Ron Howard’s Hillbilly Elegy is not nearly as bad as many of the critics have made it out to be. Not that I like it. I dislike it for different reasons than most of the critics though.
I wish I loved Hillbilly Elegy, the movie, because I love the Vance family’s story. It’s just too bad a filmmaker like Jeff Nichols or Debra Granik didn’t adapt J.D.’s book instead of Howard.
Thank you to Tyler Hummel and Cultural Revue for publishing this article.
“My grandma would say if someone else calls you a hillbilly, you might need to punch them in the nose. But if we call ourselves hillbillies, it’s a sort of a term of endearment, something that we have co-opted.” – J.D. Vance, Hillbilly Elegy
If we are to believe Netflix, America has been fairly intrigued by Ron Howard’s latest directorial effort, Hillbilly Elegy, based on the controversial but popular memoir of the same name by author and venture capitalist J.D. Vance. Netflix declared Hillbilly Elegy its most viewed item Thanksgiving weekend, and the film remains in Netflix’s top ten movies even now at the time of writing this review. How popular the movie will actually stay remains to be seen. But that is not why I am writing today.
J.D. Vance is sort of a hillbilly abroad. He grew up a misplaced hillbilly, as his memoir and Ron…
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