Sean Penn's "Into The Wild" (2007)

IN the spring of 1992, after vagabonding around the country for two years, Christopher McCandless, a 24-year-old Virginian and Emory graduate, hitchhiked to Alaska and set off into the wilderness with little more than a .22-caliber rifle and a 10-pound sack of rice. Not far from the Teklanika River, he set up camp in an abandoned International Harvester bus, a 1940s relic of the Fairbanks City Transit System. He lived there for four months, from late April to late August, before finally starving to death. When his body was discovered in September, he weighed only 67 pounds.

Exactly what happened is something of a mystery. Some Alaskans believe that Mr. McCandless was a hopeless tenderfoot with no business being alone in the wild. Others speculate that Mr. McCandless, who had burned or given away all his money, cut himself off from his family and renamed himself Alexander Supertramp, was mentally unbalanced.

Jon Krakauer, in his best-selling book about Mr. McCandless, “Into the Wild,” argues that he had sufficient skills to survive but might have inadvertently poisoned himself by eating the seeds of the wild potato plant. Mr. Krakauer’s book also suggests that, far from being deranged, Mr. McCandless was a hero in the tradition of Jack London and Thoreau: a solitary quester, an explorer of his own interior landscape, in search of a more authentic relation to the natural world.

The Krakauer view has prevailed among a small band of pilgrims who over the years have visited the bus and made it an informal shrine, keeping everything there much as Mr. McCandless left it and adding their own written tributes. The place, 22 miles from the nearest road, is apt to become a full-fledged tourist attraction after the opening next week of “Into the Wild,” a deeply affecting movie version of the Krakauer book, with cinematography so beautiful it makes the Alaskan landscape seem seductively otherworldy.

The movie was written and directed, and even partly filmed, by Sean Penn, who invested the project with some of the same testy singleness of purpose he has recently brought to his political activism, his reporting stints in Iran and Iraq, his jeep tour of Venezuela with Hugo Chávez. That Hollywood might not be wild for a movie about a guy who slowly turns himself into a cadaver did not deter Mr. Penn for an instant.

Read the full article in The New York Times here.

Video Clips:

Click Here – Ultimate Freedom

Click Here – Things, Things, Things

Click Here – Where Are Your Mom and Dad

Click Here – Society

Click Here – I’m Supertramp

Click Here – Do You Wan’t to do Something Together?

Click Here – Moving On

Click Here – I’m Gonna Take Stock In That

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"The Bucket List" (2008) [HD Trailers]

View the HD Trailers here.
Visit the official site here.

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Francis Ford Coppola and "Youth Without Youth": A new career in filmmaking

Youth Without Youth," Francis Ford Coppola's first film in 10 years, is about Dominic Matei, an elderly Romanian professor of linguistics who, after being struck by lightning, becomes young again. Though Matei, played by Tim Roth, retains a septuagenarian's memories and experiences, his body, restored to 30-year-old fighting trim, is mysteriously immune to the effects of time.

The professor's condition is presented as a medical curiosity and a metaphysical conundrum — like the novella by Mircea Eliade on which it is based, Coppola's movie is a complex, symbol-laden meditation on the nature of chronology, language and human identity — but it also speaks to a familiar and widespread longing. What if, without losing the hard-won wisdom of age, you could go back and start again? What if you could reverse and arrest the process of growing old, securing the double blessing of a full past and a limitless future?

Seeing "Youth Without Youth" for the first time this summer, I tried to resist the impulse to imagine parallels between the filmmaker and his hero. Was Coppola trying to recapture something of his own youth in telling this story? Was Matei's state — a predicament as well as a blessing — also, in some way, the director's own? Did this project, a return to filmmaking after a long hiatus, represent an attempt to turn back the clock and start again?

Having been trained to be skeptical of easy biographical interpretations, I dismissed such questions as too obvious to take seriously. My high-minded, theoretically correct determination to avoid them did not last long, however. When I spoke to Coppola on the phone a few weeks later, he was quick to suggest the connection himself. "I'm really a lot like the man in the movie," he said.

Read the full article on iht.com here.

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"Superbad" (2007) [The New York Times review]

Horny is as horny does in the sweetly absurd high school comedy “Superbad.” A tickly, funny tale of three teenage boys revved up by their surging, churning, flooding hormones, the movie joins the tumescent ranks of similarly themed works about male sexual desire — consider “Portnoy’s Complaint,” think “Porky’s” — and its somatic epiphanies, treacherous secretions, anguished lessons and apparently limitless storehouse of embarrassments. Behold the man (well, boy): fully sexed and wholly, touchingly virginal.

Read the full review here [registration required].

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"Superbad" (2007) [YouTube Trailer]