MOVIE - The Rider

R (1:44)

4/13/18 Limited release

Viewed Tuesday, 6/19/18 at The Majestic in Gettysburg
IMBd: 7.7/10

RT Critic:  97  Audience: 81
Critic's Consensus:   The Rider's hard-hitting drama is only made more effective through writer-director Chloé Zhao's use of untrained actors to tell the movie's fact-based tale.

Cag:  6/Awesome  

Directed by Chloe Zhao

Sony Pictures Classics

Brady Jandreau, Lilly Jandreau, 

My comments:  The Rider was an amazing movie, and I didn't fully realize the extent of the meaningfulness of it until the credits rolled.  The actors were all the real people that apparently lived the story playing themselves.  Like a documentary told completely as a story. Incredibly depressing, heartfelt, and even upliftiing in its sadness.  The South Dakota plains.  Thelvies of young people that are raised around horses, raised to ride.  The harshness and reality of spial cord injuries and brain injuries.  The rodeo.  Horses.  I don't even like horses!  But I sure did like this movie.  Here is Roger Ebert's (actually Godfrey Cheshire's)vright-on, excellent review:  https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/the-rider-2018

RT/ IMDb Summary:  Based on his a true story, THE RIDER stars breakout Brady Jandreau as a once rising star of the rodeo circuit warned that his competition days are over after a tragic riding accident. Back home, Brady finds himself wondering what he has to live for when he can no longer do what gives him a sense of purpose: to ride and compete. In an attempt to regain control of his fate, Brady undertakes a search for new identity and tries to redefine his idea of what it means to be a man in the heartland of America.

Goodreads has a poetry group whose members vote on a favorite submission each month. I really like the following June poems:

Union Line Cemetery

In a graveyard in Mississippi
Lie the bones of a woman I loved
And those of a man I did not,
Though I am more like him than her.

Down a paved road off the federal highway
Slicing diagonally from Mobile,
The road turns sharply as if
It was meant to dead end.

But as if someone moved the gates
The road bends, goes on precisely south
While the sun goes west away from the graves.

Marble benches wait through the undisturbed dust
For me to stop to pick sand spurs from my dress socks
And prick my fingers and remember I am alive.

While under clumps of low growing weeds,
Neat green grass and bare spots
These dead people rest in a Mississippi summer quiet,
As they do in winter beneath a midnight ice storm.

Dead, yes, they are dead.
But I am alive and they are why I am so.
They keep us, our families, ourselves alive.

I wonder if in a few years when I am dead,
Ashes tossed in the Mississippi,
Will I hold anyone connected or only be dust,

Forever blown about where the delta turns to sea?

~Anthony Watkins

I really like this one, too:

Drought

The oaks that line the road
kown it didn't rain yesterday
or the month before,
that there have been summers
when the lake bottom cracked
and a noon sun lit the wheel
of an old toy in the sand
at the bottom of a well.

A woodpecker knocks on the
leaning ash black ants are eatiing
from the inside out.
Dust rises.
A thirty-something blonde in a mail Jeep
reaches out and
the rusted hinge creaks.
Her blue eyes,
Like an oven set on broil,
measure me
from boots to sweat-soaked shirt.

~M. Flynn Ragland

Mule Train Mail - Craig Brown

Illustrated by the author

2009 Charlesbridge

32 pages

HC $16.95 TPPL

Goodreads rating: 3.20

My rating: 3

Author's Note:  two informative pages at the end.

Endpapers:  FRONT:  birds-eye-map-type view of the Grand Canyon

BACK:  illustrations of the mailman/cowboy, his dog, and six mules

Illustrations:  pastel and colored pencils all the way to the edges, no white.  LOTS of brown, gives the sense of desert and sand, sand, sand....

1^st line:  "Anthony the Postman doesn't wear a uniform.  He wears a cowboy hat, chaps, and spurs.  Anthony doesn't drive a mail truck.  he drives a mule train.  He picks up the mail at the south rim of the Grand Canyon."

