Into the Wild
by Sean Penn
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DVD details
Actor: Brian Dierker, Emile Hirsch, Jena Malone, Marcia Gay Harden, William HurtDirector: Sean Penn
Brand: PARAMOUNT PICTURES
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: Danish (Original Language); English (Original Language); English (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Dubbed); Spanish (Dubbed)
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, NTSC, Subtitled, Widescreen
Picture Format: 2.35:1
Running Time: 148 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2008-03-04
Audience Rating: R (Restricted)
Studio: Paramount
DVD Reviews of Into the Wild
DVD Review: What's the point
Summary: 2 Stars
What a self indulgent little twrip. I found nothing at all endearing about this character. What a waste of 2.5 hrs.
RWF
DVD Review: WOW!
Summary: 5 Stars
I had heard about this real story watching a TV talk show that the author appeared on and it intrigued me. While it starts a bit slow the depth of it soon comes through and you are right there with CHristopher Johnson McCandless. A sad tale about a young man who has the right idea but doesn't prepare himself enough. Especially for one so bright and full of life.DVD Review: KS Movie Buff
Summary: 4 Stars
A compelling story! I've wondered time to time about the "why" behind these characters we've all run across in life. I thought the director did a great job in asking us all to really question the way we've chosen to live and have compassion for those that choose differently. The movie did drag a little in parts and I did wonder how much of it really was true, but overall, worth watching.DVD Review: Stuff of Dreams
Summary: 4 Stars
Sean Penn as a director is at least as interesting as is his work from acting and this movie proves it once again. It is the true story of Chris McCandless, wonderfully portrayed by Emile Hirsch, who, graduating at 22, seems to have a very promising future ahead of him being admitted into Harvard Law, but instead chooses not to fulfill his parent's dreams for him but pursue his own. In doing so he wanders through the US after leaving behind his worldly goods, including giving away 20000 dollars of savings to charity.
He breaks off all contact with his family and in the voiceover of his sister we gradually are handed pieces of the puzzle that lead him to do so. After more or less 2 years the trip ends in Alaska, after we've enjoyed a number of his interesting encounters with other people and many beautiful landscapes that made me want to pack my bags right there and then for another one of my cross country hikes.
The development of the rather naive Chris is both fascinating as well as moving and Penn treats his journey as a classic novel, even up to dividing his movie into chapters with titles like "birth" or "adolescence", for those who weren't quite clever enough to pick up on it.
What annoyed me the most about the movie was the music, which tries too hard to convey a certain atmosphere which distracts more than makes you focus. Penn seems to forget at times that old lesson that less is more and that the story is so powerful, it doesn't need this artificial boost of sentiment, but I guess being American, he just couldn't help himself, it is a national affliction after all.
However it's one of very few issues I had with the movie that signifies a marvelous contribution with full adherence to the rules and laws of a traditional road movie.
It's obvious that Penn has a lot of respect for this intelligent young man whose mind lives in his treasured books of writers like Tolstoy and Thoreau from whom he receives his life's lessons that serve to fuel his dreams of a pure and uncompromising life far away from anything materialistic and the corrupting influence of society. Unfortunately our hero is not able to see that all his philosophizing and travelling is just a self-deception to avoid dealing with the legacy of the dysfunctional past with his relatives and rather embrace a romantic philosophy of life in general and himself in particular. It is tragic that he eventually paid such a high price for this delusion.
Until quite far into the movie Sean Penn doesn't take any critical distance from his subject but rather chooses to immerse his movie in romantic notions and atmospheric photography and rather trite repetition of the same adolescent ramblings.
As a viewer however this doesn't bother you at all and on first viewing you're eager to embrace the dramatic events and dreams of youth, passion and hope that we all want to catch again, even though at a certain point we learn that, though not an illusion, at least for those that have not yet sought refuge in misanthropy (a flight just as effective and opposite to the one Chris McCandless took), there is a more noble, though less attractive on the outside, heroism in defying the mud of day to day life in the mist of it rather than seeking oblivion in the remote wilderness. It's a little too easy and a bit like giving up of whom we are in our most fundamental level of being: a social animal. Chris McCandless too, in his last note, in one of his treasured books between the printed lines that so inspired him, comes to this conclusion and it is truly a heart breaking moment in the film.
