Beasts of the Southern Wild

In lieu of a post on Bomb Girls, which is still on hiatus, I give you: Sparkler Girl, aka Hushpuppy, heroine of Beasts of the Southern Wild, a new-to-me movie until a few nights ago.

You most likely already know it's about Hushpuppy and her daddy (every Southern father is a daddy) and how this tiny, very poor family and its neighbours weather a hurricane. So I won't go over that, but just the things I didn't know before I saw the movie:

• Hushpuppy probably has a real name, -- I thought I heard her father call her by it a few times, but I couldn't make it out. Their last name is Doucette -- French for "small sweet thing", or maybe just a mispronunciation of Doucet, as in Isle Charles Doucet, off the coast of Louisiana, where they live.
• They're at the low end of the scale even for the place they live in. The neighbours mostly seem to have cars and houses (rundown, for sure, but still standard modern construction). A couple of them even run a small store.The Doucettes live in a trailer+shack and get around in a boat improvised from a pickup truck bed.
•  Hushpuppy's father keeps calling her by misplaced masculine words even when he's trying to encourage her ("You da man"). As I grew up, I was also on the receiving end of a lot of this and it annoyed me. Couldn't he see . . .? or didn't he want to?

 Altogether not a typical Hollywood movie, which was why I wanted to see it -- except for the way it idealized the poor. These people couldn't wait to "escape" from the hospital/shelter they were taken to and get back to their squalid homes; I couldn't help thinking if I'd been among them I would more likely have hidden in the hospital and stayed there till someone made me leave. 

The middle class half of me thought, "But it's their world, where they can be themselves" and the hardscrabble half of me said, "Ha! They don't know when they've got it good!"

If you can live with that, see it.