My Goodreads notes: This book is very simple and suited for younger children. I'm not sure how I want to say this, but it just wasn't .... exciting ... in any way. Although I enjoyed the illustrations, they were all similar to each other, nothing different or surprising. I plan to read it aloud during my Arizona unit, as a starting place for research into the Grand Canyon. I like the information in the author's note at the end.

Goodreads summary: "Mule Train Mail introduces readers to Anthony Paya, wearing a cowboy hat, chaps, and spurs, who leads a train of ten mules on a daily 3-hour trek down into the Grand Canyon to bring mail to the townspeople of Supai."

Charlie the Ranch Dog – Ree Drummond

Illustrated by Diane deGroat

Harper, 2011

HC $16.99

40 pages

Rating:  4.5

Endpapers:  red

Title Page:  2 page full painting of part of the ranch – with trees, pond, two cowboys, and both dogs

Illustrations:  Full page, usually double spreads, with no white, edge to edge.  Very cool, really like them.

Extras:  Lasagna recipe on the last page

Dog’s p-o-v, 1^st person

Setting:  a contemporary Midwestern ranch

OSS:  Charlie, a bassett hound, details all the “work” he does all day on the ranch.  

Tongue-in-cheek, Charlie considers that his humorous lazy escapades are work.  He and Suzy, another dog in the household, have their run of the ranch.  Great fun book with very clever writing.

53. The Scent of Rain and Lightning - Nancy Pickard

Ballantine Books, 2010
HC $25.00
for: Adults
319 pages
Rating: 5

The story begins in 2009 with 26-year-old English teacher, Jody Linder. Her three much-loved uncles arrive to tell her that Billy Crosby, the man convicted of murdering her parents 23 years earlier, has been let out of jail. However, after these first few pages it flips back to 1986 and explains how she was orphaned one fateful, stormy night when she was only three. But it leaves off before finding out what really happened.

The second part flips ahead again, to 2009 and Crosby's re-entry into the town of Rose, Kansas, where the Linder family is honored and admired and the entire town is up-in-arms...literally. We learn more about Billy's son, Collin, who was seven when his father was sent to prison. Through the years Collin and Jody have been weirdly attracted to each other, and as the rest of the story unfolds, their connection becomes even more powerful.

This is an excellent piece of storytelling. Even though I did a lot of guessing about what "really" happened, in some ways I was close and in some ways I wasn't. I couldn't wait to finish it. I enjoyed my trip through Kansas two summers ago, and now I want to return and check out some of the small towns, the cattle farms, and the COWBOYS!

Mercy Watson Fights Crime - Kate DiCamillo

Illustrated by Chris Van Dusen
#3 Mercy Watson series
Candlewick, 2006
74 pgs.
For: ages 6-8
Rating: 5

Now here's a series where a clever, funny story and very clever, comical illustrations work together perfectly. Just perfectly. Such characters! Such humor. Great fun.

Mercy Watson, a pig, a plain old non-talking, food-loving pig, lives with Mr. and Mrs. Watson in her own room with her own bed. She loves to eat and sleep and ... well, that's about it, I guess. But what an adventure she unwittingly gets herself into.

Tiny Leroy Ninker, who wants to be a cowboy but is a robber, breaks into the Watson kitchen. He steals the toaster, the clock, and various other kitcheny items until Mercy hears the toaster sliding across the counter and thinks someone is preparing toast with butter. She discovers that no one is, so she falls asleep in front of the getaway door. When Leroy begins to step over her, she awakens and takes him for a Yippee-I-Oh ride across the lawn, waking up two old-lady sisters next door.

Hilarious and fun. Last week when I was in Maine, my granddaughter, Ashley, and I went into the Briar Patch children's bookstore in Bangor. (Wow, more on that later...) Her immediate choice of a new book was the newest Mercy Watson, #6, that has just been published. She said that Chris Van Dusen (the illustrator) had come to visit her school and she'd read other books in the series. Ashley's somewhat of a reluctant reader, so this was a very happy discovery for me. A very worthwhile, happy discovery. I want to get to know more of these characters - especially Baby and Eugenia Lincoln, the two elderly sisters who live next door.

