Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)Top rating deserved for subject matter and positive portrayal of unsung heroes, but falls short of hitting pure excellence in lack of research and failure to film in Kentucky. Holly Hunter would have won the Golden Globe if she had been allowed to spend any time in Kentucky before filming. The many Emmy nominations suggest true grandeur if the movie had actually been about the intended subject matter instead of Tony Bill deciding what he thought had happened.
The time line, scenery, and vocabulary were the most disturbing errors.
If they had gone to the actual place, they would have known that it does not take long for the women to get riled, and they take up sticks much faster than suggested. There are still laws on the books that compare the danger of a Kentucky woman with a stick versus two men with guns. Also, the incident of people walking up to each other and shooting them dead without comment was ridiculously downplayed. There was and is much more "just as soon shoot ya as look at ya" going on, and these are men of action not words.
Most painful was when Hunter looks out and comments that she has seen the same "mountains" all her life (and has only been to Lexington once). The scene shows a Canadian scene completely foreign to Kentucky instead of the Appalachians that are unusually beautiful in those parts. Everyone knows they are "hills" and that is what they are called. Lexington is referred to as the city, and young girls get out that way more often than once per lifetime. When a Kentucky woman looks out her kitchen window and says "its like heaven come right down to earth," it is obvious why she never wanted to be anyplace else, and that is what the movie lacks.
Other strange points include the presentation of hog brains as a delicacy. Maybe squirrel brains, but on the hog, the common thing would be the Rocky Mountain Oysters. Also, the repeated reference to "moon shine" although it is called white lightening or mountain dew (moon shining is bootlegging, and has a different connotation). The most ridiculous is when the one wife says her cover for sneaking out is to borrow some "pinto beans" from Hunter, but a pinto is a horse. I mean, everyone knows what "soup beans" are, but I do not think anyone ever heard the word pinto used to describe a bean in Kentucky. The director allowed several similar word choices that would have been corrected by having ever been there.
The movie has a wise old relative come up from Knoxville to remind the women that they used to call it Bloody Harlan. HELLO, Bloody Harlan & Bloody Breathitt, two of the four counties that never had to draft a man because they signed up 100% to go kill the enemy and still trade number one positions as the highest per capita murder rates in the nation. If the director had ever been there, he woulda knowed that.
Other than that, the movie was first rate. Whatever money was saved by filming in Toronto, would have been recouped by actually filming in Harlan.
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Harlan County War (2000)Academy Award-winning actress Holly Hunter stars as Ruby, the wife of a coal miner in Harlan County, Kentucky. After two senseless deaths, the union calls a strike against the mining company. What follows is one of the most violent, bitter and notorious union battles in history. With no end to the violence in sight, Ruby decides to fight the company her own way.
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