Review by Russ McSpadden 
Beasts of the Southern Wild is a big budget Indy film about anthropogenic ecological collapse as experienced by a poor and backwoods bayou island community called the Bathtub, situated just off the coast of New Orleans. More specifically, it’s about the experience of a 7 year old bad ass named Hushpuppy who has a keen and deep ecological understanding that “the whole universe depends on everything fitting together just right. If one piece busts, even the tiniest piece, the entire universe will get busted.”
And she is caught up in the bust for sure. Climate disruption has pushed the glaciers into the ocean and the Bathtub is submerged. From the frozen millennia a pack of long extinct aurochs is unleashed and they are seeking Hushpuppy.
As the tides rise, hers is a village cut off as a sacrifice zone for the sake of the city. Folks are left flooded, their marshlands and forests salinated, their livestock drowned and their supplies of fish and crayfish poisoned. Technocrats and politicians have walled in the all-important commercial zones of the city, leaving the outskirts to tread water on the wrong side of the levy. The worst effects of melting polar ice and rising temperatures are mitigated by marvelous engineering designs in place for the protection of the very systems and communities that spurred the crisis on in the first place. Hushpuppy and her daddy take care of that the only way they know how–a dead gator stuffed from teeth to ass with dynamite.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q2td1U_4ULI&feature=relmfu]
This movie ain’t no small potatoes nor some obscure deep ecologist’s film school submission. Its already won awards at Cannes and Sundance, with murmurs of an Oscar nod. Many of the actors were farmed right from the region, from the Katrina ravaged coast, and its therefore a blessing to these communities to have their story told and their people paid. And don’t worry if you don’t have an art house theater in town. This one is playing at the big box offices. Take your kid friends. It’s PG-13 and real and harsh but not inappropriate. I took my 8 year old daughter. This might be the most profound feature length non-documentary representation of the way climate change will affect the lives of poor children.
You people are a bunch of assholes! I worked as a cowboy in Arizona when you shitheads cut water lines to the tanks which the cattle drank from, cut fences, tore down gates and spread roofing nails around the working pens. Yea, you assholes really care about animals. You people only want to cause trouble and you are no better than communists and there ought to be an open season on you jackasses. Go to hell!
Well thanks for the kind words Terry. I’m not sure who did all that you say back in your cowboy days but I can guess it was a couple of Earth First! cowboys themselves tired of your shitty cattle baron boss receiving government subsidies and grazing his cows on public land at the expense of the vast open wild and free beauty of Arizona, all on the public dime to boot. Fences are part of trapping our world in, domesticating us all and they won’t cut themselves down. If you had the grits about you and you loved the wild and all that vast freedom, you’d be out there cutting fences too. Now get out there!
Or should you really desire our murder as you say I guess you can keep on that track. Seems a bit disturbed though.
By the way, are you the same Terry McGahey, cowboy poet extraordinaire? http://www.cowboypoetry.com/terrymcgahey.htm
Why ya trolling movie reviews on the internet?
Pingback: Catching Fire to the Reign | Earth First! Newswire