Bubba the Cowboy Prince - Helen Ketteman

A Fractured Texas Tale
Illustrated by James Warhola
Scholastic, 1997
Rating: 4

Bubba lives with his wicked StepDaddy and his hateful stepbrothers Dwayne and Milton. One day Miz Lurleen, who was purty and rich and owned the biggest spread around, decided to throw a ball to find herself a feller that was "cute as a cow's ear."

You know the story. This one is cute and the illustrations are really cute. And who was his "fairy godmother?" Well, let's see: "Now, Bubba figured he'd bonked the bejeebers out of his bean, 'cause the voice was coming from a cow. She chewed her cud for a moment, then said, "I'm your fairy god cow, and I can help you go to the ball."

Yee ha!

The illustrations are full page, edge-to-edge and give a whimsical old west feel.

Note: The illustrations include a lot of saguaros. I've become quite sensitive to this, living in the Sonoran Desert which is the only place in the world where saguaros grow naturally. They are NOT native to Texas, and won't be found in the wild there.....

The Toughest Cowboy - John Frank

(or How the Wild West Was Tamed)
Illustrator: Zachary Pullen
For: Kids and adults - just plain fun
Published: 2004
Rating: 4.5/5
Endpapers: Burlap

Four very tough cowboys work together herding cattle in the wild west. Grizz Brickbottom drank a quart of Tabasco every day. Chuck Wagon cooked and was great with his guitar. Lariat was the fastest rope in the west. Bald Mountain was the biggest bronco-buster this side of the Rockies. They were "nose-pickin' card playin', bath-fearin' tough guys." But Grizz decided they needed another kind of companionship - someone with silky hair and a pleasant smell. The needed ------a dog. And oh, what a dog they find!

Wordplay, creative similes,humor, and great storytelling make this book a BLAST. The full-page oil paintinga go perfectly with the story - just plain fun with every turn of the page.

The Cowboy Night Before Christmas - James Rice

For: anyone, for fun
Published: 1986/2007
Pelican Publishing
Rating: 3.5 (uninspiring illustrations, great poem)
Read: sometime in November
Endpapers: White ! ! !

'Twas a cold Christmas eve
...on the Southwestern plain
And the north wind was blowin'
...through a broke winderpane.

So starts this rewrite of "Twas the Night Before Christmas". Every other two-page spread is in color, mostly brown and yellow hues, with the ones in between being pen and ink.

Santa's team had taken off, fled north, and he had "many a mile yet 'fore the sun hits the sky." The only help the cowboys could offer was some ornery longhorns to help pull his wagon:

While roping the longhorns
...they bumped and they stumbled
And numerous times
...from their hosses they tumbled.
It took all three working
...an hour or more
To hitch up the wagon
...in two rows of four.

And of course, they couldn't believe their eyes when the whole outfit took off into the sky and, shaking their heads in disbelief:

They reached the sod shanty
...and opened the door
And they couldn't believe
...what they saw on the floor.
Two pairs of new boots
...with spurs made of silver,
With a note but not clue
...as to who was the giver.

Little Red Cowboy Hat - Susan Lowell

Illustrator: Randy Cecil
For: Kids
Pub: 1997
Rating: 4/5
Finished: Aug. 11, 2008

I love fractured fairy tales, and while wandering around the the Texas State History Museum gift shop I found this book. It was actually the author's name that drew me, because I'm not crazy about the cover illustration. However, the opening two-page spread of bright yellow, orange chartreuse, lime, and gold desert appealed to me greatly.

Local author Susan Lowell has created a fractured fairy tale about Little Red Riding Hood that is set in the Sonoran desert and has the feistiest grandmother I've ever met on the pages of a picture book. "That yellow-bellied, snake-blooded, skunk-eyed, rancid son of a parallelogram!" she exclaims after they have successfully driven him out. (We actually never know whether Little Red and Granny kill him or not, but that would make a great conversation!) Great language throughout.

As far as illustrations, I liked the outdoor, desert pages far more than the pages set indoors. And the cover still doesn't work for me, but now I'm going to explore other works of Randy Cecil to see how I feel about his work as a whole.