Rating: none
Plot: Following the Civil War, the titular families living on opposite sides of the border between West Virginia and Kentucky talk trash and shoot at each other for a couple few decades.
This birthday gift from my father isn't a real movie, but if I'm going to spend nearly five hours staring at a screen, I need to count it as one. Also, I want my three readers who didn't watch this with me to know how good it is. The acting is terrific from top to bottom although there are so many characters that all look like people from the border between West Virginia and Kentucky, two of the states America can really be proud of, and my wife and I initially had a difficult time keeping track of them. Costner and Paxton are especially great, but all the participants do a great job to add flavor to the time and place. I loved the family feud trash talk. They should have settled this feud by lining everybody up to trade insults with a few impartial judges later determining which side had the best insults. I don't know if these people actually spoke like this to each other or not, but I'm going to pretend it's completely accurate because it makes history more fun. I also don't have any knowledge at all about this historical feud, but if this was accurate at all--Wikipedia told my father that it was--then it's really informative and paints this wild picture of how this second Civil War almost started. Wild, wild stuff, the type of story that could get kids more interested in history. You really grow to hate a few of these characters--Berenger's Uncle Vance, Ronan Vibert's despicable lawyer Perry Cline, the mean "Bad" Frank played by Andrew Howard--and have trouble finding any redeeming qualities in most of the others. But they're all characters you love to spend time with, even if it's nearly five hours of time. My favorite character was in the series only briefly--a posse hopeful who can shoot a rat's ass at forty yards and who tried to join both sides of the Civil War but couldn't because his genitals were askew. Really cool stuff and definitely something your father should think about buying you for your birthday.
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