| Posted by: moviePig at March 15, 2008, 2:03 pm | | Topic: INTO THE WILD Forum: groupsrv | | On Mar 15, 4:22 pm, nick wrote: Quote:On Mar 15, 3:59 pm, Alric Knebel wrote: nick wrote: On Mar 15, 3:16�pm, william wrote: On Mar 15, 3:03 pm, Alric Knebel wrote: �For another, there's a thin line between adamantine idealism and mental illness; so there's that. What spiritual discovery? To me, this was the flip side of Agnes Varda's Vagabond. Vagabond was the depressive down to Into The Wild's manic up. Into The Wild should have been shot as a film noir. How anybody finds Into The Wild valuable beyond its obvious cautionary tale quality escapes me. Williamwww.williamahearn.com I think the *manic up* might be illusory, whether Penn intended that or not--a surface level hippie Jesus freak retro-love generation flick masking cautionary noir subtexts. It's telling that in the Iconoclasts episode on The Sundance Channel devoted to Christopher McCandles and Into the Wild, Penn and Krakauer concede the possibility that McCandless' larger goal may have been celebrity and a book deal. He sure didn't plan on spending the rest of his years in the wild. And Krakauer says Alaskans think McCandles was a fucking idiot. Into the Wild is a excellent film that sends out mixed messages, which isn't a bad thing. I agree. I spent half the movie changing my mind about what it was about, then by the end, I settled for just feeling something for the parents and Hal Holbrook's character. But at one point, I found myself agreeing with the Alaskans, and other times I thought the boy was seriously mentally ill. At bottom, I just didn't really give a hoot in hell about the kid's ideas. At times I thought he was pretentious. I really can't get a bead on what PENN wanted me to think. Having not read the book, one part of Into the Wild did leave me scratching my head--when McCandless turns down the sexual advances of Kristen Stewart's hippie girl because she's under-aged. We've already established that McCandless has entered into a zone of utopian counter- cultural idealism where regular norms don't apply, but when Stewart hits on him, he acts as if Chris Hansen was hiding behind a rock with the To Catch a Predator cameras. He's indifferent to the cruelty he acts on his parents and he's oblivious to where Holbrook's character is coming from but when it comes to the advances of a minor, he's positively wholesome. But those two misbehaviors come from very different barrels ...with the anti-parent one having actually positive overtones in our culture. I.e., what teenage peer-group *doesn't* say to dishonor thy father and thy mother? ...whereas diddling the underage neighbor is pretty much always taboo (...at least until middle-age). -- - - - - - - - - YOUR taste at work... http://www.moviepig.com |
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