokee have every opportunity in the world to better themselves. They get $18,000 per year as a per cap for having enough Native blood in them. What do they use it on? Drugs. Meth and heroine is a massive problem on the reservation. There's been busts but it always comes back. The Cherokee people would rather rot their brains and throw their lives away instead of preserving their livelihoods. I see it every day. It's heartbreaking. So is Gil Birmingham's comment a cheap joke? NO. It's painfully, tragically, accurate. The people that actually do want to learn can't because their parents are living from one hit to the next and they'll end up doing the same. That's how I lost my friend. Because she refused to leave her family and her family dragged her down with them. I apologize if I got a little forceful just now, this is obviously still a sensitive subject.
Nathan Jasper, the Artist Formerly Known as Primary
2024-11-26 04:37:30 +0000 UTCI totally get your opinion of Sheridan. I'm not a huge fan of some of his work including Yellowstone. I did enjoy Sicario though. In fact if this wasn't available in Canada, I gave Kaiielle the second choice of Sicario. I guess I was in a dark mood that day. LOL
Marty McGee
2024-11-26 03:10:47 +0000 UTCSorry to choose such a heavy one, but glad you watched it. Yeah I forget that movies like this probably aren't the best for reactions. I just remember being so angry the first time I watched it and how sweet Pete's death felt. I do feel like this movie did a great job of showing just how different and difficult it is dealing with murder and other crime on Native American reservations. Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen do work very well together, so it was good to see them in two very different roles than their Marvel ones. Thanks Kaiielle!!
Marty McGee
2024-11-26 03:00:47 +0000 UTCPrefacing this to say I don't intend to argue with anyone who does like the movie; I know I will be in the minority here, and I only saw this movie once many years ago, so my memory is vague, but this is one of my least-favorite movies of the 21st century so far, as is pretty much anything by Taylor Sheridan, who previously wrote Sicario and Hell and High Water before making his directorial debut with this, and then subsequently going onto create the massive "Yellowstone" TV empire. Sheridan is a white guy who generally writes or directs neo-Westerns, which have a type of yearning for some sort of old-fashioned red-blooded America that I just do not care for at all. Here, we follow a white guy who happens to be a Native tracker and a female cop who is incredibly shitty at her job, as if the movie is trying to teach her a lesson (also one of my complaints about Sicario). I am, of course, absolutely sympathetic to the SA at the center of the film but I definitely remember it bothering me that the movie decides to show it when it could just as easily cut away and still convey what happened (while I believe each movie ought to make its own choices on what to show and not to show, in this case it felt unnecessary and borderline exploitative). I also don't like the part in the video preview image with Gil Birmingham. Again, my memory has kind of faded by this point, but I felt like the makeup in that scene and the way he talked about it is meant to be sort of self-deprecating but to me it came off like Sheridan treating Native customs with the dignity of Wolverine's "What did you expect, yellow spandex?" line in the first X-Men. Here's what was traditional (obviously, Native tradition being much more important), and we're going to shit on it for the sake of a cheap joke. I am vaguely curious about the sequel they've made to this movie, which is in post-production. It was directed by Kari Skogland, a Canadian director. She is most famous for directing all six episodes of "Falcon and the Winter Soldier." Sheridan wasn't involved, which is of course more appealing to me.
Tyler Foster
2024-11-25 20:45:13 +0000 UTCOooooh, I remember liking this movie quite a bit. This should be a good one!
William
2024-11-25 20:18:35 +0000 UTCThis is a damn good movie. Only saw it once a few years ago; came for Elizabeth Olsen and Jeremy Renner, but holy shit the rest of the cast and the story as a whole is really gripping. Good shit.
Steve Mercier
2024-11-25 19:57:23 +0000 UTC
