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.

26. Merciless - Lori Armstrong

2013, A Touchstone Book, Simon & Schuster

329 pgs PLUS discussion questions

Goodreads rating: 4.17

My rating: 4/Liked it a lot

Contemporary Murder Mystery; South Dakota

TPPL
First sentence/s:  "I blamed my unrealistic expectations of becoming an FBI special agent on The X-Files.  Granted, Mulder and Scully were fictional characters, but working in the FBI was nothing like portrayed on any TV shows.  Disappointment made e want to crawl inside the TV and kick some ass."

My reactions:  I love the complicated person that is Mercy Gunderson.  She's smart, tough, strong - physically - and loyal.  She's also got weaknesses and a few vulnerable soft spots that appear once-in-awhile.  She has an incredible urge to own, know, practice and know guns.  She was, after all, an army sniper.  She lives on a huge ranch in South Dakota on, near, around the Eagle River Reservation.  I've read the previous book in the series, but it was so long ago that I forgot all the numerous relationships.  This was one of the drawbacks of the book that took it down a star.  Everyone's related to someone, many generations worth, and it got very confusing.  There are a lot of "everyones."  If there's a fourth in the series I will, of course read it, but I'll begin by figuring out the family tree/s and posting it at the beginning of the book!   

Goodreads summary:  In the spirit of J.A. Jance, Nevada Barr, and C.J. Box comes Shamus Award-winning author Lori Armstrong’s sharp and gritty Merciless, about Black Ops army sniper-turned-FBI agent Mercy Gunderson and her quest for vengeance when a killer narrows his sights on her and her family.Mercy Gunderson is thrown into her first FBI murder case, working with the tribal police on the Eagle River Reservation, where the victim is the teenaged niece of the recently elected tribal president. When another gruesome killing occurs during the early stages of the investigation, Mercy and fellow FBI agent Shay Turnbull are at odds about whether the crimes are connected.

              Mercy can’t discuss her reservations about the baffling cases with her live-in boyfriend, Eagle River County Sheriff Mason Dawson, due to job confidentiality, and the couple’s home on the ranch descends into chaos when Dawson’s eleven-year-old-son Lex is sent to live with them. While hidden political agendas and old family vendettas turn ugly, masking motives and causing a rift among the tribal police, the tribal council, and the FBI, Mercy realizes that the deranged killer is still at large—and is playing a dangerous game with his sights set on Mercy as his next victim.

     Torn between her duty to the FBI and her duties to those she loves, Mercy must unleash the cold, dark, merciless killer inside her and become the predator, rather than the prey.