Really bad according to most reviewers Sounds like it would make a good MST3K episode.
https://www.thewrap.com/hillbilly-elegy-reviews-ron-howard-director/
Sorry to hear. I enjoyed the book.
probably won’t stay in theaters more than 1 week. Or they might just skip theaters
Just the other day a friend and I agreed there was no part that Glenn Close couldn’t play.
Maybe we were wrong.
most actors won’t look good with a terrible script
Huh. 95% of the time I disagree with a critic it’s because he/she raved about a movie that I thought was at least semi-lame.
But “Hillbilly” is the exception. 25% on the Tomatometer as I write this, but I thought it was, while not The Godfather, fairly well done. I thought Close was superb.
I’d give it a solid B.
mmm
My GF said it was OK
My wife said it was a sad waste of time and I hated the book, so I will give it a pass.
This is hardly surprising. It’s been the case for several years now that critcs rate a movie not based on how entertaining it is, how well-acted, how engaging the story is, but whether it promotes or contradicts their narrative/worldview. Overwhelmingly SJW professional film critics are of course going to hate a movie that’s sympathetic to the deplorables.
I’m reminded of how in the 90s, other film critics used to trash Michael Medved for giving negative reviews to movies on the basis of their being anti-family-values.
Now the shoe is on the other foot.
I saw it. Haven’t read the book, though I know some about it. If people hate the book, the movie does seem to decontextualize it almost entirely. It’s an OK movie, but it doesn’t seem to make any forceful points, really, except maybe that snooty Northeast people make Appalachians feel bad for not knowing which fork to use. Even that is a single scene; it’s hardly a theme.
If the narrative is supposed to be “be more sympathetic to the deplorables,” I’m not seeing that. They’re shown to be entirely deplorable. We see that they’re poor due to collapse of manufacturing jobs, but that’s not set up as an excuse for anything. It’s the luck of the draw that one reasonably bright boy had Glenn Close for a granny, though it’s weak even on this point: what exactly did Mamaw do or say that made all the difference, besides “straighten up and fly right” banalities? She too was poor due to the region’s decline, and it’s not made clear why she had what it took to set a boy on a career path, while her own daughter didn’t.
In the end it seems to be just a movie about a dysfunctional family with a scrappy granny who helped one son make good. Not a great movie, maybe not even a good movie, but nothing to get too excited about either way.
I didn’t like some of the takeaways of the book (the author puts a lot more emphasis on individual responsibility than I agree with), I thought it was a good enough read. So I’m intrigued enough to watch the movie. I’m going to try to watch it this evening.
I just watched it.
It’s Oscar bait, that’s for sure. But it isn’t Oscar-worthy in my opinion.
However, it’s not as bad as I thought it would be based on the consensus of this thread. Glenn Close was a believable Mamaw, and I thought Amy Adams did an OK job as a rage-aholic, emotionally-wrecked mama. I thought the guy that played young JD did a great job. But the movie was kind of flat. The book really makes you feel immersed in a specific American subculture (I know scholars question whether that subculture truly exists in the way that Vance think it is does…but at least Vance does a good enough job writing about it so that it feels like a real thing). But the cultural color of the book is missing in the movie, so it was not as interesting for me.
It’s no The Glass Castle, that’s for sure. The Glass Castle was an incredible story of Appalachian overcoming–one that is honest and sober but also told with some humor and compassion. At the end of the movie, you clearly see how Jeanette Walls would not have been the person she was if it weren’t for her crazy-ass parents and upbringing. I’ve read her memoir and watched the movie twice, because her story is just that moving. So I think I’m biased against Hillbilly Elegy just because it didn’t leave me with the same feeling. Intellectually we know that JD Vance is who he is because of his family–both good and bad. But the movie doesn’t drive that point home emotionally.
Also, I was really shocked to hear that mid 90’s R&B hit “My Boo” in this movie.
Which of the bad reviews do you feel were written by “SJWs?” Usually a review will say why they did, or did not like the movie.
It’s already on Netflix, and even if it beat IMDB’s highest-ranked movie the last time I checked, I still wouldn’t want to watch it because I appreciated the book and don’t think it would translate well to the screen. (“Enjoyed” wasn’t quite the right word for a story like this.)
That movie, BTW, was “The Shawshank Redemption.”
I liked the book but the movie felt flat. I wasn’t sure that I was supposed to learn anything about that part of the country or if I was supposed to feel something, anything (anger? fear? sadness?). It felt like the movie could have used a John-boy like narrator to explain who some of the people were and more importantly why they behaved the way they did.
Lol, this post is more revealing about your inner world than it is about your thoughts re: the movie.
Frankly, it was a film written by rich people who don’t understand poor people. A case in point is the scene where the credit card is declined. Anyone who has been poor… truly poor… is never caught in such a situation. To be destitute is to know, to the penny, how much is in your account(s) and how long it will be until the next payday/deposit. You know if you’re late on your credit card. You know which bills can be skipped and which must be paid. You never act with surprise and resentment when the card is declined because your card is declined all the time. As noted elsewhere, the only people who think poor people are surprised when they run out of money are people who believe poor people are poor because they are bad with money. In most cases, they are not.
Yup, most of the backlash to the movie and the book came from Appalachia. Articles like these:
As near as I can figure, SJW means a viewpoint that doesn’t come from a white conservative man.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I read the book a couple of years ago. At that time I concluded that while it was an interesting life story (well, up to that point in Vance’s life at least), such attempts as Vance made at a sociological analysis of the people he grew up with and the area he grew up in weren’t very good. I wanted to read it because although, like Vance, I grew up in Ohio what I would describe as a struggling working-class family and went on to get a degree beyond a bachelor’s degree, otherwise my life story wasn’t much like Vance’s.
I grew up in northwest Ohio, not southeast Ohio, so nobody would call themselves hillbillies, even if like me you grew on a small farm. My father was a farmer and a factory worker and my mother was a housewife after she got married (and an office worker who had also grown up on a farm before that). None of my grandparents went to high school and neither of my parents went to college, but most of my brothers and sisters and nephews and nieces have gone to college. None of my family are alcoholics or drug addicts. This doesn’t prove anything except everybody’s life is different and you can’t make any big conclusions from just looking at one person’s life. We should take movies like Hillbilly Elegy as being, at best, good story-telling, even if they are something close to the real story of someone’s life.
I agree with your girlfriend not the worst movie but not that good either. My mom thought it was unrealistic based on similar economics when she was growing up. We both liked the book.