By Doug Thompson

“Winter’s Bone” is showing at the Fiesta 16 in Fayetteville and, according to the film’s official website, nowhere else in Arkansas.

It’s good. The cinematography isn’t going to take home any awards, but the movie won best picture and best screenplay at the Sundance Film Festival for good reason.

This is “True Grit” without the fantasy, a story about a girl thrown into an adult world before her time who proves to have more strength and sense than just about any of the adults.

The best description of it I’ve heard comes from Kenneth Turran, film critic for the Los Angeles Times, who called it “country noir.” The most perceptive comment I’ve heard about it is that you don’t now where the local people used in roles stop and the professional actors begin. New Yorker magazine makes this insight: “Meth is a character in the film, creating paranoia and corruption everywhere.”

But the essence of this movie and its attraction is caught by famous critic Roger Ebert, whose review begins with this: “The movie heroes who affect me most are not extroverted. They don’t strut, speechify and lead armies. They have no superpowers.

They are ordinary people who are faced with a need and rise to the occasion. Ree Dolly is such a hero.”

“Winter’s Bone” is about Ree Dolly, who lives in rural southwest Missouri and takes care of her younger brother and sister because nobody else does. She’s a 17-year-old who’s not just self-reliant but able to carry her family while dad’s away cooking meth and mom’s a vegetable. She is not to be pitied, however.

Then she finds out dad put up the family home for his bail and skipped. She has to find him or her family goes homeless.

There are no “They don’t know they’re dead” or “The stuff that dreams are made of” plot twists in this movie. This one turns out exactly as you can expect something like this to turn out — and that’s this movie’s great strength.

There are times when the way to go is both obvious and hard to take, when reality must not only be faced but faced down. “Winter’s Bone” makes you believe Ree Dolly can do it, and feel for her because what she does and suffers is so clearly necessary. The law’s no help, and that’s just a fact.

This is not a movie for the squeamish or the seekers of Hollywood endings. It’s a movie based on the strength of its performances in roles that are demanding. Even the kids can act in this one.

“Winter’s Bone” has an impressive 94 percent “fresh” at the “Rotten Tomatoes” website and a 93 percent from the top critics, and there are 27 top critic reviews posted there. Of the two critics who didn’t like it, one is notorious for wanting to stick out and be different.

For instance, he was one of only 12 percent of reviewers who gave a positive review to the absurd “Jonah Hex.” Anybody who says he likes “Jonah Hex” and doesn’t appreciate “Winter’s Bone” is no one to be taken seriously.

By Dough Thompson

OK. Let me get this straight.

Unions and liberal bloggers spend millions trying to beat Blanche Lincoln, an incumbent Democrat.

They lose. Somebody at the White House makes an unnecessarily harsh statement of the obvious: Unions “flushed” $10 million of their members money in this race.

The White House gets criticized far and wide, even by an editorial in the New York Times, for undermining Democratic unity.

What Democratic unity?

Where was this “unity” when Lt. Gov. Bill Halter was recruited to unseat a Democratic incumbent in a tough election year in a swing state that happens to be listed by every pundit around as one of the most likely spots for GOP takeover?

These critics might have a point if the “flushers” had declared support of the voters’ choice after the primary. Instead the Daily Kos, for example, posted that the seat was lost and GOP John Boozman would win. Period. They advise the Democrats to spend money on races they could win. As if Kos knew what a “race they could win” looks like.

I know a lot of people in this town supported Halter. I know they’re very disappointed. I know people who have deeply held convictions that Lincoln has disappointed. They’re not a bunch of sore losers, but they are upset at the results.

However, it is not all right to launch what amounts to a destructive party civil war against an office holder you deem politically incorrect — and then gripe when somebody correctly points out how pointless and wasteful it was.

Here’s the real problem. People define “real Democrats” as liberal. Well, folks, a “real Democrat” is somebody who puts a Democratic ballot in the box. That’s as real as it gets.

