sleepy_bird (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sleepy_bird) wrote2009-11-23 05:20 pm
sleepy_bird) wrote2009-11-23 05:20 pm
(no subject)
Just saw "Into the Wild," which is really beautiful and must be watched on a very large, very high-tech television if not in a theater. The listening part isn't so great, in particular the voiceover from his sister who constantly explains that the reason that Christopher ran off into the woods was that his parents were mean. The theme of Christopher's parents being mean is explored in a number of grainy flashbacks in which his parents yell at each other, beat each other up, and just generally act like big caricatures of stifling lameness (at one point, the dad threatens to cancel Christmas. Really!) This is problematic because the film expects you to sympathize with McCandless's point of view, as expressed through his sister, but it's such an juvenile point of view that you want to smack him around the head and tell him to grow up and stop listening to that damn emo music. Plenty of people have traumatic childhoods, but not everybody runs off to hitchhike through the West. Maybe it helps if you haven't read the book before, which goes into McCandless's past but doesn't attribute his actions to one certain set of traumas. The film improves in the last half when the voiceover stops and the story is just left to tell itself.
I also had a problem with the movie's ending. which ends with him accepting death and writing a message about how good his life was and sticking it in the bus window. In real life, McCandless's last message was less" thank you God for a good life, please call mom and pop" and more "if you see this, bring me food, I'm STARVING IN THE MOTHERFUCKING WOODS." I don't need to be reassured that McCandless accepted his fate and died "happily," whatever that means, in order to accept the movie.This is a story about someone who starved to death in an abandoned bus. It's supposed to be a downer.
It's the same problem I had with "Men Who Stare at Goats," which starts off as a fun, "Masters of Atlantis"-type riff on conspiracies but ends up on, well, an up note about heroism. See, somebody may seem a little kooky, but in the end they all love good stuff like family and not torturing people! Thanks for making these important points, movie!
Then again, if you watch "Goats" you also have to believe that slipping LSD to a bunch of heavily armed 18-year-olds would provoke anything other than mass carnage.
I also had a problem with the movie's ending. which ends with him accepting death and writing a message about how good his life was and sticking it in the bus window. In real life, McCandless's last message was less" thank you God for a good life, please call mom and pop" and more "if you see this, bring me food, I'm STARVING IN THE MOTHERFUCKING WOODS." I don't need to be reassured that McCandless accepted his fate and died "happily," whatever that means, in order to accept the movie.This is a story about someone who starved to death in an abandoned bus. It's supposed to be a downer.
It's the same problem I had with "Men Who Stare at Goats," which starts off as a fun, "Masters of Atlantis"-type riff on conspiracies but ends up on, well, an up note about heroism. See, somebody may seem a little kooky, but in the end they all love good stuff like family and not torturing people! Thanks for making these important points, movie!
Then again, if you watch "Goats" you also have to believe that slipping LSD to a bunch of heavily armed 18-year-olds would provoke anything other than mass carnage.