As I work my way through the studio screeners sent out to New York Film
Critics Online (NYFCO) members in anticipation of our awards meeting on
December 9th, I feel like Diogenes with his lamp. I finally stumbled
across a couple of good ones. The first is Sean Penn’s “Into the Wild”
that I will be reviewing today. I will follow up with a review of
Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom’s “The Hoax”, based on the Clifford
Irving saga of the 1970s. Both of these films are by no means perfect,
but they are intelligent, serious and worthy attempts to transcend the
standard Hollywood crap. Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that both
are focused on driven personalities, who are responsible for their
respective falls–in other words, characters ready made for classic
Aristotelian drama.
“Into the Wild” tells the story of Chris McCandless, who died of
starvation in the Alaskan wilderness in August 1992 at the age of 24.
Alaska was the last stop in a voyage that the idealistic but naïve Emory
University graduate had taken in pursuit of a goal shaped by the
writings of Jack London, Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau and others who
have rejected materialism and conformity.
It is doubtful that even Thoreau would have gone to the extremes taken
by McCandless. The first thing he did after graduating was to donate his
graduate school tuition fund of $24,000 to Oxfam. After setting fire to
all the cash he had on hand, he began hitch-hiking here and there in the
style of the Beat Generation. He might have read Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl,”
which described the best minds of his generation “cowered in unshaven
rooms in underwear, burning their money in wastebaskets and listening to
the Terror through the wall.”
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/into-the-wild/