“Real Democrats” in this state are Blue Dogs.

President Obama got elected because the other side got close to ruining the country and Obama was the only available alternative. Obama did not get elected because the rest of the nation “saw the light” after overwhelmingly electing George W. Bush in 2004.

By insisting that only “real Democrats” should run, liberals are more responsible for the repeated election of conservatives, more than Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, the entire Bush family — and Mike Huckabee, Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin — put together.

If the choice is either/or, this country’s going to go with the “conservative” every time until the brink of disaster is reached. Even then, whoever they turn to — Jimmy Carter or Barack Obama — isn’t going to be able to put the liberal checklist over the goal line, even with a super-majority in Congress.

Speaking of things Democrats could do better, check this out:

“At this point, neither the politics nor the economics support the idea of spending large sums, directly or through tax breaks, just to shave a percentage point off this year’s unemployment rate. But with plenty of slack in the economy and interest rates at historic lows, this is the ideal time to borrow and invest heavily in public infrastructure that has been badly neglected over the past 30 years.”

That was from the latest column by Washington Post Pulitzer Prize-winner Steven Pearlstein (www.washingtonpost.com) and that sharp, metallic clang you hear is the nail being hit squarely on the head.

We bailed out state governments and social spending with the “stimulus” package and launched an expensive new health care package — and left “roads and bridges, airports and air traffic control systems, urban transit, high-speed rail, schools and university facilities, national laboratories, national parks, ‘smart’ electric grids, broadband networks, green generating plants, and health information networks” lying around with what were, relatively speaking, crumbs.

As Pearlstein writes: “Properly chosen, these projects can have huge long-run economic payoffs while tangibly improving the lives of all Americans.”

Oh, by the way, they would have created a whole lot of jobs.

By Doug Thompson

You can put an iPad in a purse or use one in the stall in a men’s room, I noted a couple of weeks ago. These were key features, I said then, and I wasn’t even half joking.

Lately a friend of mine who owns one advised me that you can find a place for one on many types of exercise equipment. With care — and without the recharger plugged in — she’d even used one while she was in the bathtub.

Then she showed me the feature on her iPad where you turn on “night reading.” The page of a book she’d downloaded turned black with white, very legible type. My first thought was that this would allow me to sit up and read in bed without turning on a light, even a book light.

Then she touched a word on the page and up popped a definition of it.

Folks, we’re talking about a major boon to literacy here.

You hear a lot of talk about “post-literate” society, a society where most information is received through sound or images. That may yet come to pass, but I submit the iPad is a weapon that can prolong the resistance.

I don’t know how good the iPad’s selection of books is, but I bet it’s better than many a local library. You have to pay to download an iPad book, but I wonder how far off the idea of an iPad lending library can be.

We may soon be able to, within reason, read any book we want.

Some very serious-minded people believe that digital media offers escapism and fantasy that undermines people’s ability to live and cope with the real world. They may be right. However, I look at the iPad and I see things going in a better direction — and I don’t even own one.

People are addicted to amusement, we’re warned. OK. When were we not?

Julius Caesar presided over public games before he was a famous general. If I remember my history right, he once flooded the floor of a public arena so they could have a naval battle there instead of just another old gladiator fight. He also went heavily into debt during that time, if I recall correctly.

You can read in Edward Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” about public obsession with games. The worst case involves a city in Greece where the people formed a mob to break a popular charioteer out of prison after he was arrested for raping children. Then there was the matter of the two rival political factions who vied for power in much of the empire: the Greens and the Blues. The distinction between them? Some were fans of a particular athlete in the games. The other consisted of fans of his rival. The athletes that formed these divisions varied from one town to the next.

Compared to most of our predecessors, we’re a serious-minded, studious bunch of folks.

People should also remember that Shakespeare was extremely popular back in the day. So was Homer, the writers of great Greek tragedy, Leo Tolstoy and Ludwig van Beethoven.

