Wind River

Friendships slowly cultivated over the years like birch trees crafted into dependable canoes, launching this way and that across un/familiar waterways, consistently patchworking principles and down-to-earth dossiers, weathered yet versatile hardboiled harkenings celebrating cherished repetition with iconic seasoned variability, thematic thimbles boisterous bows, jaded elasticity ample comebacks, good hearts strong people all too aware of systematic cruelties lodged in impermeable stone, bookhousin' it nevertheless hived and alive intrepid backbone, resourceful headway, local integrity, tooth and nail, afloat.

Aware of the dark side, contending with wayward unscrupulous desire detached and frothing with venomous inadmissibility, beautiful strong intelligent women cut down by worthless ignorance, whose fear leads it to horrifically crush inquisitive spirits, without generating remorseful emotions, the branding of men without honour.

I don't even like to use that word, the word honour. Search these blogs, I doubt you'll find I've used it often. It's associated with the killing of independent women so regularly that its merit has been severely diluted. And even if it's honourable to serve your country, when the leaders of a country drive it astray, it's just as honourable to humbly refuse them.

Canada has launched an inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women. Said murders and abductions represent a reality that's so offensive it makes me ashamed to be human.

Deer don't pull that kind of shit.

Water buffalo, horses, nope.

Wind River works in a more rustically sophisticated frame than the one I've laid out, a dark sombre penetrating investigation into one of the most loathsome hushed-up realities assaulting North American culture.

It isn't a box of chocolates.

It ain't a bouquet of flowers.

It's a character driven harshly hewn multidimensionally matriculated stark blunt tragedy.

With the best performance I've seen from Jeremy Renner (Cory Lambert) in years.

There's good and evil in everyone and people fight if differently at various points in their lives.

But if you see people doing the purely evil things the bad guys do in this film, you need to stand up to them.

It doesn't matter if you get hurt. It doesn't matter if you lose your shit. It don't matter if corrupt policepersons lock you up. It matters that you did the right thing.

It's not about being Indigenous or European, Chinese or African, Australian, Brazilian, Danish or Russian, it's about simply being human.

Not that I won't plug the Irish at times or write about how I love being Canadian, but I don't consider those groups to be superior to any other, just different, and I know that there's so much to be learned from other cultures that it seems foolish to clash with them, I'd rather have a pint or something nice to eat with strangers from other lands/towns/provinces/neighbourhoods, I don't understand this divide and conquer nonsense.

It's nothing new you know.

In fact it's probably the oldest play in the book.

The demonic logic of the damned.

Pestilent profitability.

When I was a kid I figured all the people who saw the ending to the original Planet of the Apes film would get it and peace would globally prosper.

Such a shame.

Such a missed opportunity.