DVD Review: Independence taken to the extreme
Summary: 4 Stars
I may have liked this movie for different reasons than some of the other reviewers. I didn't necessarily find it inspiring or particularly beautiful, but I did think it was very intelligent, thought provoking, consistent, and well directed/acted. It's basically a film about independence and freedom, and how those can be terrible, isolating things when taken to the extreme. For those who thought the minor characters were too distracting, try to think about them in that context.
It's almost like the minor characters are there to warn the main character that even though living your own life is great, a lack of human interaction makes that freedom painful. These are lessons he fails to realize at every turn, whomever he meets, (instead he feels like he is there to enlighten them) and this selfish interpretation of independence is his tragedy.
Think about why he dies: not only has he tried to do everything himself, which is a mistake on this kind of trip, (again, there were warning signs, like he should have figured this out when the moose killing thing went bad) but he's either so devoted to his dream or so frightened to go back and face the family he's running away from that there is nowhere to run to anymore. I guess living by independence means dying by it.
There's a key scene in the middle, where he goes to the homeless shelter in LA, then sees himself getting sucked into the upper middle class hypocrisy he hates. Even though this is irrational -- if he can strike out on his own with a backpack, he can also do so in a more socially integrated way -- he turns away from going back to his old name. He does realize eventually that it was a mistake, but like all tragic figures, it is only after it is too late to change anything.
I think most people knew a guy like this in college, the upper middle class "rebel" who could have done anything and then took to the road after graduation, but eventually came back to sell out and work on wall street. maybe that's why this book was so popular -- because this guy took it to the extreme and he died, thus reinforcing others' decisions to rebel a little, but then run back home to mommy and daddy. Put in that way, the people who like the book and film for these reasons don't come across so well.
Truly a provocative and interesting film -- those are just my thoughts, but I think you should see it and decide for yourself.
Description of Into the Wild
A superb cast and an even-handed treatment of a true story buoy Into the Wild, Sean Penn's screen adaptation of Jon Krakauer's bestselling book. Emile Hirsch stars as Christopher McCandless, scion of a prosperous but troubled family who, after graduating from Atlanta's Emory University in the early 1990s, decides to chuck it all and become a self-styled "aesthetic voyager" in search of "ultimate freedom." He certainly doesn't do it halfway: after donating his substantial savings account to charity and literally torching the rest of his cash, McCandless changes his name (to "Alexander Supertramp"), abandons his family (William Hurt and Marcia Gay Harden as his bickering, clueless parents and Jena Malone as his baffled but loving sister, who relates much of the backstory in voice-over), and hits the road, bound for the Alaskan bush and determined not to be found. For the next two years he lives the life of a vagabond, working a few odd jobs, kayaking through the Grand Canyon into Mexico, landing on L.A.'s Skid Row, and turning his back on everyone who tried to befriends him (including Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker as two kindly, middle-aged hippies and Hal Holbrook in a deeply affecting performance as an old widower who tries to take "Alex" under his wing). Penn, who directed and wrote the screenplay, alternates these interludes with scenes depicting McCandless' Alaskan idyll--which soon turns out be not so idyllic after all. Settling into an abandoned school bus, he manages to sustain himself for a while, shooting small game (and one very large moose), reading, and recording his existential musings on paper. But when the harsh realities of life in the wilderness set in, our boy finds himself well out of his depth, not just ill-prepared for the rigors of day to day survival but realizing the importance of the very thing he wanted to escape--namely, human relationships. It'd be easy to either idealize McCandless as a genuinely free spirit, unencumbered by the societal strictures that tie the rest of us down, or else dismiss him as a hopelessly callow na?f, a fool whose disdain for practical realities ultimately doomed him. Into the Wild does neither, for the most part telling the tale with an admirable lack of cheap sentiment and leaving us to decide for ourselves. --Sam GrahamThis is the true story of Christopher McCandless (Emile Hirsch). Freshly graduated from college with a promising future ahead McCandless instead walked out of his privileged life and into the wild in search of adventure. What happened to him on the way transformed this young wanderer into an enduring symbol for countless people -- a fearless risk-taker who wrestled with the precarious balance between man and nature.System Requirements:Running Time: 148 Mins.Format: DVD MOVIE Genre: ACTION/ADVENTURE/COMING OF AGE Rating: R UPC: 097363481249 Manufacturer No: 348124
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