Bad stuff falls by the wayside. Culture is, for instance, a book that’s still read a couple of hundred years or more after its written. Those can come from anywhere. In a digital age, they can’t be destroyed or lost. The bad stuff can’t be destroyed or lost either — but will be ignored. How many “landmark” books or films have you heard about in your lifetime that no one much remembers today?

Those who want escapism will always find it. Those who want knowledge or high art will always find it too — or make it. It seems absurd to me to talk about the decline of culture when I can, within reason, read any book from a wide selection of languages at any time, anywhere.

I also can, within reason, write a book and offer it as a free download from a web page of mine. It may not be any good, but I don’t have to have some publisher’s permission to offer it to the public.

Maybe we are descending into an age of dithering and dissipation. We’ll see. For now, I prefer to believe we are on the cusp of a golden age.

By Doug Thompson

I would argue that this former supposed messiah of young voters sounded like a stodgy President Eisenhower warning against the evils of television and rock and roll, except for one thing. I’m pretty sure that Eisenhower never said anything remotely this goofy.

It’s enough to make me wonder if the president of Change and Hope (note capitalization) is absolutely hell-bent on alienating the young voters who elected him. He’s saddled their generation with debt, has inherited an economy that’s absolutely bleak for the young and jobless and now decides to attack their pastimes with a lecture most of us wouldn’t expect from our grandmother.

I may not have a Nobel Prize, but I manage to hold a responsible job and be a father to four kids. Would the world be a better place if I’d stop playing Mass Effect 2 over and over again after my kids go to bed and focus on world peace? Yeah, probably; I’ll agree to do that when my middle-aged brethren agree to give up whiskey and golf.

What did this guy do with his campaign staff? Back when he was running for this job, he made some statement implying that maybe he had a Zune instead of an iPod. His campaign staff went into damage control mode. Zune wasn’t nearly cool enough for this candidate. Now we learn the guy doesn’t even know how to work an iPod. Good grief.

Enough about that; Let’s talk about gadgets.

And the winner of the next generation game console war is — the iPad?

Nintendo didn’t make as much money as it’s used to this past year. It’s comfortably in the black, but sales are down.

Rather than admit that Wii Fit, Mario and Rock Band have been milked for all they’re worth, the company blamed the onset of the iPad. There’s an excellent article about it in the Times of London’s website at http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article7118570.ece#cid=OTC-RSS&attr=1063742.

Great games for the Wii console were always few and far between. The ones that did hit in earlier years scored massive sales, but there are only so many copies of Wii Fit that you can sell and only so many added gadgets that people will buy. Designers have hit the creative dregs after the play-along music genre finally maxed out with the swan song Beatles version of Rock Band.

I don’t deny that the iiPad and all are big factors in causing the first year-to-year drop in Nintendo profits in six years. I just want to point out first that wandering down a creative dead end didn’t help either. The best thing I’ve seen for the Wii anytime recently is the disc that lets me watch Netflix on it.

These iPads and iPhones are new, fun and far more practical than the Wii and the hand-held DS ever were. Apple’s history of letting independent contractors write apps for Apple hardware, while hardly inspired, looks like a great creative flowering compared to the Nintendo-centric policies for the Wii and DS.

I’ve never even been tempted to buy a DS for myself, though each of the kids has one. I doubt I’d carry the thing if somebody gave me one. However, I would use an iPad.

A buddy’s old computer went kaput. All his family used it for was web browsing. Rather than replace it or spend a considerable sum getting it repaired, he just bought an iPad. He’s very happy with it.

Industry figures show the iPhone has, indeed, hurt the DS, after it gravely wounded the Sony PSP, which clearly took the brunt.

Nintendo’s still making a profit. Sony just crawled back into making one. “Crawled” is too harsh a word, though. The cost-cutting the company embarked upon is very impressive. That spans the whole company, especially its flat-screen TV operations and such. Even Sony’s game division, though, is finally expected to turn a profit.

I’m still wondering how all this is going to turn out. I’ll let you know when I think of something.