WAS1 Productions

Originally Written 11/08/07

I saw Into the Wild tonight. I really didn’t know what I’d think of the film, the journey of a young man, who graduates college, drops out of society and ends up trekking to the wilderness of Alaska where he ultimately dies of starvation. I was a little worried about my own prejudices going into the movie. There is something to be said for living your life your way, but you also have to be smart about it, especially doing something like that. You don’t screw around in the woods.

I was really happy with the film though. I thought it was pretty even handed with things and didn’t praise or judge him too much. I did feel that the beginning of the film kind of romanticized his adventures to some extent, but in the end it did show the harsh reality and the consequences of getting in over your head. I was also pleasantly surprised to find that most of the film didn’t take place in Alaska.

The narrative kept on jumping back to fill in the story of the past. We learned of his troubled family life and also saw the two year journey where he tramped around the country, before heading to Alaska on his final stage of self-discovery. Those two years were made up of several little vignettes, stories where he’d meet people who became his friends and even surrogate families.

There was some wonderful drama and joy in those stories. Even there though, the film did show moments where he was being selfish, as he’d move on when he got wander lust and also touched upon how he’d left his family in the dark and never told them where he was. There were several scenes where I wanted to shake him and tell him to see what he had where he was, and to abandon the useless quest.

In the end, the movie was sad and beautiful and made me long for what might have been. The greatest irony is that he’d wanted to head out of the wilderness, but had been trapped there and then his situation had deteriorated. If not for a couple of mistakes, he might have lived to tell his tale and learned to make it back into people’s lives again. Of course this is a dramatization of a book written about him, but it’s my understanding that it was written from reading the journals he kept and talking with the people he’d met on the road, so hopefully it’s somewhat accurate.

The shots of nature were wonderful in the movie as well. There were scenes of beauty and wonder that were also tempered with the stark reality of the expanse of wilderness. The artful choreography of the film was quite wonderful. If not for the chapter in Alaska, it made an good travelogue, made only more riveting by the knowledge of what was eventually going to pass. In the end, I was left with a profound sense of loss and a bit of futility, which I think is fitting.

Update 04/24/10

After seeing the film, I listened to the audio book of the same name which the movie was based on. The book was longer and gave a lot more information about Christopher McCandless and explains some of his problems with his family, especially his father, which led up to his walkabout trip. There were a lot more details about the places he went and the people he met as well.

The book is more matter-of-fact about things, so it didn’t have the same emotional and dramatic impact as the film did. However, the film is liked a dramatization of many of the events, so while it plays better as a narrative, the book might be closer to the truth. However since McCandless didn’t survive, we can never know.

The book also talked about other people’s misadventures in the wilds of Alaska, many of them who died from it. The author even tells of his own crazy youth on a mountain climbing trip that he was lucky enough to return form, despite a few bad ideas. These added stories gave a lot of depth to the book and complemented McCandless’ story.

Originally Written 02/03/08

Second Hand Lions was a wonderful film and a joy to watch. All of the characters were very colorful and the actors breathed them full of life.

That was a modern fantasy done right too. I loved the fairy-tale like stories of the great uncles’ pursuits in their younger days, as well as the slow reveal of where the lines of truth and fiction blended. It reminded me a lot of Big Fish which was another movie I adored. I definitely recommend both of those films.

Originally Written 02/03/08

I had a lot of problems with The Astronaut Farmer. I could’ve cut it some slack if it was more of a modern fantasy or fairy tale, but it had too many real and serious moments to be taken as such. It’s one thing to follow your dreams, but when you put your family at serious risk, then it’s just selfish.

I wanted to bitch slap Billy Bob Thornton’s character several times in the movie. His wife was also too blandly and blindly supportive of him for most of the film. Second, there’s a deus ex machina which occurs to wipe out all of the family’s financial trouble, and glosses over that source of strife. So overall I found the mood and theme of the story very unbelievable and aggravating and more than a little troubling.

