Suman Roberson
It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.
HallmarkMovieBuff
This is a family film in more ways than one. The Dirksens are dairy farmers in Indiana. Dairy farming is a family affair, a year-round, never-a-day-off occupation. Dairy farmers get no vacation. Imagine if one day you found a couple small airplanes had landed in your alfalfa field. Alfalfa is a cash crop in the sense that it's feed for your dairy cattle, and alfalfa doesn't abide traffic. Two pilots, Andrew King and Frank Pavliga, who like to perpetuate the barnstorming tradition, and who landed merely to take photographs, might have had reason to be apprehensive when they spied the farmer's pick-up coming toward them. But Farmer Dirksen was not upset. He, and the two young sons with him, were intrigued by the airplanes. The barnstormers relaxed. They gave the boys rides. It turned into an annual affair, and the barnstormers became like family to the Dirksens. As the family grew, so did the annual air show. By the time this documentary was made, nine years later, antique cars were added, with food and entertainment; and the event became a town picnic with a crowd in the hundreds...and still on the Dirksen farm. For the children, the anticipation of airplanes landing in your field once each summer to put on a show and give you rides just might be bigger than anticipating Santa Claus. Americana survives!
