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Blog postings should always be of note, right? Well, unfortunately, this one isn't. It's noon and I've just woken up. It feels like early morning... no cars on the street, no sunlight, no sounds except the fan behind me. "I should write" I say to myself, "I have two articles waiting for completion." One is due on Thursday, the other in two weeks. But I can't bring myself to do either of them. I want to, I have outlines ready and know what I'm going to say. I know I write better if I do multiple drafts. But I just can't do it.
I know the best thing to do is to work through the frustration and get words to... screen. But I can't work on these articles. Not just yet.

henrik and I watched two movies last night: "Eastern Promises" and "Into The Wild" and while, on the surface, it would seem these movies have nothing in common, I did find a few similarities:
1) the obvious - both have full-frontal male nudity. Eastern Promises has an amazing fight scene in a bathhouse, while Into The Wild shows the main character Chris McCandless/Alexander Supertramp floating naked down a river.
2) the main characters in both stories - Nikolai in Eastern Promises (played by Viggo Mortensen) and Alex in Into The Wild (played by Emile Hirsch) tell their life stories in pictures. Nikolai has tattoos all over his body showing where he has been, what he's done, and if he's been true to his people. Alex is taught how to carve leather, and he proceeds to carve the story of his travels onto a belt, which he wears every day until his (spoiler alert!) death.

I was disappointed with Into the Wild. I was hoping other critics had been wrong, that perhaps there was a bias in the industry against Sean Penn, or that the critics hadn't read the book or something. But no, the movie is as bad as all the reviews claim.
I'm going to write this to you assuming you've read the book, and if you haven't, apologies. I read the book last year, over Christmas, and while it isn't my favourite book of all time, one has to congratulate John Krakauer on the amount of research he did.
So, with that said, why was John Krakauer not in the movie? When I read Into The Wild, I was acutely aware that I was reading the voice of Mr. Krakauer, someone so interested in this story that he followed a trail of bread crumbs around North America, trying to piece together the life of this dumb-shit guy who died in the woods. Krakauer added a lot of psychological and philosophical depth to Alex, and Sean Penn turned that research into one drunken bar scene where Hirsch and his friend Vince Vaughn yell "society!!!" over and over. If Krakauer had been a character in the movie, too, they could have used the great scene at the end of the book where the parents visit the bus. That was the best scene in the book, for me, because it showed Alex's father as a human being with real emotions.
Now I'll admit I'm biased against Alex (sorry, Chris) after reading the book, and this caused a bit of an argument between Henrik and I while we were watching the movie. I says to Henrik, I says "through all Alex's travels, all the places he goes and people he meets, he doesn't reach any new insight about his family issues. He's not LEARNING anything. So why the hell should we care about him?" People ask him over and over about his family, tell him that family is the most important thing in the world, and he ignores them. He's so scared of his feelings (and possibly of his father) that he'd rather live in the woods than talk to his family. I just don't get it. Henrik says to me, "people deal with things in different ways. Just because it's not the way you'd do it doesn't mean he's stupid."
No, but see, he IS stupid. Another discussion we had during the movie:
Me: I'm upset that they don't establish, from the beginning, that the kid's gonna die. If you knew that right away, the movie would have a whole different flavour, wouldn't it?
Henrik: yeah, it definitely would.
Me: Do you think that NOT establishing his death early on... do you think it glorifies his life?
Henrik: Possibly.
I'd say definitely. Not only do they leave out one key fact about Alex's travels - that he refused to take a map of Alaska, and if he had he would have known there was a ranger station just a few miles from the bus - but they (meaning Sean Penn) make it seem as though living alone in a bus is the height of philosophical ecstasy. It's all clouds and mountaintops, clear running water and slow-motion animals, sweeping helicopter panoramas and the like. My personal favourite shot was a slow-motion shower scene where Alex shakes his head from side to side, and the drops of water spray out and around him to make a kind of watery halo. Subtle. I saw Penn's first film, The Crossing Guard, a few years ago, and I can't say I remember too much about it. But I can say this: Into the Wild feels amateurish, like the work of a recent film-school grad trying to impress a girl with his mad skills. It feels like Penn is completely disconnected from his audience. It feels like the movie wasn't so much a movie as an essay or scientific thesis: "in this paper I intend to prove that Alexander Supertramp had everything right and the rest of the world has it wrong." No-one likes to be lectured, and it seems like that's all Sean Penn knows how to do.
In conclusion, sure, go and see this movie if you haven't already. But if you read the book and, like me, left it feeling like Alex was kind of an idiot, you're probably not going to like Sean Penn's rendition of the tale. Krakauer's book explores all sides of the story, while the movie chooses one idea and runs with it.