Posts tagged Arkansas River

“Another Mysterious Stranger”

“Hotshots” looks at a movie!

Mud stars Matthew McConaughey, he has received praise for his performance in this film, but once again he does what he seems to do in all of his films, and that is to take his shirt off.

The story takes place in Arkansas along the Arkansas River near the Mississippi River, and it is basically another in a long line of movies about coming of age.

It begins in the middle of the night when a boy named Ellis, who is 14 years old, sneaks out of his parents’ houseboat and meets his best friend, Neckbone, where they take a boat out onto the river and motor downstream to the Mississippi, where they beach their boat on the shore of an island.

They walk inland for a while, come to a tall tree, and one of them says, “There it is.”

“It” is a boat in pretty good condition stuck high up in the tree from some previous time when flood conditions caused it to get stuck up there.

Although they claim the boat as theirs, they soon discover that someone is living in the boat, and he shows up telling them that the boat is his, because he is living in it.

The man tells them to call him Mud, says that he grew up around there, and he will trade them the boat for food.

Mud is waiting for someone, a woman named Juniper, and when she shows up, they will leave and the boys can have the boat.

Back home, Ellis’s mother tells him to be home that evening by 7, so they can have a sit-down dinner and talk.

Then while he is in town, Ellis sees an older boy picking on a girl Ellis knows named May Pearl, and Ellis punches the boy to get him to stop.

Ellis and Neckbone also see a pretty woman in town they had never seen before, who turns out to be Juniper, played by Reese Witherspoon.

Later, Ellis learns that his parents want to separate, his mother wants to move back into town, and they will lose the houseboat.

And this is all just the beginning of the story, which has too many parallels and is not original.

Mud is just another movie about a mysterious stranger who shows up and changes the lives of others.

I’m Dan Culberson and this is “Hotshots.”