Originally Written 02/03/08

I finally got around to seeing Cloverfield, after missing it for the past couple of weeks due to various circumstances. I saw it with my friend Paul on Friday night. It was pretty cool. It’s definitely Godzilla meets The Blair Witch Project and it has some of the problems that the original Blair Witch did as well. The camera work does get shaky at times. I never got dizzy, but there were a few spots where I was ready for it to stabilize.

Also, it had the same trouble with stupid characters doing stupid things, but that’s also kind of the charm of these films. I was getting a little tired of the party banter in the beginning and the monster could’ve showed up a few minutes early. However, once the action got going, I thought the characters worked well. I was chuckling at them at times, but that’s good.

The drama was bare-bones and there wasn’t any character development, but you can’t have that in this type of movie. I also thought the mechanisms they used to drive the drama were fairly effective. Having the footage from an earlier tape the camera was recording over pop into the movie from time to time was an obvious trick, but I liked it.

I liked the first person POV of the camera too. It’s been likened to various video games, which I think is a good analogy. It’s a fantastic and fun ride and I was laughing with joy several times throughout the movie. The action and pacing was quite good and everything worked pretty well.

I really liked the shots of news footage that was used in a few spots of the movie too, which gave just enough needed information, but not heavy exposition to slow it down. I was worried that they wouldn’t show enough of the monster, but there were several nice shots and scenes with monsters that were really cool.

So it wasn’t high art, but it’s a really neat experiment and a successful one at that. It was also just plain fun. I had a good time watching it. Heh, my friend Paul and I had a good laugh when the Statue of Liberty loses its head. “You blew it up! Damn you all to hell!”

Written 11/30/07

I went to see The Mist tonight. I’d heard some good things about it, so I was really interested in checking it out. It was a mixed bag, but fairly decent. Director’s have a tough time bringing Stephen King’s stories to the screen, in part because he can tell a tale in such a way that makes a silly concept believable, whereas in a movie it might not fly.

The Mist is a good mix of horror as well as atmosphere. It has some nice monsters, but also a good bit of the end-of-the-world drama where a small group of people watch society fall apart. It’s the same type of society in a microcosm setting that I like about good zombie movies. Things started out really well. The characters were arch-types but they were nuanced and played off one another well, that is except for the protagonist of the fundamentalist nut job. She was a cardboard figured who was really grating.

Unfortunately, from what I remember of the story, she was the same way in the novella. Once again Stephen Kings shows he has an axe to grind against religion, or at least a certain interpretation of it. He’s done that in several other stories as well. The character could have worked as an even-handed critique of the dangers of an over-zealous interpretation of religion, if only she’d been given some nuance like the other characters, but she was too much a caricature. It’s odd, most of the film-adaptations of King’s films fail because they didn’t translate his stories well enough, but here I think they translated it a little too well. They had the story warts and all, and I think a little bit of depth to that plot would have worked much better.

The monsters were pretty cool and the scenes with them were great fun. They were a little cartoony in their design for a couple of the beasts, such as the faces of the giant spiders, but I think it worked well. It’s not as good as that film, but I don’t think I’ve seen a monster film that’s been as fun since Pitch Black. There were lots of different beasties to enjoy here.

So the first two-thirds of the film were great, but it fell apart in the last act. There was the heavy-handed twisted-religion angle, and also the ending annoyed me. I was worried about that, since I remembered the story ended very ambiguously and I didn’t think they’d let that happen in a mainstream film.

I was impressed with the ending at first, since it was a little different but very hard-core. If they’d ended it there, that would have been fine, but then they had to tack a stupid Hollywood ending onto it. It’s not as egregious as the one in A.I., but I still wanted to slap the director for it. It got a couple of points for its irony, but lost even more for how it de-constructed and went against the whole mood of the story.

Oh well, I still liked enough of the film to find it enjoyable. It’s definitely flawed, but it’s a good ride. If you don’t see it in the theater, it’s definitely a good rental. I’d give it 3 or 3.5 stars out of 5.